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The present structure for the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church was built in 1849 on Macedonia Ridge north of Burlington, an abolitionist sanctuary for escaped and freed slaves since 1799. It was built by the existing Baptist congregation and a group of 37 freed slaves who had arrived in Burlington from Virginia. The Baptist congregation in Macedonia had organized in 1811-1813 and practiced their faith in their homes and later in a small building with a bell tower made of sticks. The 1849 church was the religious and social focal point for the black community and became the “Mother Church” for approximately eight Baptist churches that exist in Ohio and West Virginia. The Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
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Built by people of the Adena or Hopewell cultures during the Early to Middle Woodland era (circa 800 B.C – 500 A.D), the Beam Farm Mound, 1200 feet northwest, has stood on the uplands overlooking Anderson Fork for two thousand years. Notable among the thousands of commemorative burial mounds built by these associated prehistoric cultures throughout the Ohio Valley, the Beam Farm Mound has been protected by its caretakers and remains unexcavated. Similar mounds have revealed formal tombs and evidence of elaborate funerary rituals.
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Ransom E. Olds was born on this property on June 3, 1864. Olds co-founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company, forerunner of the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors in Lansing, Michigan, on August 21, 1897. The curved dash model, built from 1900 to 1907, was the first car to carry the name Oldsmobile. With a 66-inch wheelbase, it weighed about 650 pounds, cost $650, and was powered by a one-cylinder, seven-horsepower engine capable of a speed of 20 miles per hour. It was the first commercially successful American-made automobile built using a progressive assemble system that led to modern mass-production methods.
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When St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated on January 6, 1884, an ornate brass chandelier presented by the Edison Electric Light Company provided illumination for the ceremony. Wired for electric lighting before its completion, St. Paul’s was one of the first churches in the nation lighted by Edison lamps. The Tiffin Edison Electric Illuminating Company, the first central electric power station in Ohio and the tenth in the United States, was built in Tiffin in late 1883. With a 100 horsepower boiler, a 120 horsepower engine, and two dynamos, it supplied direct current sufficient to light 1,000 lamps. It stood two blocks north of this site. The original brass “electrolier” still hangs in the sanctuary inside.
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The author of fifteen novels, ten plays, and more than 100 stories, Dawn Powell was born in 1896 in Mount Gilead at 53 West North Street and grew up in Shelby. She graduated from Lake Erie College in Painesville and moved to New York in 1918. Although some of her early works, such as She Walks in Beauty (1928) and The Bride’s House (1929), draw from her life in small-town Ohio, she is best known for her satiric portrayals of life in New York, including A Time to Be Born (1942) and The Wicked Pavilion (1954). Often compared to Dorothy Parker and associated with contemporaries John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, and Gore Vidal, Powell received the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifelong achievement in literature in 1964. She died in New York in 1965.
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Frances Rappaport Horwich was born in Ottawa on July 16, 1907, the daughter of Sam Rappaport, an Austrian immigrant who operated a general store, and Rosa Gratz Rappaport, a Russian immigrant. The youngest of six children, she attended the Ottawa elementary school and graduated from Ottawa High School in 1924. After high school, she attended the University of Chicago where she earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and taught first grade for three years. “Miss Frances,” as she was called, then earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1942 from Northwestern University. From 1942 to 1952, she was involved in teaching and education development. The basic education she received in the Ottawa schools enabled her to achieve great skills and abilities. [continued on other side]
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Seeking an alternative transportation route to distant markets, many farmers and manufacturers in Ohio wanted to connect the Ohio River to Lake Erie with a canal. Beginning in Cleveland the Ohio-Erie Canal ran south, the length of the state, to Portsmouth. The canal was a total of 308 miles long, 40 feet wide at the surface, and 4 feet deep. The Ohio-Erie Canal opened for traffic along its entire length in 1832 and consequently effected great change. Population along the canal increased, and commercial, political, and industrial growth in Ohio boomed. Products grown and manufactured in this previously isolated region now had access to world markets. Profits for farmers and merchants increased, and the entire state economy was bolstered. With the rise of railroads in the 1860s, however, canals were destined to become obsolete because the railroad was a faster and more dependable means of transportation. The canal system ceased to operate altogether after a disastrous flood in 1913.
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In 1893, Ohio and Indiana constructed the first Union School on the state line separating Ohio and Indiana. For 111 years, students from both states have been educated in what is the only schoolhouse located in Ohio and Indiana. In 1925, a new Union School was designed to replace the old schoolhouse. The dedication of this new school building took place on December 21, 1926. A new addition was added in 2004. The Union School Building has special architectural features such as a center stone placed on the Ohio and Indiana state line and Ohio and Indiana arched doorways. The bell from the 1893 Union School is displayed to the south side of the current school.
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