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In 1873, Tiffin’s Cronise sisters became the first women admitted to the Ohio Bar. At that time, Ohio laws did not provide for the admission of women attorneys. On April 4th 1873, Nettie Cronise applied to the district court. Despite vigorous opposition, leading local attorneys, including William Harvey Gibson and George Seney, supported Nettie’s applications. Ironically, at the same time as Nettie’s admission, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Illinois’ denial of admission to the bar to another woman based upon gender. Regardless, Nettie opened the door for the admission of women to the bar of Ohio. Six months later, Florence, Nettie’s younger sister, was admitted. Florence was also the first female notary public in the state. Together the sisters opened the first female-owned law practice in Ohio, N. & F. Cronise. (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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In 1918, Charles Young made a desperate attempt to convince the U.S. Army that he was fit for duty. The Army’s highest-ranking Black officer, he had been medically retired and not given a command during World War I. To demonstrate his fitness, he rode 497 miles from his home in Wilberforce, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. Leaving on June 6 he made the journey in 17 days, 16 on horseback and 1 resting. Averaging 31 miles each day, he rode 45 minutes and walked 15 minutes every hour. Upon his arrival, Young met with Secretary of War Newton Baker. Pressured by the Black press and the White House, Baker hedged. He recalled Young to active duty a year later and assigned him to Camp Grant, Illinois, just five days before the end of the war.
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Platted in 1802 by John Zane and William Chapline along the old Wheeling Road, Morristown was named for Duncan Morrison, an early settler, innkeeper, and Justice of the Peace. Older than the state itself, Morristown prospered into the mid-1800s, nurtured by trade along the National Road, the first federally funded highway project in the United States. The National Road was a major overland route to the West in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Federal style brick and frame structures that remain standing today replaced the original log cabins that first made up the town. Named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, Morristown is a well-preserved example of a National Road town.
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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 Village of Tadmor is significant as being the location of one of the most important centers of transportation in early Ohio history. As early as 1809, keelboats were poled up river from Dayton to load and unload freight in the village. By 1837, the Miami and Erie Canal had reached Tadmor, connecting it to the Ohio River in the south and Lake Erie in the north. In the 1830s, the National Road was constructed through Tadmor, connecting it to points east and west. In 1851, the Dayton & Michigan Railroad established freight and passenger service to the growing town. Residents hoped that Tadmor’s strategic location would help it prosper, however, successive flooding on the Great Miami River stifled growth. Tadmor was finally abandoned when a dam constructed by the Miami Conservancy District in 1922 to retain water during flooding made the site uninhabitable.
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Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. He immigrated to Allegheny City Pennsylvania with his family when he was 13. While operating the telegraphs for the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie perceived the great need for steel in the railroad industry. With this insight, he founded the Carnegie Steel Corporation which operated for 35 years before he sold it to J.P. Morgan in 1901. Andrew Carnegie wrote the article, “Wealth” in 1889 in which he said that a responsible person of wealth should help his fellow man. Carnegie’s philanthropy provided 2,509 libraries throughout the world. Carnegie was already familiar with the city when he wrote a letter to offer funds to build the Steubenville library on June 30, 1899.(Continued on other side)
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Captain Gordon C. Greene, a veteran riverman, was born in Newport, Ohio, on September 8, 1862. In 1890 he started the “Greene Line” with the “Henry K. Bedford,” a small shallow draft steamer; he owned twenty-five packets in his lifetime. The “Greene Line” later became the “Greene Steamboat Line” then the “Delta Queen Steamboat Company,” with the original port at the Newport Landing. The Greene family launched packets for tours on the Ohio River and its tributaries. Captain Greene died in 1927 at Hyde Park, Cincinnati, and is buried in Newport Cemetery. (continued on other side)
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