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Doctors Charles Elmer Sawyer and his son, Carl Walker Sawyer, opened Sawyer Sanatorium on White Oaks Farm in 1911. Built to provide physical and emotional healing in a unique environment, the complex incorporated six patient bungalows, houses for the two doctors, offices, a large dining and social hall, and treatment buildings. An enclosed quarter-mile-long cloister connected these buildings around a large courtyard. Each bungalow, given botanical names such as “Ivy” and “Rose,” contained individual patient rooms, a communal living room, and bathing facilities. Hydropathic and electropathic treatments buildings were added later. A shady ten-acre knoll on the farm featured a grove of white oak trees that served as a picnic area for patients. Over the years, the facility also hosted local and national social and political events. (Continued on other side)
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The Marysville Ohio National Guard Armory was the first such armory constructed in the state after the recognition of the Guard in 1909. The new armory and others like it were built in response to federalization of National Guard units after the passage of the Militia Act of 1903. Armory buildings served as the headquarters for local companies and provided drill rooms and arsenals for the storage of military equipment and supplies. Architect Charles Insco Williams designed Marysville’s armory and it was built by James Laughlin, both of Dayton, Ohio. Marysville contractor George W. Fox provided the brickwork for the structure. Construction began in 1910 and was completed in 1911 at a cost of $19,886. (Continued on other side)
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Jeremiah Reeves was born in England in 1845 and began his career in the mills of Wales, United Kingdom, at the age of ten. In 1867, he immigrated to the United States where he worked in the steel mills of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Connellsville, Pennsylvania. He met his wife Jane Rees in the latter place and they married in 1869. In 1883, Reeves acquired a steel rolling mill in Dover for $14,000. Despite a history of financial difficulties, the Reeves Iron Works would go on to expand several times and employ over 800 men. The iron works and later the Reeves Manufacturing Company established Dover as an industrial center during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, many young men of Bristol Township enlisted in the army when President Abraham Lincoln issued his call to defend the Union cause. The death toll of some of these men at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April 1862 touched the local community as did the loss of Bristol Township lives at the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky, the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Virginia, and other theaters of war later in the year. The local citizenry responded to a plan for a lasting public memorial at the Town Park through a fund raising campaign. In 1863 the town square was transformed with a marble monument placed on an elevated mound at its center. The monument was designed by local artist Frank J. Hammond and manufactured by Myers, Uhl & Company of Cleveland at a cost of $500. [continued on other side]
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The charter establishing the original thirteen colonies were vague in their descriptions of location. In some cases, more than one colony had a legal claim to the same western land, After much controversy and compromise, each new state gave up its claim to the west. The lands were placed in public domain to benefit all the states. Virginia, which had given up vast claims as part of the compromise, reserved an area in Ohio called the Virginia Military District. It was bounded by the Scioto River to the north and east and by the Little Miami River to the west. All of present-day Union County was within the Virginia Military District. (Continued on other side)
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Canfield, named for the area’s primary landowner Judson Canfield, is one of the earliest examples of a New England town plan in both Ohio and the Western Reserve. It dates to April 20, 1798, when surveyor Nathaniel Church arrived from Connecticut to layout the town. Church and his team erected a log cabin and laid out roads and lots using a New England Green Plan that envisioned a communal ground at the center that would later be surrounded by various civil buildings. During the War of 1812, the Canfield Green was used as a drill ground for the Northern Ohio and Western Reserve militia, led by General Elijah Wadsworth. On August 23, 1812, General Wadsworth and the Canfield Dragoons left the Canfield Green heading for Cleveland to defend the United States and the Western Reserve from attacks by the British and their Native American allies. (Continued on other side)
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Frances Dana (Barker) Gage was born on October 12, 1808, in Marietta. She married James L. Gage in 1829 and they raised eight children, including four sons who served with Union forces during the Civil War. Throughout much of her life, Frances was deeply involved with the Temperance and Anti-Slavery movements and Women’s Rights issues. Presiding over the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, she invited Sojourner Truth to give her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. The Gage family moved in 1853 to St. Louis, the western extension of the Mason-Dixon Line, where her life was threatened whenever she spoke out against slavery. During the Civil War, she traveled south to aid Union soldiers and teach freed slaves. Though crippled and permanently disabled by a stroke, she continued to lecture on social issues until 1867. Frances Dana Gage died on November 10, 1884, in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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American Legion Union Post No. 79 was organized on August 21, 1919, at the National Guard Armory in Marysville. In 1927, the Legion purchased a 24 acre parcel known as “Clement Woods” to serve as a living memorial “to Union County Veterans of All Wars”. The park was dedicated on August 24, 1927, and renamed American Legion Memorial Park. The brick Memorial Building was constructed from 1937 to 1938 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Post held their first meeting there on September 12, 1938. An addition to the Memorial Building was completed in 1960. In 1989, the Legion donated the park to the City of Marysville on the condition it remains a free, public park.