The Great Sleigh Ride, 1856

A monumental, spontaneous, and continuously intensifying horse-drawn sleigh competition unfolded in Twinsburg in February of 1856. It started semi-innocently enough as a group of young Solon residents embarked on a procession through Twinsburg composed of seven sleigh teams drawn by four horses apiece. The Solonites brandished a homemade banner depicting a nose-thumbing youth and the challenge “You Can’t Come It” (Meaning you can’t beat it).

The next afternoon, Twinsburg residents retaliated by loading fourteen sleighs and went to Solon with their banner “Who Can’t Come It?”, and stole the original Solon banner. A few days later, Bedford sent twenty-one decorated sleighs and returned the banner. Other communities got into the contest and more and more sleighs and banners were brought and stolen. A contest was decided upon between three counties. Almost 10,000 people turned up in Richfield to watch it. Four hundred and sixty-two bobsleds competed and Summit County won with one hundred and seventy-five sleds (Cuyahoga sending one hundred and fifty-one and Medina sending one hundred and forty). They proceeded to paraded through Akron, where the banner was given to Hudson Twp. for having the largest number of teams from Summit County. Later, Medina sent one hundred and eighty-four sleds to steal the banner, but on their way back home, the snow melted and the sleighs had to be hauled through the mud back home. The poem “The Great Sleigh Ride” by John Greenleaf Whittier was written about this unique event.

First Twins Day Festival

Twinsburg’s annual Twins Day Festival was created to commemorate the legacy of the city’s founding twins, Moses and Aaron Wilcox, and was kicked off with a flag raising and dedication of the Wilcox Monument. A comparatively inauspicious beginning (to the current incarnation), it launched in August of 1976 on a rather humble scale, as only 37 sets of twins participated in the inaugural event. It was an byproduct of the local bicentennial celebration, intended initially as a one-off event. In the years that followed, expansion was steady, so much so that today’s version bears little resemblance to the first iteration.

The first festival, held on the square, was “very rural, very Mayberry/ RFD type of event.” (Andrew Miller). Attractions ranged from sack races to a firefighter battle of the barrels. A children’s parade was held, with the wee little ones riding their colorfully decorated bicycles in a pint-sized procession. There were a few food and arts and crafts vendors peddling goods. Most notable may have the appearance of the world’s only skydiving clown, Thunder Chicken. After he landed, a magic show was performed for the children and then he was whisked away in a Wizard of Oz themed hot air balloon.

The festival may have been diminutive in scale, but proved a huge success leading to plans for a second festival the following year. By the second installation of the event, the locale was moved to the park.

Twinsburg’s Centennial

1917 marked the centennial of Twinsburg Township. Numerous committees worked feverishly to put together a celebration worthy of the area, its inhabitants, and the founders. The week-long festivities commenced on Sunday, August 4th with church services held in both the morning and early evening on the pageant grounds and concluded the following Saturday with the highly anticipated Pageant. Other activities and events included a dramatization of fifty year old pranks pulled by schoolchildren attending Bissel Academy, family reunions, log rolling, band music, and old time Virginia reels.

One of the highlights of Twinsburg’s Centennial was it’s pageant. The Pageant was a faithful portrayal of the highlights of the area’s first hundred years from the earliest settlers right up to the modern day (or at least what passed for modern at that time). Over a third of Twinsburg’s populance (350 of 900) participated in the pageant, with 1,200 others in attendance.

Billed as a history of a town, in dramatic form, for many it was the high point of the celebration.  The Independent, which was the newspaper of Northern Summit County in 1917, reported that many people “pronounced it the finest pageant they had ever seen.”

The production was so popular it was produced in Cleveland during the following month. It was directed my S. Gertrude Hadlow.

View the Pageant Book here.

The Township of the time was fiercely religious and so was the Centennial. Opening festivities were imbued with a spiritual fervor. Both the Congregational and Methodist churches had hour-long services to kick off the festival. An excerpt from The (Hudson) Independent sums up the religious tone: “Let us come to this service with a keen realization of the meaning of the hour and let the whole community, young and old, render unto God, their Captain, their deepest allegiance and pledge their unfailing loyalty to the great cause of humanity, and show that with malice toward none and charity for all we enter this struggle reluctantly, but as true Americans, obedient to the stern daughter of the voice of God—DUTY.”

According to an article published in the Akron Beacon Journal: “No town in Northern Ohio has greater unity and loyalty among its people.” Unity and loyalty was on full-display for the duration of the preparation and subsequent festivities.

Thunder Chicken

In 1976, during the inaugural Twins Day Festival, a peculiar sight was observed: the only skydiving clown in the world, Thunder Chicken, hurled through the afternoon sky, safely landing on Twinsburg soil to the delight of all who were lucky enough to glimpse it. The man behind the greasepaint and guise of Thunder Chicken is Dallas Wittgenfeld, who improbably came up with the idea of a skydiving clown while serving in the army during the Vietnam War in 1969.

Wittgenfeld figured that Vietnamese orphans would never get the thrill of seeing an American clown, so he donned some makeup and deployed from an airplane high above the cheering throng. After the war he continued to delight children and adults alike with his skydiving chicanery at fairs, air shows and shopping center openings. His one-of-a-kind career was almost cut short in May of 1985 due to an arrest at Deland Municipal Airport (located in Central Florida) for flying while intoxicated.