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Shortly after Oberlin Colony was established in 1833, a two-acre burying ground was set aside south of Plum Creek in the area bounded by Main, Morgan, and Professor streets. By 1861, however, with the town and Oberlin College growing and the Civil War escalating, the need for a larger cemetery became clear. After an extensive search, 27.5 acres of land belonging to Henry Safford were acquired one mile west of the center of Oberlin. H.B. Allen was hired to create a design in the style of the Rural Cemetery Movement, and in July 1864 Westwood Cemetery was formally dedicated. Burials in Westwood had actually begun in August 1863, and over the next few years hundreds of remains were reinterred from Oberlin’s “Old Cemetery” and from burying grounds in surrounding communities. In the mid-1860s the cemetery was enlarged to its present 47 acres, and in 2004 burials and memorials were estimated to number almost ten thousand. (Continued on other side)
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Originally part of the Casterline farm, this cemetery was once the site of the 1824 Bazetta Presbyterian Church, the first church in Bazetta Township. Ziba Casterline deeded .75 acres for the cemetery to the church in 1829 for five dollars. When the small log structured church was relocated to Lot 55 in the township, the cemetery remained. Buried in the cemetery are several early settlers, including Moses Hampton, Joseph Headley, Joseph Pruden, and John Hulse, the first white child born in the township. [continued on other side]
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Soldiers from Company F of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry died in the explosion of the steamboat Sultana seven miles north of Memphis on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865. The Sultana reportedly carried more than 2,400 passengers–six times its capacity of 376. The vast majority were Union soldiers recently freed from Southern prisons at the end of the Civil War. Approximately 1,800 passengers and crew died in what is considered the worst maritime disaster in American history. Company F was organized in Stark, Columbiana, and Portage Counties and was mustered into service at Camp Massillon in the fall of 1862. This marker is a memorial to the soldiers of Company F who died as a result of the Sultana tragedy and other war-related causes.
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Prompted by response to his popular lectures, astronomer Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel (1809-1862) founded the Cincinnati Astronomical Society (CAS) in 1842. With CAS funding, Mitchel traveled to Munich, Bavaria, to acquire the optical elements for what became the world’s second largest refractor telescope. In 1843 former president John Quincy Adams laid the cornerstone of the observatory building, located upon the hill since known as Mount Adams. The Cincinnati Observatory was completed and opened for study in 1845. Mitchel, who died in service during the Civil War, was among the first to popularize astronomy in America. The telescope he brought to Cincinnati remains in daily use, the oldest such instrument in the United States.
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In the early years of the nineteenth century, a religious unrest known as the Second Great Awakening spread across much of the American frontier. Among the most influential of the evolving religious organizations were the Campbellites, or Disciples of Christ, founded in the 1820s by Thomas and Alexander Campbell. The Campbellite movement sought to “restore” New Testament Christianity by calling for a return to the primitive church revealed in the gospels. Campbellites denied creeds and oath-taking and rejected sectarianism. They believed in baptism by immersion and communion on Sundays. Followers also dealt with problems and transgressions of members within the church and did not use civil courts. They held a millennial view that professed human happiness and the belief that Christ would reign on earth for a thousand years. Believers spread this word to the pioneers of the Doty Settlement and elsewhere. By 1850, there were ninety Campbellite Churches in Ohio.
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In 1820, Mark Evans, John Davis, and Jacob Waggoner acquired from Daniel Triplett an 18-rod-square parcel (approximately two acres) at this location on which to build the first school in Plain Township. Education was not publicly funded at the time and the first teacher, Jacob Smith, “kept” school for $1.50 per scholar. The fact that part of the school lot became a cemetery suggests that the log building was also used for church services, as was a log school a mile and a half east of here on Central College Road. (continued on other side)
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For ninety-one years, The Mahoning Dispatch served Canfield and the surrounding communities, earning the distinction of being the oldest continuously published newspaper owned by a single family in Mahoning County. The first edition of the weekly journal was published May 4, 1877, with a yearly subscription price of $1.50, to be paid in advance. Founded by Canfield native and Civil War veteran Henry Manning Fowler, The Mahoning Dispatch was originally located on the corner of East Main and Broad streets. In 1893, the business was moved to this location, which was built by Pierpont Edwards in 1866 to serve as a grocery store. The journal was one of the first printers in the area to purchase a linotype composing machine, which replaced the method of hand setting type. Published by three generations of the Fowler family, the newspaper was discontinued in 1968, maintaining its “country” paper characteristics to the end.
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In 1833, Archibald Smith (1803-83) began to build a sawmill a short distance east of here where a tributary enters Blacklick Creek. His work was soon destroyed, he wrote, by a “rise of water known as the great Fourth of July Flood.” Undaunted, he completed the mill the next year and used it to saw lumber from trees felled as he cleared land for cultivation. Archibald’s son, Dr. Isaac Newton Smith, described his father’s mill as the first on Blacklick Creek. Dr. Smith recalled four mills on Blacklick and one each on Sugar Run and Rocky Fork Creeks. These mills, he noted, received some of the best oak, butternut, chestnut, and walnut timber in the area. (Continued on other side)
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