Talk and Signing

From authentic letters written in the 1840s and 1850s by German immigrant blacksmiths and wagon-makers to Cleveland, and research for her novel The Last of the Blacksmiths, author Claire Gebben describes the city of Cleveland in its early days, the time of the opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal and the advent of the railroads, when the population was one-third English, one-third Irish and one-third German. The lens of the German immigrant experience reveals unique (and often humorous) insights into the culture of the day. Claire Gebben is the author of The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel, released in 2014 by Coffeetown Press.