Local Businesses Emerge

Antioch might never have come to settle west of the Alleghenies had it not been for “Judge” William Mills, who routed the railroad away from Clifton and through town. Mills is also credited for convincing Antioch’s founders to settle in Yellow Springs in the early 1850s.

In 1853, the commitment to humanity was forged, paving the way for Arthur Morgan who came to town in 1920.

From the beginning, Morgan’s wife Lucy knew they could effect change at Antioch, which was suffering from an extended financial drought. “This place is in such bad shape I think we can do whatever we want!” she is said to have exclaimed.

Morgan was the chief engineer of the Miami Conservancy District and worked with innovators such as Charles Kettering during the time he first began to take an interest in Antioch College. Though Kettering, a Dayton man who invented the self-starter, did not agree with the Antioch philosophy in its entirety, he heartily supported Morgan’s idea to incorporate work with study, the practical application of classroom theory. Kettering donated a badly needed $250,000 to the College. Morgan became president in 1921, and through the College, they forged an unparalleled surge of interest in humanitarian entrepreneurship in the Village that resounds in community planning models today.

The seed for Morgan’s first business incubator must have already been germinating in the mind of his son Ernest Morgan ’29, who worked at the College press as a student. He was at the cutting machine, trimming large sheets of paper when he came up with the idea to recycle the scraps for bookplates. He founded the same Antioch Bookplate Co. in Yellow Springs in 1926 that has diversified and expanded into an international business called The Antioch Company.

Though the company has long since integrated employee ownership principles, it remains a family business run by Ernest’s son, Lee Morgan ’66, his wife Victoria “Vicki” Neff Morgan ’66, and their daughter Asha. The headquarters remain, of course, in the small town where it all started. “The values my husband was raised with, those same socialist, Quaker, Antiochian ideals, are what guides this global company today,” Vicki said. “They’ve been integrated in the day-to-day operations of the company, and it comes from his being raised in Yellow Springs and at Antioch.”

Later Antiochians who started businesses in the Village used the College faculty and local research institutes, such as Kettering Research Labs and the Fels Research Institute, as resources for ideas and product development. Even though the College’s science program was small, these centers helped offer a wide variety of resources to students. Around the time when three Antioch alums, David Jones ’44, John Benedict ’48 and Hardy Trolander ’47, began engineering work in the basement of the Science Building in 1948, Doctor Jim Corwin, Professor of Chemistry, saw an article in a magazine about a device he thought the young men could build and sell.

They built and sold 50 dialectric constant meters, and the Yellow Springs Instrument Company was born. It wasn’t just that the young business owners benefited from their mentors, but the professors began using their students’ inventions for new research projects. In YSI’s early years, the scientists, in conjunction with Associate Professor Dr. John Lacey, developed a series of instruments to measure changes in the autonomic nervous system, also known as a lie detector.

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