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On this site, the evening of December 29, 1866, a group of men gathered in the First Baptist Church for a prayer meeting which resulted in the founding of the Painesville Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Two years later the YMCA outgrew its headquarters at the Baptist Church and moved to upstairs rooms at 71 Main Street. In 1905 it purchased the former Steele mansion on Painesville’s Park Place and relocated once again. The Painesville YMCA and the county YMCA merged in 1922 to become the Lake County YMCA, the second oldest YMCA in continuous existence in Ohio.
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The Ridgewood neighborhood, platted in 1914, was one of the first fully planned and restricted suburbs in the United States. Its innovative developer, Springfield native Harry S. Kissell, was among a small group of nationally-acclaimed real estate developers who, in the early twentieth century, created the modern suburb as we know it today. Their developments offered spacious lots in park-like settings; curvilinear, paved roads; utilities, and sewers. They also ushered in the practice of deed restrictions, which were both protective and exclusionary. Harry Kissell went on to become president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards in 1931. During his tenure, he conceived the idea for the Federal Home Loan Banking system, which, during the Great Depression, saved millioins of Americans from foreclosure and permanently opened up the possibility of home ownership to the middle class.
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Betsey Mix Cowles dedicated her life to fighting slavery and improving the status of women. Her desire for a formal education led her to Oberlin College, where she completed two years of study in 1840. An advocate of immediate abolition, Cowles lectured on the moral depravity of slavery, opened her home, at this site, to fugitive slaves. Opposed to expansion of slavery into the West, Cowles protested the Mexican War. Cowles served as president of Ohio’s first women’s rights convention (in Salem) in 1850, and the following year wrote a treatise on equal pay for working urban women. She served as the first dean of women at Grand River Institute, and later became one of the first women public school superintendents in Ohio.
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Lucasville Cemetery was originally established as the Lucas Family burying ground, with Susannah Lucas as the first recorded burial on May 4, 1809. Susannah’s husband, Captain William Lucas, a Revolutionary War veteran, is interred here along with the first wife of Governor Robert Lucas, Eliza “Betsy” Brown Lucas. By 1816, the cemetery was used as a public burying ground. Hand carved monuments inscribed with poetry can be found in the old section. Recognized as one of the oldest cemeteries in southern Ohio, Lucasville Cemetery has interred veterans of the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam.
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A Shaker village called Watervliet, Ohio, was located here from 1806-1900. The Shakers, originally called the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, were followers of Mother Ann Lee who came from Manchester, England in 1774 and established the first Shaker community in Watervliet, New York. The tenets of the religion included communal living, celibacy, and public confession of sins. The frenzied dance movements, which were part of the worship of their sect, gave the members the name “Shakers.” Attracted by the great Kentucky revivals in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Eastern Shaker missionaries came west to find converts and establish communities. A discontented Presbyterian congregation in the Beaver Creek area called Beulah was the nucleus for the Watervliet Shaker community. (continued on other side)
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This village was founded in 1830 on the banks of the Blanchard River by Asa M. Lake, son of Asa Lake, veteran of the Revolution and War of 1812 and first settler of Delaware Township. The town and river are named for an early French pioneer, Jean Jacques Blanchard, who resided among area Shawnee Indians during the period 1770 to 1802. The Methodist Episcopal Church, first religious organization in Hancock Co., was founded in Delaware Twp. in 1828.
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This is the gravesite of Robert Nesbitt, an immigrant from Convoy, Ireland who named Convoy, Ohio after his home town. In 2010, the Convoy Community Foundation, Convoy Lions Club, Convoy Business Association, and Convoy Community Days, Inc. raised the funds to restore Nesbitt’s tombstone. A representative from Convoy, Ireland – Ray Bonar – attended the rededication ceremony on July 4, 2010. The Van Wert County Historical Society took over the care of the grave site, which is in the Sugar Ridge Cemetery. The cemetery has been under the care of the Tully Township Trustees since its foundation.
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Known as the Norwegian Count, Nils Louis Christian Kachelmacher was born in Oslo, Norway of wealthy parentage. He immigrated to the United States at age 21 and was responsible for industrial growth in the Hocking Valley and expansion of the town of Logan. As president of the Columbus and Hocking Coal & Iron Company, Kachelmacher pioneered oil fields and developed holdings in iron, natural gas, and coal. He also directed the construction of the Greendale Brick plant, once considered the world’s largest brick producer. He died in 1917, bequeathing 10 acres of land to be used solely as a public park. He also established a trust to create an institution “solely to research the cure, prevention, and relief of varicose veins.” He once said, “It is my belief that each person should endeavor to make the world a little better because he lived and worked in it.”