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Sully Jaymes was an African American lawyer and tireless activist for equal rights in Springfield during the first half of the twentieth century. Born on March 30 sometime between 1875-1880, he graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1901. By 1903, he opened a Black-owned law practice at 17-1/2 Main Street in Springfield. Working primarily with the city’s Black residents, Jaymes offered his services free of charge if clients were unable to pay. He was a long-time member of North Street A.M.E. Church. Jaymes served on the first Board of Directors of the Center Street YMCA (a safe-haven for young Black people), on the Board of Trustees at Wilberforce University, and as a Grand Chancellor of Ohio for the Grand Lodge, Knights of Pythias. (Continued on other side)
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First a farming community, later a railroad crossroads in southern Hancock County, Arlington was one of the county’s earliest settlements. Gen. William Hull opened a trail into the area during the War of 1812 as he crossed Buck Run at Eagle Creek. He led his army to the Blanchard River to establish Ft. Findlay. Robert Hurd owned extensive tracts of land in the area, and his sons were the first recorded settlers, building a log cabin near this site in 1834. The rich farmland and abundant water soon attracted other settlers to the vicinity of “Hurdtown.” The name was changed to “Arlington” when the village was formally surveyed in November, 1844.
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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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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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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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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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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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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)