Kim Major

Detective Major didn't know it then, but this case would come to represent a defining moment in her career, one that would taint her love of fall.

The fall colors and county fair would soon come to remind Detective Major of the year her town was turned upside down.

From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm John Quinones, and this is The Hand in the Window

Episode 2, The Survivor.

Depending on who you ask, the first county fair in Ashland was sometime around 1850.

Back then, the fair was a place for farmers to show off their cattle and for young people to meet and dance.

And while the county fair has remained pretty consistent, Ashland itself has

has survived multiple reinventions over the years.

Like many small towns in the Midwest, Ashland has ridden a kind of boom and bust roller coaster.

By the end of the 1800s, Ashland was perhaps best known for a water pump, the Myers Pump.

It was made in town in a factory that employed hundreds.

Farmland was swapped for factory buildings as more manufacturing moved in.

The town population boomed to 20,000.

By the 1970s, Ashland was a production capital for all sorts of things.

Balloons, golf balls, surgical equipment.

But it didn't last.

Ashland is right in the center of the Rust Belt, and when manufacturing declined, the population didn't grow bigger.

but factory jobs became fewer.

Production moved elsewhere, and squatters took over what were once busy factory floors.

20 years ago, the Red Brick Pump factory was sold off to a local Christian charity.