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In 1819, the State of Ohio formally recognized Shelby County, named for Isaac Shelby, veteran of the American Revolution and former governor of Kentucky. The first county seat was located in Hardin, but was moved to Sidney in 1820 to centralize county government. The corner stone of the present courthouse was laid on July 4, 1881. George Maetzel from Columbus served as architect and superintendent of construction. Modeled after the county courthouse in Licking County, the project was completed in 1883 at a cost of $200,000. Materials, such as limestone, sandstone, and marble arrived by canal boat. The French Second Empire style building has four symmetrical sides facing the four points of the compass, each side with pillared porticoes approached by broad stone steps. A figure of Lady Justice holding the scales of equal justice surmounts each facade. The roof is classical mansard, and the center170-foot tower is of galvanized iron, encompassing four clocks.
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Here, on April 6, 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, a contingent of Delaware Christian Indians, led by John Heckwelder, an assistant to Moravian missionary David Zeisberger, founded the last of five missions to occupy the Tuscarawas Valley between May 3, 1772 and September 8, 1781. The mission was located immediately adjacent to the west bank of the Tuscarawas River. Eighteen months later, British led Indian soldiers forcibly removed to the Upper Sandusky region all 400 of the Indian converts then living in the Tuscarawas Valley at the New Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten, and Salem missions. Seventeen years later, Zeisberger returned to the Tuscarawas Valley and founded his last mission at Goshen on October 4, 1798.
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Col. William Crawford and Dr. John Knight, separated from the American troops following the Battle of Upper Sandusky, June 4-5, were captured by Indians on June 7 at a site about five miles southeast of this marker. Taken first to Chief Wingenund’s camp north of Crestline, they were then taken, on a trail passing near this marker, to a bluff near Tymochtee Creek northwest of Upper Sandusky. Crawford was tortured and burned at the stake on June 11. Knight later escaped. For years afterward, Crawford’s fate inflamed frontier sentiment against the Indians.
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Described as a Columbus “institution” when he died in 1969, Emerson C. Burkhart was born on a farm in Union Township, Putnam County in 1905. The son of Albert and Nora Burkhart, Emerson graduated from Kalida High School in 1924 and from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1927. After studying art in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in New York City, he settled in Columbus and, in 1937, married Mary Ann Martin, an artists’ model who devoted herself to his career. Burkhart was a prolific painter and completed an estimated 3,000 pictures during his 40-year career, including street scenes, rural landscapes, and more than 250 self-portraits, once noting his face was “cheaper than a model’s and always there.”
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In September 1786, Captain Benjamin Logan of Kentucky captured a young Indian boy during a raid across the Ohio River on the Machachac tribe towns of the Shawnee nation. Upon returning to Kentucky, Captain Logan made the 14 year old boy part of his family until he was forced by treaty to return him to his native people. From the period of residence in Kentucky to the time of his death, Johnny Logan, as he was named, was a friend of the United States. Following the declaration of war against England in 1812, he joined the American service. He was employed by the Indian Agent John Johnston at Piqua to help evacuate Ohio women and children living near Fort Wayne. The siege of that fort was later lifted by the combined force of Kentucky and Ohio troops under the command of General William Henry Harrison. [continued on other side]
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The Windsor Township Baptist Association was organized January 11, 1818 by Elder William Davis with 35 members who met in homes, barns and schoolhouses. At the death of the six-year-old granddaughter of Samuel and Tabitha Davis Henery, this plot by the river was laid out of a church yard and deeded by John Henery in 1837. In 1838 a brick church was built at the cost of $1,000. It served this community until the road and church were destroyed by the flood of 1913. More than 50 men from this area served in the Civil War. Twenty-six War of 1812 veterans are buried here as well as William Davis, veteran of the American Revolution; Obadiah Brokaw, founder of Big Bottom State Memorial; and Captain Isaac Newton Hook, river pilot at the age of ten and U.S. master of inland navigation, 1860-1873, who ran supplies on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for the Union Army. At Captain Hook’s death in 1906, the steamers Valley Gem, Zanesville, and Sonoma from Marietta in his honor landed passengers at the church here for his funeral, “largest ever held in the Muskingum Valley.” “The Lord and the River giveth and then taketh away.”
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The 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs opened much of northwest Ohio to white settlement. In return, the U.S. Government granted the Wyandot Nation permanent use of the Grand Reserve at present-day Upper Sandusky. There farming continued, a school was built, and, in 1824, this Mission Church was constructed by Indians and Methodist missionaries. However, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 called for relocation of all eastern Native Americans to areas beyond the Mississippi River. By 1840, all Ohio Indians had been removed except for the Wyandot, who refused to leave, preferring instead to stay upon their beloved Sandusky (now known as Killdeer) Plains. Facing considerable pressure from Federal authorities, the Wyandot Nation in 1842 agreed to relinquish the Grand Reserve and move west. From this site on July 12, 1843, 664 individuals began their week-long journey to awaiting steamboats at Cincinnati. The Wyandot were the last organized Native American people to leave Ohio, settling in modern-day Kansas and Oklahoma. (Continued on side two)
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On a stormy autumn morning in 1925, the giant Navy airship, christened Shenandoah, crashed near this site. Initially, the Shenandoah was commissioned to perform scouting missions for the Navy; however, she would soon be flying promotional missions. The Shenandoah had recently begun a six-day publicity tour across the Midwest when she crashed. The turbulent weather of late summer created strong winds, which ripped the 680-feet long Shenandoah in two and tore the control car from the keel. A majority of the 14 crewmen who died in the crash, including the captain, Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne of Greenville, Ohio, were killed when the control car plummeted to the ground. The stern section fell in a valley near Ava and the bow was carried southwest nearly twelve miles before landing near Sharon, Ohio. The Ohio National Guard was called in to control the crowds of spectators who traveled to the crash sites.
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