Today we present a taste of local history!
Our ThrowBackThursday blog features “The Jug” -- a Middletown, Ohio, fast-food drive-in pioneer dating back to 1932. It still operates with new ownership at the corner of Central Avenue and Highview Road.
According to the 2019 book, “Iconic Restaurants of Butler County” by Teri Horsley, “One of the reasons the Jug is considered a Middletown landmark is because it is one of the oldest continuously operating drive-ins in America.”
Horsley recalls that the Jug “was first opened on South Main Street, in the city, by the former Middletown Journal-News Publisher Bert Lawler, who wanted to open a restaurant for his wife. By 1939, Lawler decided to expand his business and moved the Jug to Central Avenue, and in 1948, it moved to its current Central Avenue location just up the street.”
The author reports that “numerous people” have owned the Jug over the years, including “perhaps the most successful,” Dick Henderson, who “has a background in the food service industry, having worked at the Jug as both a carhop and cook when he was a teen.” He purchased the local icon in 1966.
She continues that in 2018 Donnie Osborne, “himself a former customer of the Jug who lived in the neighborhood behind the restaurant as a teen, decided that he wanted to revive the place that was such an important part of his own childhood...”
Enjoy “Jug” nostalgia with a look at several old newspaper ads, including the following which takes the form of a letter to customers. It appeared in the June 21, 1953, Middletown Journal and recalls the Jug’s history to that point.
Titled “21 Years of Faith, Work and Service...and the Greatest of These ...is Faith!,” it begins:
