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In 1833, John Randolph from Roanoke, Virginia, died leaving three wills that requested that all of his slaves be set free and that land be purchased for them. Although contested for thirteen years by his family, the slaves were freed and the executor of the wills, Randolph’s cousin Judge William Leigh purchased about 2,000 acres of farm land in Mercer County, Ohio. Traveling by wagon train, the freed slaves, 383 in all, reached their destination in 1846, but were forced to turn back by earlier established white settlers. They turned around and ended up north of Piqua where they purchased land and developed the Village of Rossville. Later some moved on to other places in Miami County and well as Shelby County. In Rossville, they established an African Baptist Church in 1869, cemetery in 1866, and public black school in 1872.
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Southington native Newton Chalker built, furnished, and donated Chalker High School to his community in 1907. Chalker was born in 1842 in Southington Township and lived there until adulthood. He later built a prosperous law and real estate practice in Akron. Chalker’s dedication to improve educational opportunities in the township likely originated with his personal struggle to complete high school, which was repeatedly interrupted by financial concerns and family obligations. The Chalker High School building was designed in the Neo-Classical Revival architectural style which was favored for public buildings, churches and schools early in the twentieth century. The building exhibits Classical influences through the use of fluted columns that support a pedimented gable, resembling a Greek temple. Chalker High School and the Civil War Monument were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. (Continued on other side)
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A colossus of engineering acumen and structural steel, the Airdock was built in 1929 as the construction facility for the U.S. Navy’s rigid airships, the USS Akron (1931) and USS Macon (1933). The airships, or dirigibles, served as the fleet’s aerial watchdogs, but with the advancement of aircraft carriers, the Navy no longer needed these leviathans of the skies, which were large enough to carry five biplanes. Eleven steel parabolic arches, cresting at 211 feet, create one of the largest open space interiors in the world and shelter more than 364,000 square feet of floor space. Only one of the arches is fixed to its concrete piling. Its 660-ton spherical doors rest on flatbed railroad cars to open. The Airdock, a National Civil Engineering Landmark, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
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Construction of the Columbus, Piqua, and Indiana Central Railroad started in 1850 and was finished in 1854. Later referred to as the “Panhandle Railroad,” it ran from Columbus to Bradford. During the Civil War, the line carried supplies and troops and it was extended from Bradford to Richmond, Indiana. President Lincoln’s funeral train traveled the route on April 29, 1865. Eventually, three railway lines crossed Urbana: the Big Four, the Pennsylvania, and the Erie. “Corn brooms,” woolen cloth, horse carriages, and tinware were shipped by railroad to national markets and regular passenger service carried residents to destinations across the country, including Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and Washington, D.C. (Continued on other side)
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The Connecticut Land Company surveyed Vienna Township as Township 4, Range 2, in 1798. The Township’s proprietors were Ephraim Root, Uriel Holmes, Jr., and Timothy Burr. Survey members Dennis Clark Palmer, Isaac Flower, and Samuel Hutchins and their families were the first to settle here in 1799. Between 1810 and 1840, Vienna was a center for the wooden works clock industry in Trumbull County and the Connecticut Western Reserve, with six factories located amid farms, sawmills, and quarries. After coal was discovered in 1866, over twenty mines were opened, bringing boom times for two decades. Vienna’s miners helped to bring about Ohio’s first mining safety law in 1874. Vienna was the birthplace of abolitionist and attorney John Hutchins (1812-1891), who represented Trumbull and Ashtabula counties in the United States Congress (1859-1863) and raised troops during the Civil War.
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First Church was built by the Oberlin Community in 1842-44 for the great evangelist Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875). He was its pastor, headed Oberlin College’s Theology Department, and later became College president. In the mid-19th century this Congregational church had one of the largest congregations and auditoriums west of the Alleghenies. Eminent speakers such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Twain, and Woodrow Wilson have addressed the community in its Meeting House. Antoinette Brown graduated from the College’s Ladies’ Department in 1847 and then completed three years of study under Finney in the all male Theology Department. She worshipped and led women’s prayer meetings at First Church. The College denied her the Theology certificate since women were not deemed suitable to be ordained. (continued on other side)
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Quincy Adams Gillmore, considered one of the greatest military engineers and artillerists of the Civil War, was born to Quartus Gillmore and Elizabeth Reid Gillmore at this location in 1825. He attended Norwalk Academy and taught high school in Elyria before embarking on a military career. Graduating first in his class at West Point in 1849, he entered the Corps of Engineers. In August 1861, he served in the Union’s Port Royal expedition in South Carolina and later in the reduction of Fort Pulaski, which defended the water approach to Savannah, Georgia. The fort, considered impregnable to artillery, fell to Gillmore’s rifled cannon on April 11, 1862, after a two-day bombardment. His success effectively ended the use of large masonry fortifications. (Continued on other side)
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Rev. George Messenger and his congregation built the first Universalist Church on this site. It was dedicated during a state convention of Universalists in Woodstock in June 1844. In 1893, Rev. John A. Carpenter was instrumental in erecting a new building — the one before you. It was dedicated Easter Sunday, April 14, 1895. The church’s front window memorializes the men of the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, recruited from Champaign County during the Civil War. Woodstock in Rush Township contributed more of its sons to the Union cause per capita than any other community in the county.