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This area, known as Calmoutier, was an early French Catholic farming community founded in 1832 by Claude Druhot, who came from Calmoutier, Hte-Saône, France. Its first native, the four-month-old Claude Joseph Druhot, was baptized on 9 June 1833 by Fr. John Henni, who resided at St. John’s in Canton (and in 1854 became Milwaukee’s first bishop). In 1836 Fr. John Alleman, O.P., established St. Genevieve’s Mission (when it began to keep its own records) on land donated by the Pierson and Roussel families. The log chapel that was built (the first of four churches here) predated any Catholic church building in Cleveland, Akron, and Toledo.
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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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The museum of the Mercer County Historical Society, the Riley Home represents six generations of the Riley family in the county. The first Riley to arrive here was Captain James Riley, who surveyed the area in 1819, after it was opened to American settlement following the Treaty of Saint Marys in 1818. Captain Riley was elected to the Ohio General Assembly in 1823. Captain Riley’s son, James Watson Riley platted Celina in 1834, was Mercer County’s Clerk of Courts, and then represented the area in the Ohio General Assembly beginning in 1843. (Continued on other side.)
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Opened in 1926, Tanks Memorial Stadium became the home of the Ironton Tanks semi-professional football team. The Tanks were formed in 1919 and through the years played other semi-professional teams as well as teams from the American Professional Football Association that became the National Football League in 1930. In twelve seasons the Tanks had a record of 85 wins, 19 losses, and 14 ties, including wins against the Chicago Bears and New York Giants. The Tanks disbanded in 1931, but five players moved on to the Portsmouth Spartans, which became the Detroit Lions, and other NFL teams picked up four other players. Tanks Memorial Stadium is one of the few remaining roofed high school football stadiums in the country.
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Maple-Dell was the home of John Butler, a Quaker who expressed his religious faith by working for humanitarian causes. An early Goshen Township teacher, Butler opened his home to orphans, the homeless, and runaway slaves, and devoted 20 years of his life to support the Freedman’s Camps for former slaves. One of the many individuals he sheltered was Edwin Coppock who was hung along with abolitionist, John Brown, after the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Butler met with President Lincoln and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton in 1862 to request exemption from military service for Quakers during the Civil War. In 1868, President Grant petitioned the churches to assist in organizing a peace policy for the Indians. Butler prepared and presented to Congress a proposal for treating the Indians humanely including providing them with scientific and industrial education.
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The West Liberty area, in the Mad River Valley, was the location of at least seven Shawnee Indian villages. This elevated site was the location of one of those villages. Several septs or divisions of the Shawnee nation lived in this area after being forced from their homes in southern Ohio. In 1786, together with Simon Kenton, Colonel Benjamin Logan’s army destroyed all the Shawnee villages in retaliation for the Indian raids in southern Ohio and Kentucky. Consequently, the remaining Shawnees moved to northwest Ohio near the present-day site of Maumee.
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The Sharp family homes and their locations on N. State Street and Africa Road mark an important route through Westerville on the Underground Railroad. The family patriarch, Garrit Sharp, was an original settler of Sharp’s Settlement, now Westerville, and donated land for and helped organize the first Methodist church. He is also associated with the founding of Blendon Young Men’s Seminary, which was acquired by Otterbein College, an institution with enrollment open to African Americans and women from its inception in 1847. He and his sons were all noted abolitionists who, along with Bishop William Hanby and Otterbein president Lewis Davis, assisted southern slaves on their road to freedom. From the Sharp homes, slaves would have proceeded north to the house of Samuel Patterson on Africa Road and along Alum Creek to the Quaker settlement near Marengo in Morrow County.
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Acclaimed author and illustrator of juvenile literature Lois Lenski was born in Springfield in 1893, grew up in Anna, and graduated from Sidney High School. In 1915, Lenski graduated from The Ohio State University and moved to New York City to work and study art. After illustrating several children’s books in the early 1920s, she began writing and illustrating her own stories. Lenski specialized in historical fiction and regional themes–eventually publishing nearly one hundred carefully-researched books.
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