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When inventor and entrepreneur Garrett Augustus Morgan sold his Traffic Signal patent to General Electric in 1923, he used the $40,000 to purchase a 121-acre farm in Huron County in 1924. Advertising “a village of our own,” Morgan established the Wakeman Country Club — one of Ohio’s early African American recreation clubs — and offered 247 lots for $60 each in “Wakeman Heights.” Located near the intersection of State Route 60 and Chenango Road, the development provided country pleasures to Blacks excluded from the Country Club lifestyle. Club membership, included in the purchase of a lot, offered fishing, hunting, swimming, and horseback riding. A restaurant, dance hall, and amphitheater provided cultural and boxing events. The club waned during World War II and no buildings from the once-thriving Wakeman Country Club remain.
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From 1942 until 1946, members of local churches and two railroad auxiliaries operated a community-based free canteen for passing troops on the platform of the Pennsylvania Railroad station. A grateful region honored approximately 1.2 million of the nation’s sons and daughters with welcoming words, sandwiches, pies, cakes, cookies, fruits, drinks, and other sundries. Staffed and funded entirely by volunteers, donations came from many communities in eight counties. Crestline’s children donated their pennies to pay for construction of a larger canteen in 1943. Volunteers met as many as 25 trains daily. They served troops on passenger trains, troop trains, and hospital trains and new recruits and returning veterans as well as troops from allied countries on their trips to and from Europe or the Pacific. Throughout World War II, many other canteens were created across the nation, including many in Ohio. The Crestline region’s reputation was enhanced immeasurably by the volunteer’s service.
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Union Baptist Church, established in 1819, is one of Ohio’s early Black churches. Its pastor and members were active on the Underground Railroad from that early date. Between the 1840s-1860s Black churches along the route to and from nearby Poke Patch assisted over 200 escaped slaves. Members met in their homes until able to obtain a log cabin (circa 1879) on a Blackfork farm. In 1919, a larger church was built on land given by The Cambria Clay Products Company. The adjacent cemetery has over fifty veterans from the Civil, Spanish American, both World, Korean, and Vietnam wars. Donald Russell Long, laid to rest in 1966, received a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor. Union Baptist Church, the historic foundation of the Poke Patch-Blackfork community, celebrates an annual Church Anniversary to honor its legacy.
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The Zoarville Station Bridge is a rare survivor of the earliest period of iron bridge construction in the United States, an era when unprecedented railroad expansion gave American bridge builders an international reputation for innovation. German immigrant Albert Fink first developed this truss design for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the early 1850s. Charles Shaler Smith, a prominent civil engineer and Fink’s former assistant, designed the bridge with patented features that improved on Fink’s original design. His firm, Smith, Latrobe & Company of Baltimore, Maryland, built this example in 1868 as a highway bridge over the Tuscarawas River in Dover. It was moved to this site in 1905 and abandoned in 1940. The Lebold family donated the bridge to the Camp Tuscazoar Foundation in 1997 for preservation and restoration. Of the hundreds of Fink Truss bridges built in the mid-1800s, the Zoarville Station Bridge is the last of its kind known to exist.
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With the Division Act of 1800, the U.S. Congress divided the Northwest Territory at a line essentially the present boundary of Indiana and Ohio. The Indiana Territory stood west of the line. The name Northwest Territory was retained for the land east of the line and Chillicothe became its capital. The legislature for the territory convened in Chillicothe in November 1800. Since there were no public buildings in which the legislature could meet, its session was held in a two-story log house that stood on this site called “Abrams’ Big House.” It was so called for its owner, Basil Abrams. During the War of 1812, the building served as the barracks for the 19th U.S. Regiment of Infantry. Thereafter, it was known as the “old barracks” until it was razed circa 1840.
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Tah-gah-jute, the Mingo chief named Logan, was a native of Pennsylvania. Logan moved to Ohio in 1770, and settled at the Pickaway Plains. Logan and his father, Shikellimus, had long supported friendships between Native Americans and white men; however, in the spring of 1774, his tribesmen and family were murdered at Yellow Creek, along the Ohio River. Once an advocate of peace, Logan went on the warpath and raided frontier settlements. These and similar raids along the Ohio frontier precipitated Lord Dunmore’s War in October 1774. After the Shawnees and their allies were defeated at Point Pleasant, Virginia governor Lord Dunmore marched up the Hocking River to the Pickaway Plains. Dunmore asked his interpreter, Colonel John Gibson, to assist in negotiations with Cornstalk and other Indian leaders, including Logan. Logan declined to attend the conference, but spoke to Gibson about his anger and betrayal.
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Two leading figures in nineteenth century national and state politics were born in log cabins located near this spot. Lewis Davis Campbell (1811-1882) served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1849 to 1858, rising to the leadership of Ohio’s “Know Nothing” Party. During the Civil War he raised the 69th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and served as its first colonel. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson appointed Campbell U.S. Minister to Mexico. In 1870, Campbell was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for another term by defeating Robert Cumming Schenck. Campbell is buried in Hamilton’s Greenwood Cemetery.
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Soldier, engineer, and statesman, W.S. Rosecrans was born in Delaware County in 1819 and grew up in Homer. He graduated from West Point in 1842. During the Civil War, Rosecrans commanded the federal Army of the Cumberland. Popular with his troops, who called him “Old Rosy,” he was a cautious commander and, though victorious at, Corinth, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga, he suffered major defeat at Chickamauga in 1863. A skilled engineer, Rosecrans developed coal properties in western (now West) Virginia before the war and helped design St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus for his brother, Bishop Sylvester Rosecrans. Following the war he served as minister to Mexico and represented California in Congress from 1881 to 1885. He died in 1898 and is interred at Arlington National Cemetery.