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Myron T. Herrick, Governor of Ohio from 1904 to 1906, was born in Huntington Township in 1854 and lived here until age 12. A respected Cleveland attorney and businessman, Herrick was a friend and confidant to Senator Mark Hanna and Presidents McKinley, Taft, and Harding. His public service career culminated in two appointments as ambassador to France, from 1912 through the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and again from 1921 until his death in 1929. Enormously popular with the French people, Herrick escorted Charles Lindbergh in Paris after his historic 1927 transatlantic flight.
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Evansport is named after brothers Amos and Albert G. Evans who, with Jacob Coy, had the village surveyed next to the Tiffin River on December 14, 1835. The “port” suffix in Evansport’s name reflects the river’s significance as a transportation thoroughfare. Evansport’s early growth was spurred by its mills powered by the Tiffin River. The mills provided settlers with lumber for buildings and supplied flour and cornmeal for sustenance and commerce. Settlers who poured into Williams County’s northern townships in the 1830s agitated debate about moving the county seat to a more centralized location. Evansport was platted as a possible site for the county seat. The Williams County seat was moved to Bryan in 1840 and in 1845 Defiance County was created, leaving Evansport on the Williams-Defiance county line.
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The Carthagena Black Cemetery (Union Cemetery) is a remnant of approximately 70 documented rural black and mulatto settlements established in Ohio before the Civil War. In the charged atmosphere following race riots in Cincinnati in 1829, Quaker abolitionist Augustus Wattles led 15 black families north in 1835. In 1837 Wattles purchased 189 acres where the cemetery is located. Headstones date from 1840, the year mulatto Charles Moore, platted the Village of Carthagena. Wattles and mulatto clergymen Sam Jones and Harrison Lee were Underground Railroad conductors. Wattles moved to Kansas in 1855. By 1860, more than 100 black and mulatto families, totaling 600 people, owned over 10,000 acres. (Continued on other side)
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The Temple of Rumley Church is of one of two remaining buildings in what once was Rumley, a thriving African American community in Shelby County. On May 19, 1837, the village was surveyed for Amos Evans, who built his hewed log dwelling and store. Brothers Joel and George Goings (aka. Goens), freed black men from Monongalia County, Virginia, purchased 80 acres of land that same year. They settled with their families near Rumley in Van Buren Township along with other free men and women of color, including former slaves. Joel Goings erected the first brick house in 1841, using bricks from his own brickyard. By 1846, the Rumley community stretched over 7,000 acres and included the Collins, Redman, Williams, Davis, Lett, and Brown families. (Continued on other side)
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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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One of the most influential Native Americans of the 19th century, Tecumseh was born in 1768 in the Pickaway settlements on the Mad River and raised by older siblings at Old Town. A prominent Shawnee war leader who vigorously opposed American expansion, he fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers but refused to attend the subsequent signing of the Treaty of Greene Ville in 1795. Angered by purchases of Native American land in Indiana by the United States, Tecumseh promoted a pan-Indian confederacy to resist the encroachment of white settlers, traveling thousands of miles throughout the western and southern frontiers in an effort to gain supporters for the alliance. Tecumseh sided with the British during the War of 1812 and was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813. His death ended hopes for a united Indian coalition.
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The Lincoln School, which stood on this site from 1869 to 1956, was a segregated elementary school intended for the city’s African American students, grades one through eight. Hillsboro was the site of the first Northern desegregation suit following the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a decision that abolished the nation’s long standing “separate but equal” doctrine. (Continued on other side)
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Samuel Patterson arrived in East Orange in 1824 and, within a few years, began to hide runaway slaves in his home. He also invited anti-slavery speakers to the pulpit of the East Orange Methodist Church, which brought Patterson and his neighbors into conflict with the bishop. Following their consciences, they became Wesleyan Methodists and built a new church. A pro-slavery neighbor mocked them by calling their community Africa, and so East Orange was renamed. The village has disappeared, but several homes owned by Patterson and his neighbors still stand in this vicinity.