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As a member of the 2nd Ohio Volunteer Cavalry that fought at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek in Virginia on April 6, 1865, the last major battle of the Civil War, Private William Richardson was personally recommended by General Phillip Sheridan to receive the Medal of Honor for bravery. Private Richardson was the only survivor of an eight man recon group sent to investigate the strength and position of the Confederate troops. His information was invaluable toward the defeat of the enemy forces that day. Private Richardson is buried with his comrades by the Civil War Soldiers Monument.
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Border warfare characterized the American Revolution on the northwest frontier. Between August 26 and September 15, 1781, sixty-four survivors of Lochry’s Expedition were held captive by “Butler’s Rangers” (British-allied Indians led by George Girty) in a camp near this site. Colonel Archibald Lochry’s battalion of Pennsylvania militia, part of a larger punitive expedition under General George Rogers Clark and traveling down the Ohio River behind the main force, was attacked by Girty’s men ten miles downstream from the mouth of the Great Miami River near present-day Aurora, Indiana. Thirty-seven militiamen were killed in the August 24 battle, including Lochry, and the rest captured. Afterwards Rogers abandoned his objective of capturing British-held Detroit. The captives were taken to Detroit and eventually to Montreal. Tradition holds that fewer than twenty of Lochry’s battalion ever returned to their homes.
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Carlisle Station Depot. The Carlisle depot for the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton (CH&D) railroad was located nearby. The CH&D started operations in 1851 and was the second railroad through Warren County. Carlisle Station was a passenger and freight-shipping depot and was joined in 1872 by another, when Cincinnati & Springfield Railroad (later part of the Big Four and the New York Central Railroads) erected a depot in nearby Franklin. Carlisle was originally known as the “Jersey Settlement,” because many settlers in the early 1800s were from New Jersey. George Carlisle, vice-president of the CH&D, purchased a large tract of land here. After Carlisle and his wife Sarah donated a lot to the community in 1856, residents renamed the place “Carlisle Station.” The Carlisle Literary Association built a hall on the lot c. 1856, which, as of 2019, remains as the older section of Carlisle’s municipal building. Side B: Schenck-Stanton Rally, October 3, 1868.
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Using the power of eminent domain, the United States Government purchased 9,000 acres of land in Perkins Township, Erie County, Ohio to build the Plum Brook Ordnance Plant in 1941, displacing many families and businesses. This tract included the original Perkins cemetery, the resting-place for many of the township’s founding families who settled here in 1809 and victims of the numerous cholera epidemics of the early to mid-1800s. Though many of the earliest graves could not be located, most were re-interred here as part of the war effort on the home front during World War II.
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Soldiers from Company F of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry died in the explosion of the steamboat Sultana seven miles north of Memphis on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865. The Sultana reportedly carried more than 2,400 passengers–six times its capacity of 376. The vast majority were Union soldiers recently freed from Southern prisons at the end of the Civil War. Approximately 1,800 passengers and crew died in what is considered the worst maritime disaster in American history. Company F was organized in Stark, Columbiana, and Portage Counties and was mustered into service at Camp Massillon in the fall of 1862. This marker is a memorial to the soldiers of Company F who died as a result of the Sultana tragedy and other war-related causes.
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Prompted by response to his popular lectures, astronomer Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel (1809-1862) founded the Cincinnati Astronomical Society (CAS) in 1842. With CAS funding, Mitchel traveled to Munich, Bavaria, to acquire the optical elements for what became the world’s second largest refractor telescope. In 1843 former president John Quincy Adams laid the cornerstone of the observatory building, located upon the hill since known as Mount Adams. The Cincinnati Observatory was completed and opened for study in 1845. Mitchel, who died in service during the Civil War, was among the first to popularize astronomy in America. The telescope he brought to Cincinnati remains in daily use, the oldest such instrument in the United States.
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Born in Kentucky in 1793, his family moved to the Ohio country in 1797. Taught by his mother and in a log-cabin school near Dayton, he began teaching here by 1809. Purchasing land here in 1811, he served at Fort Greenville in the War of 1812. He married Priscilla Knight in 1815 and fathered eleven children. He held offices of assessor, appraiser, constable, trustee, justice of the peace, and attained the rank of Brigadier General in the Ohio Militia. He died in 1883 and is buried here in Lostcreek Cemetery.
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President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, created a national tragedy, and the nation mourned as his body was transported by rail from Washington D.C. back to Springfield, Illinois, where he would be buried. In Champaign County, Ohio, the train passed through Urbana and Westville late at night April 29 and traveled through the Blue Hills for eight miles of dangerous curves and hills to arrive in St. Paris. Reaching the summit in St. Paris, the train paused near Springfield Street for a brief memorial service. Christian McMorran and Rachel Furrow, representing a crowd of local residents who stood in silence, laid a wreath on the coffin. The train would continue to Conover, Fletcher, Piqua, and Bradford on its way to Richmond and Indianapolis and then Chicago, finally arriving in Springfield, Illinois, on May 3, 1865.