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Ohio’s fifty-ninth governor, Marietta native C. William O’Neill was the only Ohioan to head all three branches of state government. An honor graduate of both Marietta High School and Marietta College, O’Neill won election to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1938, serving there until 1950 but interrupted from 1943-1946 when he was with General George Patton’s Third Army in Europe during World War II. In 1947 he became the youngest Speaker of the House in Ohio history. Elected Attorney General in 1950, he won the governorship in 1956, modernizing the highway and mental health departments during his tenure. His election to the State Supreme Court in 1960 and elevation to Chief Justice in 1970, noted by landmark judicial reforms, capped his exemplary career of public service to Ohio.
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The Brothers of Christian Instruction founded Walsh University in 1958. It is named for Bishop Emmett M. Walsh, then leader of the Diocese of Youngstown. The order created the institution to provide a college-level education that developed students’ moral virtues and sense of social responsibility as embodied in traditional Judeo-Christian values. As of 2015, Walsh University is the only Catholic university in the diocese and the only university sponsored by the Brothers of Christian Instruction, a religious order founded by the Fathers Jean Marie de la Mennais and Gabriel Deshayes in France in 1819. The University’s mission reflects the Brothers’ commitment to provide quality Catholic education with an international perspective to all who seek it, and to develop leaders in service to others. Since Walsh’s founding, it has become a successful regional and international Catholic university.
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In 1833, Archibald Smith (1803-83) began to build a sawmill a short distance east of here where a tributary enters Blacklick Creek. His work was soon destroyed, he wrote, by a “rise of water known as the great Fourth of July Flood.” Undaunted, he completed the mill the next year and used it to saw lumber from trees felled as he cleared land for cultivation. Archibald’s son, Dr. Isaac Newton Smith, described his father’s mill as the first on Blacklick Creek. Dr. Smith recalled four mills on Blacklick and one each on Sugar Run and Rocky Fork Creeks. These mills, he noted, received some of the best oak, butternut, chestnut, and walnut timber in the area. (Continued on other side)
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After the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, the U.S. War Department commissioned Ohio Senator B.F. Wade of Jefferson and local Congressman John Hutchins of Warren to supervise the Union Army’s recruiting service in Northeastern Ohio. Recruitment rolls were to be filled in summer so training could be conducted during the fall. The Oak Grove Fairgrounds in Warren, home of the Trumbull County Agricultural Society, was one of the sites selected for the training. This camp was named Camp Hutchins in Congressman Hutchins’ honor. John Hutchins, an attorney by profession, had served as Trumbull County Clerk of Courts and had been assocaited with future Ohio governors David Tod (1862-1864) and Jacob Cox (1866-1868), in their law firms. An ardent anti-slavery man and Underground Railroad agent, Hutchins served in the U.S. Congress from 1859 to 1863.
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In 1942, Charity Adams Earley (1918-2002) became the first African American woman to receive a commission in what became the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). She rose through the ranks to command the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in Europe, the only unit of African American women to serve overseas in World War II. Upon leaving the service in 1946, she was the WAC’s highest-ranking African American officer, a lieutenant colonel. Raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Earley moved to Ohio to attend Wilberforce University and later The Ohio State University. She married Stanley Earley, Jr., M.D. in 1949 and they later moved to Dayton. She became active in civic affairs, including serving on the Sinclair Community College Board of Trustees.
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The Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad Company was chartered by the State of Ohio in January 1832 to connect west central Ohio with northern Ohio and Lake Erie. It was the first company to be incorporated for railroad purposes in the state. Construction started in Sandusky in 1835. By June 1849, the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad was completed to Springfield. Through a series of mergers, the railroad became known as the Big Four Railroad in 1890. It came under control of the New York Central Railroad in 1905. As the railroad industry consolidated, ownership transferred from New York Central to Penn Central and then to Conrail. In 1994, the West Central Ohio Port Authority, a special purpose district established by the boards of county commissioners of Champaign, Clark, and Fayette counties, acquired the railroad track to ensure that freight service would continue.
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Camp Chase was a Civil War camp established in May 1861, on land leased by the U.S. Government. Four miles west of Columbus, the main entrance was on the National Road. Boundaries of the camp were present-day Broad Street (north), Hague Avenue (east), Sullivant Avenue (south), and near Westgate Avenue (west). Named for former Ohio Governor and Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, it was a training camp for Ohio soldiers, a parole camp, a muster-out post, and a prisoner-of-war camp. As many as 150,000 Union soldiers and 25,000 Confederate prisoners passed through its gates from 1861-1865. By February 1865, over 9,400 men were held at the prison. More than 2,000 Confederates are buried in the Camp Chase Cemetery.
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The German Reformed Church was organized on Kelleys Island in 1865. The congregation built this church from island stone in 1866 on 1/2 acre of land purchased from Alfred S. and Hannah Kelley. By 1871, the congregation, one of five on the island, heard services in German and had 25 families as members, including those of Baumler, Beatty, Becker, Boker, Burger, Cattenach, Dodge, Elfers, Fischer, Gerlach, Hess, Huber, Jordon, Keifer, Lange, Nowalk, Pringnitz, Renter, Schaedler, Scheele, Smith, Stoll, Suhr, and Trieschman. Rev. A. William Von Kaske was the congregation’s last resident minister, leaving in 1915. The church’s final service, a funeral for William Burger, was held in 1942. The church’s Ladies Aid Society was able to maintain the building until 1957, after which it was left vacant. The Kelleys Island Historical Association leased the church in 1981 and was granted the deed in 1986.