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Harvey Howard, a local druggist, built the house at 407 North Market Street around 1860. After many owners, Captain James B. Taylor bought the home in 1893. Taylor commanded Company H of the 120th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. He studied law after the war and moved his practice to Wooster in 1882. Taylor’s wife Emelie died in 1905 and in 1906 Taylor sold the property to become Wooster’s first city hospital. Many of the town’s noted physicians practiced here and the facility was eventually enlarged to accommodate 30 beds. The house was a hospital until 1943, when Central Christian Church purchased it. The church used the building for education programs and restored much of its decor, including four fireplaces, inlaid floors, and bronze door hardware.
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Harold Hart Crane was born at this site on July 21, 1899, to Grace Hart Crane and Clarence A. Crane, the inventor of Lifesaver Candies, and lived here until the age of three. “A born poet,” according to e.e. cummings, Crane dropped out of high school in 1916 and moved from Cleveland to New York City to focus on a literary career. Mainly self-educated, Crane drew his influence from the writings of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His major work, The Bridge (1930), uses the Brooklyn Bridge as the perfect metaphor to celebrate contemporary urban life. Uniquely lyrical in structure and full of imagery, it is considered one of the three major poetic sequences of the first half of the twentieth century along with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Crane died on April 26, 1932.
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Zenas King (1818-1892) was a 19th century bridge builder whose iron bridges received wide acceptance throughout the country. He developed his tubular bowstring bridge in 1859, patented the design in 1861, renewed the patent in 1867, and founded King Iron Bridge & Manufacturing Company in 1871. Based on an arch’s inherent strength, King’s design used less raw materials than wooden bridges and the square tubes were simple to fabricate and ship for on-site assembly. His Cleveland-based company soon built so many patent bowstrings across Ohio that it set a design standard. (Continued on other side)
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Across the road was the site of Camp Circleville, where members of the 90th and 114th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (O.V.I.) were mustered into service during the Civil War. Pickaway Township farmer Jacob Ludwig donated the land for the camp, which was then approximately two miles south of the Circleville at the southwest corner of Kingston Pike and the Circleville-Tarlton Road. The 90th O.V.I was mustered into service on August 29, 1862 to serve for three years. The unit saw action during some of the war’s well-known western battles, including those at Perryville, Kentucky in October 1862; Stones River, Tennesee on December 31, 1862-January 2, 1863, and Chickamauga, Georgia in September 1863. Later, the 90th joined in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia in the spring and summer of 1864 and later that year was part of the Union force that fought in the Battles of Franklin and Nashville, Tennesee. At war’s end, the unit was mustered out of service at Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati in June 1865. During the regiment’s service, five officers and 247 enlisted men were killed, mortally wounded, or died from disease.
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In 1849, the city of Ironton was founded by local ironmasters, railroaders, and financiers associated with the Ohio Iron and Coal Company. They saw the city as a manufacturing and shipping point for their products. As a young industrial city, Ironton prospered when river transportation facilitated the development and export of Lawrence County’s natural resources and manufactured items. The Iron Railroad Company was also established to transport pig iron and manufactured goods from nearby towns to Ironton, to awaiting steamboats on the Ohio River. Steamboats, in the form of towboats, packet boats, and showboats, traveled the river providing the city with goods, services, and entertainment. The Ironton wharf and boat landing once served the community as a gathering place to greet incoming passengers, receive mail, and hear the latest news.
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Seba Bronson Jr. left Columbia Township in early 1810 and followed the Rocky River to an area one and a half miles north of here. He built a cabin and planted a crop and thus started what became known as the village of Hardscrabble in Liverpool Township. The village was centered around the Columbia/Grafton Road area, and the township is the oldest continuously inhabited township in Medina County. The Potawatami Indians occupied this area and camped annually along the Rocky River. For five silver dollars, they showed Seba and a partner a hidden salt springs which they sought to exploit. Other men also scrabbled to own it and Justus Warner succeeded. Seba was turned out. Warner operated the Liverpool Salt Works beginning in 1811. The first industry in the county, salt was a necessity and eagerly sought by setters in the area.
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Major John James (1772-1854) established James Cemetery in 1828 on and around a Native American mound that is the only significant ancient mound remaining in the city of Jackson. The mound is about 70 feet in diameter and nearly six feet tall. In the late 1800s, this mound comprised one point of three ancient mound groups forming a triangular configuration along East Broadway Street, formerly known as James Street. One group was a few hundred feet northeast of here on the Watson farm and a second was just to the northwest on the Warnicke farm. These mounds were built by the Hopewell Culture, prominent in southern Ohio from about 100 BC to 400 AD. Major James, his wife, and several immediate family members are buried on the mound including Jackson County pioneers Andrew Long, Daniel Hoffman, and David Mitchell.
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The Lincoln School, which stood on this site from 1869 to 1956, was a segregated elementary school intended for the city’s African American students, grades one through eight. Hillsboro was the site of the first Northern desegregation suit following the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a decision that abolished the nation’s long standing “separate but equal” doctrine. (Continued on other side)