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Fairfield County quickly mobilized after the attack on Ft. Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861 and the beginning of the Civil War. Parts of the county fairgrounds became Camp Anderson, in honor of Major Robert Anderson who commanded Fort Sumter during the attack. Enlisted men were trained there before being sent to war. Meanwhile the existing militia company- the Lancaster Guards plus new volunteers reported for duty at the Ohio Statehouse. They had the honor of being designated Company A of the 1st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. The 1st OVI became the Capital Guard in Washington D.C.
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Born in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, William Lawrence moved to Bellefontaine shortly after graduating from Cincinnati Law School in 1840. Lawrence was prosecuting attorney for Logan County (1845); a member of the Ohio Legislature (1846, 1847, 1849-51, 1854); Judge of the Common Pleas and Third District Court (1857-1864); colonel, Eighty-fourth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Civil War; United States Congressman (1865-1871, 1873-1877); Founder and President of Bellefontaine National Bank (1871); First Comptroller of the United States Treasury (1880-1885); and original owner of Lawrence Woods State Nature Preserve, Hardin County. Judge Lawrence was instrumental in helping Clara Barton found the American Red Cross and served as its first vice president and chairman of the Executive Board.
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Vice President Thomas A. Hendricks was born at this site on September 7, 1819. While still a baby, Thomas’ family moved to Indiana and he grew up and rose to prominence in the Hoosier State. Hendricks served consecutively in the Indiana State Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives during the late 1840s and the 1850s. From 1863 to1869, he was one of Indiana’s U.S. Senators. Hoosiers elected Hendricks to serve as Indiana’s sixteenth governor in 1872, making him the first Democrat to win that office in a northern state after the Civil War. In 1876, vice-presidential candidate Hendricks and his running mate, Samuel Tilden, lost the presidential election to Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes. Hendricks joined Grover Cleveland on the Democratic party’s presidential ticket in 1884 and won. Hendricks died in 1885, after serving only eight months as vice president.
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As the county seat, Port Clinton is home to the present Ottawa County Courthouse, completed on May 20, 1901 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Constructed in the Richardson Romanesque style, the exterior of the courthouse was built using sandstone quarried at Amherst, Ohio. Pink marble wainscoting, an ornate staircase, and stenciling enhance the interior. A copy of William Powell’s mural, “Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie,” is featured along with smaller murals depicting early county industries – farming, fishing, fruit growing, and quarrying. Memorial tablets honor veterans from the Spanish-American War and Civil War.
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In 1817, Revolutionary War veteran and Camden co-founder James Moore Sr. and his wife, Mary, deeded a plot to the trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to erect a place of worship. Although a church was not built until 1825, the earliest burial stone recovered on the plot was that of five-year-old Simon P. Zimmerman, dated 1818. Many subsequently interred were victims of the cholera epidemic of 1849. Felix and Rachel Marsh, in 1852, sold an adjacent one-acre plot to the MEC trustees “for a graveyard.” The expanded cemetery became known as Orchard Hill Cemetery due to the nearby fruit orchards. Prominent citizens of early Camden as well as veterans of American conflicts from the Revolution through the Civil War are buried in the cemetery. (Continued on the other side)
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The Zoarville Station Bridge is a rare survivor of the earliest period of iron bridge construction in the United States, an era when unprecedented railroad expansion gave American bridge builders an international reputation for innovation. German immigrant Albert Fink first developed this truss design for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the early 1850s. Charles Shaler Smith, a prominent civil engineer and Fink’s former assistant, designed the bridge with patented features that improved on Fink’s original design. His firm, Smith, Latrobe & Company of Baltimore, Maryland, built this example in 1868 as a highway bridge over the Tuscarawas River in Dover. It was moved to this site in 1905 and abandoned in 1940. The Lebold family donated the bridge to the Camp Tuscazoar Foundation in 1997 for preservation and restoration. Of the hundreds of Fink Truss bridges built in the mid-1800s, the Zoarville Station Bridge is the last of its kind known to exist.
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Union Baptist Church, established in 1819, is one of Ohio’s early Black churches. Its pastor and members were active on the Underground Railroad from that early date. Between the 1840s-1860s Black churches along the route to and from nearby Poke Patch assisted over 200 escaped slaves. Members met in their homes until able to obtain a log cabin (circa 1879) on a Blackfork farm. In 1919, a larger church was built on land given by The Cambria Clay Products Company. The adjacent cemetery has over fifty veterans from the Civil, Spanish American, both World, Korean, and Vietnam wars. Donald Russell Long, laid to rest in 1966, received a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor. Union Baptist Church, the historic foundation of the Poke Patch-Blackfork community, celebrates an annual Church Anniversary to honor its legacy.
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A descendent of Knox County’s earliest pioneers, Confederate Brigadier General Daniel Harris Reynolds was born just three miles west of Centerburg in 1832. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, where he became a close friend of Otho Strahl, another Ohio born Confederate general. Reynolds taught school in Ohio before studying law in Iowa and then Tennessee. Admitted to the bar in 1858, Reynolds established a law practice in Chicot County Arkansas. An advocate of secession, Reynolds chose to serve the Confederate States of America in his adopted state of Arkansas at the start of the Civil War. Well respected in his community, he raised a company of cavalry known as the “Chicot Rangers.” (Continued on other side)
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