Ashtabula Harbor was a sleepy Lake Erie port until 1873, when competing railroads finally connected it to the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio. Within two decades, it had become the greatest iron ore receiving port on the Great Lakes. Much of the greatness was due to immigrant labor - Finns, Italians, Irish and many others found work, home and a better life in Ashtabula. The Harbor had a reputation for being the toughest port on the Great Lakes, thanks to dozens of saloons, brothels, fights, murders and bums. This is a story of innovation, hard work, transformations and revival, the story of the world's greatest iron ore receiving port.

Post-World War II Ashtabula was a major Great Lakes port with a thriving downtown. Local photographer Richard E. Stoner began taking photographs of the growing city in 1938, and for the next 58 years, his lens captured Ashtabula's businesses, industries, and citizens. His commercial accounts ranged from the harbor's Pinney Dock and Transport Company, to Main Avenue's locally-owned Carlisle-Allen Company department store, to Ashtabula's major war industries. Dick Stoner's earlier photographs capture the Ashtabula that once was, including the week-long Sesquicentennial Celebration of 1953. His later photos record the beginnings of fundamental change in our way of life. Also included in this volume are some pre-1930s photographs by Vinton N. Herron, whose work Stoner purchased when Herron retired. For Ashtabulans, this is a family album. For others, it is a look at a bygone time in Midwest America.

Besides being the title of this book, Lake Effect is a term that everyone in Northeast Ohio knows. It happens when frigid air from Canada dips south, picks up water from Lake Erie, freezes it at high altitude, and then, to the delight of kids hoping for school cancellations, dumps it in the form of snow as soon as it reaches the shoreline in Ashtabula, Ohio. Lake Effect, the book, touches upon the psychological and emotional impact of growing up in Ashtabula, a blue-collar town with a huge port, major chemical and manufacturing plants, a culturally diverse population, and a spider web of railroad tracks feeding into ships in the harbor. Told in fifty-eight vignettes through the eyes of an Italian American girl and a Finnish American boy (at a time when weddings between people of those crosstown cultures were considered mixed marriages), the book offers a glimpse into small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s. As beneficiaries of the work ethic of their parents and immigrant grandparents, the authors pay tribute to family and friends who provided example and advice (sometimes unheeded) during their coming of age years.