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J. Scott Garbry, a 1986 inductee into the Ohio Conservation Hall of Fame, had a lifelong commitment and passion for conservation, historic preservation, and education. His gift of land and artifacts to the Upper Valley JVS led to the creation of the Willowbrook Environmental Education Center and Garbry Museum. He was also instrumental in providing land for the site of the Piqua High School and for Garbry Woods of the Miami County Park District. These gifts make it possible to appreciate and experience Ohio’s natural and historic heritage.
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Originally known as Allen’s Mill Bridge, the Eldean Covered Bridge was built over the Great Miami River in 1860 for Miami County by the Hamilton Brothers of nearby Piqua. Its 224 feet place it among Ohio’s longest covered bridges and the longest in the nation that follows an 1830 Stephen H. Long patent, considered America’s first science-based bridge design. The Long system added strength through a series of hand-driven wedges. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, the bridge was restored in 2005/2006.
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Hanktown, settled in 1846, was home to eighty-nine of the three hundred and eighty-three slaves, owned by John Randolph (1773-1833), a wealthy Virginian landowner and cousin to President Thomas Jefferson. Randolph had decided to free the slaves and indicated the decision in his will. His family, however, found three different wills and protested. Thirteen years passed before the slaves left the plantation. In 1846, Judge William Leigh arranged for the slaves to travel to Mercer County and purchased two thousand acres. (Continued on other side)
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The Bradford or “BF” Tower was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad circa 1929, at the important site of Bradford Junction. It replaced an earlier wooden tower that stood to its west. From this building, operators controlled the movement of every train, aligned track switches, set the track side signals, and relayed messages to the crews in the locomotive and caboose of passing trains. The tower originally housed a desk, telegraph equipment, and the all-important railroad clock. Its core housed many steel throw-arms, known as Armstrong levers. These were hand thrown, connecting track switches and signals via pipes throughout the junction area. The operator telegraphed other outlying towers and dispatching centers in Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis and Logansport, Indiana. Railroad telephones appeared during the late 1920s and radios just after World War II. The tower was closed January 3, 1984. This is an example of the once common railroad interlocking tower that dotted railroads throughout Ohio and the United States.
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The 1804 Iddings House is the oldest structure on its original site in Miami County. A second generation American and cousin to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, Benjamin Iddings brought his wife, Phoebe, and six of their ten children up the Stillwater River into Newton Township and constructed the log house in 1804. In 1976 the structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places with an initial restoration in 1981. Thanks to community support, further restoration was completed in 2006.
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Born in Kentucky in 1793, his family moved to the Ohio country in 1797. Taught by his mother and in a log-cabin school near Dayton, he began teaching here by 1809. Purchasing land here in 1811, he served at Fort Greenville in the War of 1812. He married Priscilla Knight in 1815 and fathered eleven children. He held offices of assessor, appraiser, constable, trustee, justice of the peace, and attained the rank of Brigadier General in the Ohio Militia. He died in 1883 and is buried here in Lostcreek Cemetery.
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This section of the Miami and Erie Canal, constructed from 1833-1837, was vital to this region’s commerce and development. It allowed for farmers and businesses to get their goods to larger markets at a lower cost and faster speed than by hauling overland. Passengers could also travel across the area by canal boat. John Clark saw the location of the Lock 15, situated in Monroe Township at the junction of the Milton-Carlisle Pike (Main Street), as an opportunity and in 1840, platted the new town of Tippecanoe City (now Tipp City). Many types of commerce and trade grew up around the canal including boarding houses, saloons, a tannery, and a mill. Some of the original buildings still stand, such as a mill to the west of Lock 15, John Clark’s home at the southeast corner of Main and First streets, and the hotel at the northeast corner of Main and Second streets.
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Michael Ingle, the first permanent white settler in Newberry Township, arrived in Miami County in 1804. A tanner from Virginia, Ingle cleared and cultivated eight hundred acres of land, where he grew wheat and other essential produce. He erected a double log cabin in what is now the town of Covington. Ingle was a Revolutionary War veteran and is buried on the land he cleared and farmed, which is known as the Old Township Section.
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