Lustron executives pose outside the company’s factory near Port Columbus (left); promotional materials that showed the homes boasted both comfort and plenty of amenities of modern life. Continued from Page 31
for Sandlund’s glass-coated Lustron homes. The last houses came off the assembly line in late 1950. Instead of continuing to oversee the manufacture of homes, Sandlund and others were called before Congress in a series of hearings to determine how the government loan was spent. The hearings were the harbinger of the end. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation called in Lustron’s loans, and the plant shuttered. In the end, only 2,680 metal houses rolled off the assembly line and onto the delivery trucks.
But Lustron lives. The midcentury moderns persist in places such as Xenia, Findlay, Columbus, and Whitehall. The Ohio History Center, near the state fairgrounds in Columbus, has a Lustron on display, as a demonstration of American life in the 1950s. Another Lustron, a blue one, is on display at Whitehall Community Park, preserved by the Whitehall Historical Society. These glass-coated houses stand as monuments to another time — a precinct in Ohio history.
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$9,900 - Installed •2-9x8 Garage Doors •1-3’ Entry Door •Sof�it Optional
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OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • OCTOBER 2017
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Ohio Co