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John “Appleseed” Chapman is considered one of Richland County’s original pioneers. In the summer of 1809, Chapman arrived in the Mansfield area just as Mansfield’s first town lots were being offered for sale. Chapman purchased town lot 265 for $120 from Henry H. Wilcoxen. Wilcoxen served as Richland County Sheriff from 1820 to 1825. Chapman later sold the lot to Jesse Edgington on October 30, 1818 for $100. During the War of 1812, approximately two blocks west of this site, members of the Delaware Indian tribe were encamped in a ravine southwest of the public square. After being removed by military force and their village burned, the Delaware were en route from their village in Greentown to the Council at Piqua under Colonel Samuel Kratzer.
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Emmitt-Greenbaum Building, 200 North Market Street, was built around 1878 by businessman and politician James Emmitt (1806-1893) to replace his 1837 wooden warehouse. The brick three-story Italianate building featured five vertical cast iron belts of simulated stone, a projecting cornice, reeded pilasters, and a “fortress-like fourteen bay front.” A covered wooden stairway on the building’s south side originally projected over the canal. Charles Louis Greenbaum (1871-1935) purchased the building in 1912 and opened his department store advertising it as “The Store with The Goods!” Over 140 years, the Emmitt-Greenbaum building was occupied by Jas. Emmitt Dry Goods, Hoffman’s, Greenbaum’s, Armbruster and Armbruster, Waverly Drugs, and the Bee Hive Tavern. A structural collapse after decades of deterioration condemned the building and the southwestern half was razed in 2021.
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Paul Eugene Brown was born September 7, 1908, to Lester and Ida Belle Brown at their Norwalk home on 7 West Elm Street. He attended Benedict Elementary until his family moved to Massillon, where his football career began. Although small, Brown was a successful quarterback for Massillon’s Washington High School and Miami University in Oxford. In 1932, he returned to Massillon as head coach. Compiling an 80-8-2 record, he instituted new ideas now considered commonplace in football: the playbook, hand signals, and sending in plays. Ohio State University hired Brown in 1941 and he coached the Buckeyes to their National Championship in 1942. After WWII, Brown agreed in 1945 to coach Cleveland’s new pro team. Despite his objections, fans voted to name the new team after Coach Brown. (Continued on other side)
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Site of the first fortified settlement in Anderson Township and one of the first in the Virginia Military District. John Garard and Joseph Martin were the founders of this Station, who, with Elias Garard, Joseph Frazee, and others, came by two flatboats with families and livestock from Garards Fort, Pennsylvania, via the Ohio and Little Miami rivers. They landed here on December 23, 1790, and proceeded to erect the fortification.(Continued on other side)
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During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the federal government established the Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC or triple C’s under the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Nearly three and a half million men between the ages of 18-25 were employed throughout the nine-year program and worked on projects that included road construction, flood control, reforestation, and soil erosion prevention and creating state and local parks. The CCC had other names like “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” “Tree Troopers,” and “Soil Soldiers.” CCC workers were paid $30 a month for a forty-hour workweek, with $25 of the salary being sent back to the workers’ homes. The CCC remained in effect until 1942 after the Great Depression had ended and unemployment was down due to the creation of jobs associated with World War II.
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Born in Chillicothe in 1872, Burton Stevenson’s life was devoted to the written word as a prolific author and anthologist, and as a librarian. Following stints as a journalist while a student at Princeton University and then at newspapers in Chillicothe, Stevenson became the librarian of the city’s public library in 1899. He held the post for 58 years. Stevenson helped secure a Carnegie Library for Chillicothe, completed in 1906, and became prominent for his service during World War I. He founded a library at Camp Sherman (an army training camp north of the city), which became a model for others nationally.
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In 1972 a group of Welsh-Americans chartered the Welsh-American Heritage Museum to preserve Welsh history and culture, and to preserve the Welsh Congregational Church. The old brick church was where songs of praises rang, as the Welsh gathered and sang beloved hymns of their homeland in four-part harmony. The church is a link in a long, unbroken chain of memories and still serves the community as a center of Welsh-American activities and a keeper of the community’s heritage. The red dragon and daffodil are symbols of Wales.
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When inventor and entrepreneur Garrett Augustus Morgan sold his Traffic Signal patent to General Electric in 1923, he used the $40,000 to purchase a 121-acre farm in Huron County in 1924. Advertising “a village of our own,” Morgan established the Wakeman Country Club — one of Ohio’s early African American recreation clubs — and offered 247 lots for $60 each in “Wakeman Heights.” Located near the intersection of State Route 60 and Chenango Road, the development provided country pleasures to Blacks excluded from the Country Club lifestyle. Club membership, included in the purchase of a lot, offered fishing, hunting, swimming, and horseback riding. A restaurant, dance hall, and amphitheater provided cultural and boxing events. The club waned during World War II and no buildings from the once-thriving Wakeman Country Club remain.