Hercules Motors Corporation Industrial Complex

This 23-acre industrial complex lies about a mile south of downtown Canton, Ohio, and holds 35 buildings and 8 structures built between about 1855 and 1964. The oldest buildings were put up by C. Aultman & Co., a maker of threshers and engines, and include a three-story balloon frame and masonry storage building, a carpenter shop and paint shops. Later occupants included a papier-mache figure maker and an ice machine company. Hercules Motors Corporation built Building 1, a machine shop, in 1916 as its first structure on the site, then added assembly, testing, machine shop and office buildings through the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Firestone and Motter, local architects, designed the 1940s buildings. The later buildings use reinforced concrete, brick and steel industrial windows, with flat roofs and monitors. A 148-foot brick stack once lettered HERCULES marks the boiler house. The site is recognized as a layered record of how industrial architecture changed over roughly a century.