Christmas Lighting Installation in Hudson, OH

Hudson was settled in 1799 by David Hudson, who came from Goshen, Connecticut, and the town kept a distinctly New England character from those first settlers. A town with that much intact early architecture judges a December display by whether it belongs, not by how much of it there is.

The historic fabric here is formally drawn. On November 28, 1973 a large area of the village, roughly bounded by College, Streetsboro, South Main and Baldwin streets, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Hudson Historic District, and the district was expanded on October 10, 1989 to take in the area around Hudson, Old Orchard, Aurora, Oviatt, Streetsboro and College streets. If a property sits inside those boundaries it is worth establishing early what that means for anything fixed to the front elevation, and that is a question for the city rather than for a contractor.

Red brick behaves differently from siding under artificial light. It absorbs a great deal of what hits it and returns very little, so a wash aimed at a brick facade mostly disappears while the same output aimed at white painted trim, window surrounds or a portico comes back strongly.

On a brick house the trim is the canvas and the brick is the background. Lighting the trim and leaving the brick dark produces a sharper, more architectural result than trying to illuminate the whole elevation.

Northeast Ohio's install calendar does the rest of the work. Hudson sits in Summit County at about 1,066 feet, and the nearest long term station, at the Akron-Canton Airport, averages 47.2 inches of snow a season with 40 days a year at or below freezing.

Those 40 days are the reason takedown deserves a date rather than an intention. Hardware fitted to a dry fascia in November and left until a January thaw usually comes off harder than it went on.

Hudson lights its greens the day after Thanksgiving. The tradition began in 1948 with one string of lights and now runs to more than 10,000 lights and 100 light poles trimmed with greenery and bows, and in 2023 the city kept them lit daily through January 31.

The Hudson Clock Tower was built in 1912 by James Ellsworth, with a clock movement from the E. Howard Clock Company of Boston driven by 3,000 pound weights and Westminster chimes. A fire in 1892 destroyed buildings on the west side of Main Street, and Ellsworth helped rebuild the street after another fire in 1903. David Hudson built the first log house in Summit County here, and a marker stands on a boulder at Baldwin and North Main streets.

Hudson was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and 21 locations in and around the city had been tied to it by 2019. Historical markers stand at the site of the Brown family home at Ravenna and South Main streets and at the first meetinghouse of the First Congregational Church, at East Main and Church streets. The John Brown Farmhouse on Hines Hill Road is also on the National Register.

The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad began service to Hudson in 1852, and passenger service ended in 1965. The old Hudson Depot stood near the south end of College Street, where Abraham Lincoln spoke from the last train car in 1861.

Hudson's water drains to five watersheds, chiefly Brandywine Creek, Mud Brook and Tinkers Creek, and the Evaporator Works, where the G.H. Grimm company began building maple syrup evaporators in 1882, lies south of Ravenna Street and east of State Route 91.