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Betsey Mix Cowles dedicated her life to fighting slavery and improving the status of women. Her desire for a formal education led her to Oberlin College, where she completed two years of study in 1840. An advocate of immediate abolition, Cowles lectured on the moral depravity of slavery, opened her home, at this site, to fugitive slaves. Opposed to expansion of slavery into the West, Cowles protested the Mexican War. Cowles served as president of Ohio’s first women’s rights convention (in Salem) in 1850, and the following year wrote a treatise on equal pay for working urban women. She served as the first dean of women at Grand River Institute, and later became one of the first women public school superintendents in Ohio.
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Campbell Hill is named for Charles D. Campbell of Bellefontaine, who owned this land from 1898 to 1937. A marble stone marker atop the hill, set in 1900 by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, marks it as the highest point in Ohio at an elevation of 1549.09 feet. In 1951, the federal government established the 664th Aircraft Control and Warning (AC&W) Squadron here as part of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Its military and civilian operators used sophisticated radar and computer equipment to locate and identify aircraft as friendly or suspicious, and relayed information to a central site in Battle Creek, Michigan. This Cold War site operated until 1969. It was converted to civilian use as a vocational education center in 1974.
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This village was founded in 1830 on the banks of the Blanchard River by Asa M. Lake, son of Asa Lake, veteran of the Revolution and War of 1812 and first settler of Delaware Township. The town and river are named for an early French pioneer, Jean Jacques Blanchard, who resided among area Shawnee Indians during the period 1770 to 1802. The Methodist Episcopal Church, first religious organization in Hancock Co., was founded in Delaware Twp. in 1828.
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Prior to the Civil War, New Richmond citizens participated actively in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. In 1836, James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, an abolitionist newspaper, in New Richmond before moving publication to Cincinnati. Local tradition tells of Jim, a slave living in Kentucky who was given permission from his master to visit his parents in New Richmond. He aided his friend Joe, a fugitive slave, by packing him in a box and placing him on a riverboat headed to New Richmond. Famed Cincinnati abolitionist Levi Coffin recorded, “A few abolitionist – white men – who lived near were called into see the fugitive and to advise in regard to his safety.” Joe was taken from Jim’s parents’ home to Cincinnati where Levi Coffin purchased him a train ticket to Sandusky, from where he traveled to Canada.
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The Lincoln School, which stood on this site from 1869 to 1956, was a segregated elementary school intended for the city’s African American students, grades one through eight. Hillsboro was the site of the first Northern desegregation suit following the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a decision that abolished the nation’s long standing “separate but equal” doctrine. (Continued on other side)
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Major John James (1772-1854) established James Cemetery in 1828 on and around a Native American mound that is the only significant ancient mound remaining in the city of Jackson. The mound is about 70 feet in diameter and nearly six feet tall. In the late 1800s, this mound comprised one point of three ancient mound groups forming a triangular configuration along East Broadway Street, formerly known as James Street. One group was a few hundred feet northeast of here on the Watson farm and a second was just to the northwest on the Warnicke farm. These mounds were built by the Hopewell Culture, prominent in southern Ohio from about 100 BC to 400 AD. Major James, his wife, and several immediate family members are buried on the mound including Jackson County pioneers Andrew Long, Daniel Hoffman, and David Mitchell.
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General John Hunt Morgan led a force of 2,000 Confederate calvarymen into Meigs County on July 18, 1863, during a forty-six day raid north of the Ohio River. After a skirmish with the 23rd Ohio Infantry, the Confederates paused to drink and replenish their canteens with cool spring water found in Rocksprings. Nearby, Isaac Carleton, a Meigs County native, was shot and wounded by a Confederate soldier. After suffering set backs at Chester and Buffington Island, Morgan surrendered eight days later near West Point in Columbiana County. The surrender field was the northernmost point ever reached by Confederate forces during the Civil War.
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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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