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The Rev. Jacob Ward founded the Brunswick Methodist Episcopal Church in April 1817 with 13 members: Rhoda Stow, John and Lucy Stearns, John and Hannah Hulet, Samuel and Sarah Tillotson, Thomas and Phoebe Stearns, Solomon and Polly Harvey, Lydia Crittenden, and Olivia Ashley. In 1830, John and Lucy Stearns donated land for a cemetery, which included space for a church. A new church was completed in 1872. Bricks used for the building were fired locally and the first windows were glazed with clear glass and protected by shutters. In 1916, the church was extensively remodeled and redecorated. Stained glass replaced the clear glass, the church bell was relocated to the newly-added tower, and the main entrance was moved from the center of the building to the vestibule in the tower. (Continued on other side)
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The first road through Marion County followed the Scioto Trail of the Native Americans. This 120-foot wide strip through Wyandot territory led from Lower Sandusky (Fremont) to the Greenville Treaty Line. A confederation of Ohio tribes ceded it to the United States at the Treaty of Brownsville, Michigan, in 1808. During the War of 1812, the troops of General William Henry Harrison’s Army of the Northwest traveled this road en route to Fort Meigs and the British fort at Detroit, using it to transport supplies to the army and to the chain of forts and blockhouses that protected the road. After the American victory, this area was opened for settlement by the 1817 Treaty of the Maumee Rapids, and soldiers who discovered the area while traveling the Military Road were among the first settlers. (continued on other side)
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This pioneer village, which was united with its downriver rival, Vistula, to be incorporated as Toledo in 1837, was platted by Cincinnati businessmen in 1817. The “Panic” of 1819 caused the enterprise to default. The village was re-platted in 1832. A two-story log warehouse along Swan Creek was the first important structure. The village was named for Captain James Lawrence, War of 1812 naval hero.
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In 1794 Abraham Voorhees, a Revolutionary War veteran, brought his family from New Jersey to the Northwest Territory to settle on 640 acres of land, part of the Miami Purchase, for which he paid John Cleves Symmes “533 dollars 30/90ths” in United States Treasury Certificates. By 1798 the town was platted and lots were being sold. Official registration of the plat was completed in 1804, the town’s name being changed to Reading at the suggestion of Henry Redinbo, who had moved his family to the area from Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1795.
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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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The Zoarville Station Bridge is a rare survivor of the earliest period of iron bridge construction in the United States, an era when unprecedented railroad expansion gave American bridge builders an international reputation for innovation. German immigrant Albert Fink first developed this truss design for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the early 1850s. Charles Shaler Smith, a prominent civil engineer and Fink’s former assistant, designed the bridge with patented features that improved on Fink’s original design. His firm, Smith, Latrobe & Company of Baltimore, Maryland, built this example in 1868 as a highway bridge over the Tuscarawas River in Dover. It was moved to this site in 1905 and abandoned in 1940. The Lebold family donated the bridge to the Camp Tuscazoar Foundation in 1997 for preservation and restoration. Of the hundreds of Fink Truss bridges built in the mid-1800s, the Zoarville Station Bridge is the last of its kind known to exist.
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Helen Steiner Rice was born on May 19, 1900, in Lorain, the daughter of Anna and John Steiner. Demonstrating an early propensity for writing, Helen planned for college, but her father’s death during the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic kept her working at the Lorain Electric Light and Power Company. In 1929 she married Franklin Rice, a Dayton bank vice president. Following the 1929 stock market crash, she worked for the Gibson Greeting Cards Company in Cincinnati and became editor of verse lines. Known for her words of inspiration, Helen’s gift for writing continues to reach millions in her poetry found in modern-day greeting cards and dozens of books. One of America’s most prolific poets, she was also an early advocate of women in the workplace. She was elected to the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1992. Helen died April 23, 1981, and was buried next to her parents at the Elmwood Cemetery in Lorain.
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A descendent of Knox County’s earliest pioneers, Confederate Brigadier General Daniel Harris Reynolds was born just three miles west of Centerburg in 1832. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, where he became a close friend of Otho Strahl, another Ohio born Confederate general. Reynolds taught school in Ohio before studying law in Iowa and then Tennessee. Admitted to the bar in 1858, Reynolds established a law practice in Chicot County Arkansas. An advocate of secession, Reynolds chose to serve the Confederate States of America in his adopted state of Arkansas at the start of the Civil War. Well respected in his community, he raised a company of cavalry known as the “Chicot Rangers.” (Continued on other side)
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