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Hugh Mosher was the fifer portrayed in Archibald Willard’s “Spirit of ’76”, one of America”s most famous patriotic paintings. Mosher was born on January 29, 1819 in Perry, Lake County (then part of Geauga County), Ohio. He served as Fifer Major in the 43rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. After the conflict, Mosher was considered the finest fifer in the state, and performed at veterans’ reunions and other celebrations. Always popular and noted for his generosity, Mosher died on August 15, 1896 and is buried in Brighton (Lorain County), Ohio.
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New Haven, Ohio, was the mercantile center of southwest Huron County during the first half of the 19th century. Residents described immense wagons, or “land schooners,” lined up for miles on the New Haven-Worthington Road traveling from Columbus to the Lake Erie ports. Organized in 1815, New Haven was one of the early townships formed in Huron County and the Firelands. The village was platted, with streets at right angles around a diamond-shaped town green, after the plan of New Haven, Connecticut. When, in the 1840s, New Haven rejected the railroad’s direct route through the village, the Sandusky & Newark was routed to the west and through Plymouth taking with it the shipping business. Subsequently, New Haven began a steady economic decline into a small crossroads village.
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Israel Harrington (1779-1841) established a tavern at Lower Sandusky (now Fremont) shortly after the War of 1812. As a judge and land speculator, Harrington influenced the organization of much of northwestern Ohio. In 1824 he traded the tavern for land a short distance from this site, where an Indian trail crossed the Portage River. Elmore grew from this settlement. Harrington and his father (also Israel Harrington, a veteran of the American Revolution) are interred here, along with many of the pioneers who transformed this section of the Black Swamp into productive farmland.
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The Oorang Indian football team was founded by LaRue native Walter Lingo (1890-1966), owner of the Oorang Airedale Dog Kennels. The team, comprised of Native American Indians, played in the National Football League (NFL) in 1922-23. The star player and coach was Jim Thorpe (1887-1953), a Sac and Fox Indian. Thorpe gained international fame as a two-time gold medal winner (decathlon and pentathlon) in the 1912 Olympics and was acclaimed as the “World’s Greatest Athlete.” The team gave LaRue the distinction of being the smallest community ever to have an NFL franchise.
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The state’s oldest private institution of higher education, Kenyon College was founded in 1824 in Worthington by Philander Chase, first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, and relocated to Gambier four years later. Both college and village are named for British benefactors, statesman Lord Kenyon and naval hero Lord Gambier. Throughout its history, Kenyon has prepared men and women for leading roles in society, including nineteenth-century graduates Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, and Rutherford B. Hayes, Ohio governor and U.S. president. In the twentieth century, Kenyon educated such literary luminaries as poet Robert Lowell and novelist E.L. Doctorow. Kenyon has also been an innovator in education-the Advanced Placement Program began as the Kenyon Plan in the 1950s.
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The Shawnee and Delaware Indians grew restless as numbers of Virginians encroached on their lands by settling along the Ohio River. On October 10, 1774, Lord Dunmore, of the Virginia Colony, ordered Colonel Andrew Lewis and his 1100 Virginia militiamen to attack the Shawnee Indians near Chillicothe, Ohio. While Lewis’s army camped across the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Shawnee Chief Cornstalk, with 1000 warriors, crossed the river upstream for a surprise attack on the Virginia militia. After a five hour battle, the Shawnee retreated west across the Ohio. Some refer to this as the last battle fought by the Colonists while subject to British rule, and really, the first battle of the American Revolution. On November 5, 1774, following a peace treaty between Cornstalk and Lord Dunmore at Camp Charlotte on the Pickaway Plains, Dunmore’s officers met at Fort Gower, Hockingport, Ohio (48 miles upstream) and passed this resolution of “liberty”: (continued on other side)
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On March 18, 1942, four U.S. Army Air Corps pilots lost their lives within a quarter mile of this marker. Three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, these pilots left Wayne County Airport near Detroit flying P-39F Airacobra pursuit planes. They were part of the Army Air Corps Ferry Command delivering new aircraft to Louisville, KY. As they entered Allen County, a blinding snow storm limited visibility and convinced flight leader Lt. Edward H. Saunders to make a U-turn to escape the perilous conditions. With ice building on their wings and windshields, all four pilots, flying in close formation, crashed their planes into the ground within seconds of each other. There were no survivors. Although these men never faced the enemy, their mission was crucial to the United States in fighting the war.
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General John Hunt Morgan led a force of 2,000 Confederate cavalrymen into Meigs County on July 18, 1863, during a raid north of the Ohio River. More than 50,000 Union troops and mlitia pursued Morgan across the State of Ohio. At Langsville, in an attempt to delay the Confederate approach, local militia burned the bridge near McMaster’s grist mill. This was the first burned bridge encountered by the Confederates on their trek across Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. A young Confederate soldier, shot and killed by a local resident, was buried near this site. After suffering losses at Buffington Island, Morgan surrendered eight days later near West Point in Columbiana County. The surrender field was the northernmost point reached by Confederate forces during the Civil War.
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