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The foundation for the first Welsh settlement in Ohio was laid on June 29, 1801, when William and Morgan Gwilym purchased land in what is now Morgan Township at the Cincinnati Land Office. The Welsh, who settled in Pennsylvania beginning in the late eighteenth century, moved westward and settled here in 1802. This area was also the major terminus for the 1818 migration from Montgomeryshire and Cardiganshire in Wales. In 1803 a Congregational Church was organized and services were held in members’ homes or outdoors. A brick Meetinghouse, complete with a Welsh death door leading to the cemetery, was constructed in 1824. The building now serves as the Community House. The present brick church was built in 1854. For many years, the library, formed in 1852, was housed in the New London Special School District building that stood on this site. (Continued on other side)
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The Lakeside Volunteer Fire Protective Association responded to both fire and medical emergencies on the Marblehead Peninsula for more than 100 years. It was founded in 1905, after a devastating fire destroyed Lakeside’s business district. In 1946, the Association began providing emergency medical aid. During their service, the Lakeside Volunteer Fire Protective Association progressed from hand-drawn chemical carts to the area’s first heavy-duty fire and rescue truck. In 2013, the Association donated its assets to the newly-formed Danbury Township Volunteer Fire Department and passed into history.
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Near this location stood the settlement of African American families known as “The Lett Settlement.” The Lett Settlement was a self-sustaining community of mixed race families, including the Caliman, Guy, and Lett families. The families had formed ties through marriage and common background during the mid-1700s in Virginia and Maryland. These early African American pioneer families came to Ohio as “free people of color,” and began acquiring land in Meigs Township, Muskingum County, and surrounding townships in adjacent counties during the 1820s. They were soon joined by the Brown, Clifford, Earley, Simpson, Tate, and Pointer families. The families of the Lett Settlement were land owners and tax payers in Ohio before the Civil War and challenged the State of Ohio for the right to vote and for access to education during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. (Continued on other side)
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Trenton’s founder, Michael Pearce, came to the area in 1801. The original village of 33 lots was named Bloomfield. When the post office was established in 1820, it was named Trenton to honor the founder’s home state of New Jersey. Pearce’s son-in-law, Squier Littell, was the first resident doctor in Butler County. Originally settled by the English, Trenton saw a migration of Germans by 1840. By 1851, the farming community became a grain center with the introduction of the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railroad. Further development occurred when a franchise was granted to operate interurban electric traction cars through the village in 1896. Early commercial endeavors were Dietz, Good & Company grain elevator, Trenton Foundry, and Magnode Corporation. By 1991, the largest industries were Miller Brewing Company and Cinergy/Cincinnati Gas & Electric.
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Here, in what has been described as “God’s Acre,” is the final resting place of members of the Society of Separatists of Zoar (1817-1898) as well as today’s descendants and residents. The early Zoarites’ simple religion forbade headstones, believing all were equal in death. These early burials, including fifty who perished in an 1834 cholera epidemic, are to your left. The headstone of Zoar leader Joseph Bimeler was erected later. (continued on other side)
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The Snowden Family Band was an acclaimed African-American stringband who performed in and around Knox County for nearly seventy years, from the 1850s into the 1920s. Buried in Morris Chapel Cemetery are Thomas Snowden (1803-1856), his wife Ellen Cooper Snowden (1817-1894), and their nine children: Oliver, Sophia, Mary, Ben, Lew, Phebe, Martha, Elsie, and Annie. Born into slavery in Maryland, Thomas and Ellen separately relocated to Knox County and to freedom during the 1820s. They married in 1834. In the 1850s, the six surviving children formed a band under Ellen’s direction. Talented musicians, the Snowden Family performed banjo and fiddle music for public events and at their homestead near Mount Vernon. Many believe that the song “Dixie,” attributed to minstrel Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), originated with the Snowden Family Band.
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In April 1784, the Continental Congress adopted the Report of Government for the Western Territory, a broad plan drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson for organizing the United States’ new western lands that were ceded by the states and purchased from Native Americans. One of the most far-reaching legislative acts in American history, the resulting Land Ordinance of 1785, passed on May 20th, established the public land system by which all federal land was surveyed and distributed. The Ordinance established a rectilinear survey system that divided land into townships of six miles square aligned by north-south and east-west baselines, and set aside certain lands for Revolutionary War veterans and for public schools.
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In 1862, less than a mile upriver from this marker, the John Lithoberry Shipyard in Cincinnati constructed the Sultana, a 260-foot, wooden steam transport. At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. Government contracted the Sultana to transport recently freed Federal prisoners north from Confederate stockades. During the night of April 27, 1865, while carrying over 2,300 Union soldiers – over six times its capacity of 376 passengers – a steam boiler aboard the Sultana exploded. The ship erupted in a massive fireball and sank in the cold, flood-swollen Mississippi River ten miles north of Memphis, Tennessee. Over 1,700 individuals died – some 200 more than those lost aboard the Titanic in 1912 – in what remains the worst maritime disaster in American history. Of the total casualties, Ohio lost the most of any state, with 791 dead. Indiana lost 491 persons, with Kentucky suffering 194 dead. It is estimated that, of the Ohio casualties, over fifty were Cincinnatians.
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