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The comingling of faiths in an area settled predominantly by Quakers helps explain the origins of Jonah’s Run Baptist Church. Ministered to by a Baptist preacher, the children and neighbors of Daniel Collett (1752-1835), an Episcopalian and private in the Revolutionary War, and his wife Mary Haines Collett (1753-1826), a Quaker from Virginia, became Baptists and started the church in 1838. Levi Lukens (1767-1860), a Quaker from Pennsylvania by way of Virginia, purchased the land where the church stands in 1812 and sold it in 1839 to a founder of the congregation. Like local Quaker meetinghouses, the church had separate entrances for men and women and a partition between the two that divided the sanctuary. The congregation’s sons and daughters lived their faith. Howard McCune (1852-1923) was the Clinton Baptist Association’s moderator and president of the Ohio Baptist Convention’s state board. Anne Cossum (1894-1977) was a missionary in China from 1920-1927.
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Reverend John Jay Shipherd and Philo Penfield Stewart envisioned an educational institution and colony dedicated to the glory of God and named in honor of John Frederick Oberlin, a pastor in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. Early colonists signed a covenant pledging themselves to the plainest living and highest thinking. Oberlin (known as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute until 1850 when it was renamed Oberlin College) was the first coeducational institution to grant bachelor’s degrees to women and historically has been a leader in the education of African Americans. In fact, African American and white children studied together in the town’s one-room schoolhouse, in defiance of Ohio’s “Black laws” forbidding this practice. The schoolhouse, built 1836-1837, is part of the Oberlin Heritage Center.
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George Sumner Huntington was born on April 9, 1850, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York. His father and grandfather had both been medical practitioners, and George followed them into the medical profession, graduating from Columbia University in 1871 at the age of 21. The following year he moved to Pomeroy and married Mary E. Heckard. On February 15, 1872, Dr. Huntington traveled to Middleport to address the local medical society, composed of physicians of Meigs County, Ohio and Mason County, West Virginia. As a child, George had accompanied his father on sick calls, observing common and uncommon afflictions. On one such visit, he witnessed a family afflicted by chorea, a nervous disorder marked by uncontrollable and irregular movements of the arms, legs, and face. His address in Middleport, titled “On Chorea,” referenced what would be known later as Huntington’s Disease. (continued on other side)
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Established in 1873, Lakeside is a pioneer of the American Chautauqua Movement, one of the greatest revival movements in United States history which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded by the Methodist Church, Lakeside is one of the few existing Chautauqua communities that remain and thrive today. Each summer, the late-Victorian community provides spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and recreational programs designed to nurture the mind, body, and spirit. It draws visitors from across the country and around the world for its Chautauqua program. Lakeside is recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Butterworth Station (seen across the field) was the southernmost station on the Underground Railroad in Warren County. Built in 1820, it was the home of Benjamin and Rachael Moorman Butterworth. As Quakers and abolitionists who opposed slavery in their home state of Virginia, they purchased 1,500 acres along the Little Miami River and moved to Ohio in 1812. Until nearly 1850, at great personal risk, the family fed and sheltered large numbers of runaway slaves before transporting them to the next station. When the Little Miami Railroad was built in the 1840s, Henry Thomas Butterworth donated land and water and assisted with the construction. In appreciation, the railroad created a stop here called Butterworth Station and gave his family lifetime passes. On this site, a water tower with a passenger waiting area was built that served as a railroad water station for decades.
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In 1810, Dr. Oliver Bigelow from Lansing, New York purchased a 4,000 acre tract of land in Monroe Township for $10,000. Dr. Bigelow planned to build a town. After mapping out streets, the town square, and a cemetery, he named the village Johnstown. Dr. Bigelow was the town’s first medical doctor and the first mayor. He died on November 5, 1817 and was buried in Bigelow Cemetery. Located in the southwest corner of the village, the cemetery became the resting place for more than 275 early residents as well as veterans of three wars. Their grave markers, though weathered by the seasons, serve as a reminder of their great contributions to their community and the nation.
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The United Society of Believers (or “Shakers,” as they are commonly known) established White Water, the last of four Ohio Shaker villages, in 1824. White Water flourished throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At its peak during the 1850s, 150 Believers living in three semi-autonomous Shaker “families” farmed 1,300 acres of land in Crosby and adjacent Morgan townships. The Shakers were among the most successful religious societies in the United States. Belief in the equality of men and women, separation of the sexes, celibacy, communal ownership of property, and a distinctive style of worship — characterized by rhythmic movements and shaking — helped define the Shaker lifestyle. (Continued on other side)
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One of America’s most inventive twentieth century writers, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles and graduated Warren G. Harding High School in 1929. He first published his poetry while studying at an experimental college at the University of Wisconsin in 1929. A pacifist deeply concerned with the human condition in mid-twentieth century America, Patchen blended linguistic and visual elements to create avant-garde works that defied literary conventions of the period, presaging both the “beat” and “concrete” movements of the 1950s. The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) and Hallelujah Anyway: Picture Poems (1966) are among the best known of his more than forty works of poetry, prose, and drama.
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