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Here in 1887, frustrated locals destroyed the Six Mile Reservoir when legal efforts to close it failed. Years after any boat ran on the Wabash & Erie Canal, its water source, the 2,000-acre reservoir, became a stagnant, uncultivable breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitos. Legislative attempts to abandon the canal and reservoir failed because manufacturers in Defiance used the waterway to float logs downstream. On the night of April 25, 1887, 200 men calling themselves “The Dynamiters” carried a banner that read, “No Compromise! The Reservoir Must Go!” and converged here, overpowered citizen guards, gouged the banks of the reservoir, dynamited the bulkhead and lock, and burned down the lockkeeper’s house. The next day, Governor Joseph B. Foraker denounced the acts of the “mob of lawless and rioting men.” (Continued on other side)
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On July 18, 1907, Dr. Lee deForest broadcast the first ship-to-shore radio message from the steam yacht Thelma. The communication provided quick, accurate race results of the Annual Inter-Lakes Yachting Association (I-LYA) Regatta. Frank E. Butler, a Monroeville, Ohio, native and assistant to deForest, was stationed in the pavilion at Fox’s Dock (known today as The Jet Express Dock) and received the radio transmission. The creation of the vacuum tube by deForest permitted the rapid development of radio and eventually television. The inventor disliked the existing term “wireless,” and chose a new moniker — “radio.” On this site wireless-transmission radio broadcasting was born.
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The Carthagena Black Cemetery (Union Cemetery) is a remnant of approximately 70 documented rural black and mulatto settlements established in Ohio before the Civil War. In the charged atmosphere following race riots in Cincinnati in 1829, Quaker abolitionist Augustus Wattles led 15 black families north in 1835. In 1837 Wattles purchased 189 acres where the cemetery is located. Headstones date from 1840, the year mulatto Charles Moore, platted the Village of Carthagena. Wattles and mulatto clergymen Sam Jones and Harrison Lee were Underground Railroad conductors. Wattles moved to Kansas in 1855. By 1860, more than 100 black and mulatto families, totaling 600 people, owned over 10,000 acres. (Continued on other side)
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In 1927, Henry Abell, a master plumber, purchased a 100-acre dairy farm. When the Great Depression struck the nation two years later, Abell could find little work as a plumber and decided to develop his dairy farm. In 1934, he and his family began the Dairy, growing the farm to 500 acres and producing enough milk, ice cream, and other dairy products to supply five counties. The dairy closed in 1979, but today houses America’s Ice Cream and Dairy Museum, dedicated to the cultural history of the ice cream and dairy industry in Ohio and the United States.
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A founder of the Standard Oil Company, Henry Morrison Flagler spent his formative years in Bellevue and began his business career here in 1844, building his home near this site in 1858. He first became associated with John D. Rockefeller as a fellow grain merchant. The two later formed the Standard Oil Company in 1870 with capital partially furnished by members of the local Harkness family. Standard Oil became America’s largest and most powerful corporation in the late 1800s, and Flagler used his wealth to develop the state of Florida. His Florida East Coast Railroad, known as “the railroad over the sea,” extended from Jacksonville to Key West, Florida. The cities of Miami, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and St. Augustine grew with Flagler’s intensive development efforts.
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George W. Campbell originally built this highly picturesque structure in 1854. Designed with Romanesque and Norman Revival architectural features – a round tower, arched windows and doorways – and constructed of locally mined blue limestone, the home is representative of the work of architect W. Russell West. Campbell, a nationally eminent horticulturist, had a small vineyard to the east of the house where he developed and improved a variety of fruits, most notably the world famous Delaware Grape. Following Campbell’s death in 1898, the house was sold to Dr. Aaron J. Lyons and Mrs. Abbie Parish and presented to Ohio Wesleyan University, serving for more than 70 years as Lyons Art Hall.
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The last barn painter for the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company of Wheeling, West Virginia, Harley Warrick painted thousands of barns with the familiar Mail Pouch Tobacco logo over his 48-year career. Mail Pouch transcended advertising to become a fixture of nostalgic Americana, emblazoning barns across fifteen states with the “Midwestern imperative”: Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco-Treat Yourself to the Best. Once a common form of advertising through the early 20th century, barn painting became the sole province of Mail Pouch in this region by mid-century. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 restricted roadside advertising, and in 1969 Bloch Brothers curtailed its program, retaining Warrick to refinish barns for their historical value until his retirement in 1993.
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Built in the 1840s by William and Catharine Hubbard and known as “Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard” or “The Great Emporium” by fugitive slaves, the Hubbard House was an important terminus on the fabled Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. The Hubbard House sheltered escaped slaves who had risked life and limb after crossing the Ohio River into the North. From the Hubbard home, slaves walked one-quarter mile to the Hubbard and Company warehouse on the Ashtabula River, where friendly boat captains awaited to ferry their passengers to Canada and freedom. The U.S. Department of the Interior listed the Hubbard House on its National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
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