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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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Journalist David Ross Locke (1833–1888), known by his pen name Petroleum V. Nasby, gained national fame during the Civil War through satirical letters and sermons written in the voice of a fictional Copperhead. First published in April 1861, the Nasby letters mocked pro-Confederate sentiment and bolstered Northern morale. President Abraham Lincoln was a devoted reader, calling the letters essential reading during dark times. Locke’s writing—biting, ironic, and politically shrewd—remained influential through Reconstruction and helped shape the American tradition of political satire.
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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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The Soldiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Monument was planned and promoted by Butler County Civil War veterans and financed by a county levy in 1899. The monument, built of Indiana Limestone, is near the center of the site of Fort Hamilton, built in 1791 and named in honor of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury in President George Washington’s cabinet. Featured, are two large, colorful windows that recognize the contributions of Butler County women during the Civil War. Featured speaker at the July 4, 1906, dedication was Governor Andrew L. Harris, a Butler County native and Civil War veteran. His name is one of the more than 4,300 carved into the interior marble walls.
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After the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, the U.S. War Department commissioned Ohio Senator B.F. Wade of Jefferson and local Congressman John Hutchins of Warren to supervise the Union Army’s recruiting service in Northeastern Ohio. Recruitment rolls were to be filled in summer so training could be conducted during the fall. The Oak Grove Fairgrounds in Warren, home of the Trumbull County Agricultural Society, was one of the sites selected for the training. This camp was named Camp Hutchins in Congressman Hutchins’ honor. John Hutchins, an attorney by profession, had served as Trumbull County Clerk of Courts and had been assocaited with future Ohio governors David Tod (1862-1864) and Jacob Cox (1866-1868), in their law firms. An ardent anti-slavery man and Underground Railroad agent, Hutchins served in the U.S. Congress from 1859 to 1863.