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In 1798, Judge Samuel Hinckley of Northampton, Massachusetts, drew the 72nd draft in the land lottery held by the Connecticut Land Company and received 15,305 acres in Township 4, Range 1, for which he paid $12,903.23, less than one dollar per acre. The area had been inhabited for many years by trappers, missionaries, and Native Americans. One of the earliest settlers was James McMullen, who acquired the first 160-acre parcel from Hinckley in 1801. Brookfield Township became the crown jewel of Hinckley’s holdings. Hinckley named Brookfield after a city in England and set aside land for the village green and the cemetery stating that they were for public use forever. During the mid-1820s the Overland Stage Line had a run through Brookfield, linking it to Salem, Warren, and Youngstown in Ohio and Erie, Pennsylvania and Dunkirk, New York. (Continued on other side)
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The Euclid Avenue United Brethren Church, later the Mount Enon Missionary Baptist Church, was erected at Third & Euclid Street in Dayton. Milton Wright, a bishop of the church, was present at the laying of the cornerstone on May 28, 1911. Bishop and Mrs. Susan (Koerner) Wright were the parents of Orville and Wilbur Wright and their siblings Reuchlin, Lorin and Katherine. The church’s congregation included Orville and Katherine Wright and other notable Daytonians such as local historian and former pastor Dr. Augustus W. Drury, food distributor and potato chip maker Daniel Mikesell and Prof. Josiah P. Landis of the Bonebrake Theological Seminary. The church playedd a role in offering aid during the disasterous flood of 1913.
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Kirtland in the 1830s became an early gathering place and headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had been organized under divine inspiration by Joseph Smith in western New York in 1830. Here the Mormons, as they are known outside the faith, created a religious community and introduced doctrinal concepts, organizational programs, and social practices that have been central to the religion ever since. The Kirtland Temple, dedicated in 1836, was the spiritual center of the faith. Internal dissension and external persecution arose largely from the distinctive features of the religion and weakened the Mormon community in Kirtland. In 1838, the majority of the Mormons here followed Smith westward to Missouri, Illinois, and eventually Utah.
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From its founding in 1865, Dennison was a railroad town and became the second largest rail center for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Rail presence was so strong that the industry dictated social and economic development throughout the community. For example, the Railway Chapel, the historic name for the First Presbyterian Church of Dennison was built because W.W. Card, Pennsylvania Railroad Superintendent, saw a spiritual need in the community. As the first church built in Dennison, Card contacted the Presbytery of Steubenville to start the church, arranged for donation of land, provided for financing from railway officials, and arranged for labor and material from the railroad. Railroad workers constructed the furnishing for the church with walnut pews built by the Dennison Car Shops. The pews have reversible backs, designed after ones in passenger cars. The church was dedicated in April 1871 and listed on the National Register of Historical Places in 2009.
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Hiram House was Ohio’s first settlement house and among the earliest in the nation, opening in October 1896 in Cleveland’s Whiskey Island neighborhood. Representing the ideals of a late-1800s urban progressive movement, settlement houses provided–through “service, not charity” –health, recreational, and self-development opportunities that were not widely available in this era. Founded by Hiram College divinity graduate George A. Bellamy (1872-1960), Hiram House administered a wide range of social services for people of different ethnic and economic backgrounds. Bellamy established the “Fresh Air Camp” circa 1900; Cleveland industrialist Samuel Mather donated this tract of land in 1903. In continuous operation since its founding, Hiram House has provided outdoor experiences and educational programs for thousands of Ohio children.
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With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, many young men of Bristol Township enlisted in the army when President Abraham Lincoln issued his call to defend the Union cause. The death toll of some of these men at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April 1862 touched the local community as did the loss of Bristol Township lives at the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky, the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Virginia, and other theaters of war later in the year. The local citizenry responded to a plan for a lasting public memorial at the Town Park through a fund raising campaign. In 1863 the town square was transformed with a marble monument placed on an elevated mound at its center. The monument was designed by local artist Frank J. Hammond and manufactured by Myers, Uhl & Company of Cleveland at a cost of $500. [continued on other side]
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Granville, Ohio, was settled in 1805 by the Licking Company, a group formed in Granville, Massachusetts, and Granby, Connecticut, for the purpose of emigrating west. The Old Colony Burying Ground was defined on the first town plat of Granville in 1805. Many of Granville’s pioneers are interred within this ground, and the cemetery retains its original form and most of its westward facing rows of sandstone and marble gravestones. The early settlers buried here helped to lay out this town and determined the appearance and development of the village as it is today. The first burial, the infant son of Ethan Bancroft, was in April 1806. The oldest extant gravestone is dated 1808. Eighteen veterans of the Revolutionary War, thirty-nine from the War of 1812, and sixteen Civil War veterans rest here along with ministers, farmers, industrialists, physicians, young mothers, children, and other citizens of Granville.
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The Rootstown Old Cemetery (sometimes “Ye Olde Cemetery”) began as a two-acre parcel set aside on the Abram and Siley Reed Farm for use as a burying ground. County histories record that Nathan Chapman Sr. (1759-1809) was the first burial. Although the Reeds dedicated their parcel as a community cemetery in 1816, it was not until 1861 that Reed Family heirs sold the plot to Rootstown Township for the sum of $1. Old Cemetery remained an active burial ground for more than a century; farmer Frank Seymour (1861-1942) was the last burial. Cemetery researchers recorded three hundred and ninety-eight burials in Old Cemetery; one hundred and twenty-six of those graves were unmarked. The Rootstown cemetery is the final resting place for veterans of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.