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During the Civil War in 1863, twenty-year-old Massillon farmer Robert Pinn enlisted in the 5th Regiment, Company I, United States Colored Troops (USCT) at his first opportunity, saying, “I was very eager to become a soldier, in order to prove by my feeble efforts the black man’s rights to untrammeled manhood.” At the battle for New Market Heights in the 1864 Richmond campaign, he assumed command of his company after his unit’s officers were all killed or wounded – and was himself wounded three times. For his meritorious conduct Pinn received the Congressional Medal of Honor, one of four African Americans so honored from the 5th USCT. Following the war he attended Oberlin College and became a successful Massillon attorney. He died in 1911 and is interred here.
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Hallie Quinn Brown (c. 1850) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to former slaves. She and her family moved to Wilberforce, Ohio in 1870, where she received a Bachelor of Science degree from Wilberforce University in 1873. Brown taught school in the South until her appointment as professor of elocution at Wilberforce University in 1893. A gifted elocutionist and author, Brown received national and international acclaim not only for her recitals and written works, but also for her passionate belief in civil rights and African American culture. (Continued on other side)
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One of America’s most inventive twentieth century writers, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles and graduated Warren G. Harding High School in 1929. He first published his poetry while studying at an experimental college at the University of Wisconsin in 1929. A pacifist deeply concerned with the human condition in mid-twentieth century America, Patchen blended linguistic and visual elements to create avant-garde works that defied literary conventions of the period, presaging both the “beat” and “concrete” movements of the 1950s. The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) and Hallelujah Anyway: Picture Poems (1966) are among the best known of his more than forty works of poetry, prose, and drama.
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Ephraim Cutler (1767-1853) arrived in Marietta from Connecticut in 1795. Prominent in southeast Ohio, Cutler was appointed judge of the court of common pleas and justice of the peace, surveyed land for the Ohio Company, and was a trustee of Ohio University. In 1802, Cutler was chosen as a Washington County delegate to Ohio’s constitutional convention in Chillicothe. A contested issue at the convention was whether to permit or exclude slavery in the new state of Ohio. As a member of the committee that introduced Article VIII, or the bill of rights, of Ohio’s Constitution, Cutler drafted Section 2, which specifically excluded slavery or involuntary servitude in Ohio on the basis that the Ordinance of 1787 forbade it. The section passed through the convention by one vote. Veto Lake was named for Cutler’s role in having slavery vetoed in Ohio.
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Born in Alexandria in 1853, Willoughby Dayton Miller received his primary education in a nearby one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1875 and then studied in Edinburgh, Scotland. Later, he traveled to Berlin, Germany where he met an expatriate American dentist, Dr. Frank Abbot, who encouraged him to study dentistry. Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine in 1879, Miller returned to Berlin and joined Abbot’s practice. Two years later, he gained a research appointment at the University of Berlin where he embarked on a career that brought the science of bacteriology into dentistry. In 1889, he published his research findings of the study of oral bacteria and the process of dental caries (tooth decay) entitled The Micro-Organisms of the Human Mouth. For his work, Miller is credited as the first to accurately describe the process of tooth decay. (Continued on other side)
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In the early twentieth century, Marion’s West Side was dominated by the Erie Railroad switchyards, a major hub of employment. During World War I, the railroad recruited Black workers from the South for jobs in its yards and roundhouses. In Marion, these workers made their homes in a West Side encampment that became the target of white suspicion and violence. In February 1919, following the unsolved murder of a white roundhouse worker’s wife and a separate alleged assault, a 300-man lynch mob smashed windows and occupied the West Side. All Black residents were ordered to leave the city by 6:00 pm the next day. Despite pleas to Governor Cox, at least 200 Black residents were forced to flee Marion. Marion’s anti-Black violence foreshadowed the nationwide “Red Summer” of 1919.
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The son of an enslaved father and free Black mother, Martin Delany became one of the most prominent Black leaders in 19th Century America. Called the “Father of Black Nationalism,” Delany promoted African American pride and self-determination. Delany was born May 6, 1812 in present-day Charles Town, West Virginia. Because education for Blacks was illegal there, his family moved to Pennsylvania. Delany studied medicine, founded a newspaper, the “Mystery,” and advocated rights for African Americans and women. He co-edited the “North Star” with abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Delany risked his life by demanding equality and by aiding Americans of African descent in their fight from slavery to freedom. (Continued on other side)
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Lucy Depp Park was a 102-acre development named for Lucinda Depp (1844-1929). She had inherited the land from her father, Abraham (1791-1858), an emancipated African American man and central Ohio pioneer from Powhattan County, Virginia. Known historically as the Depp Settlement, Robert Goode (1876-1957), a nephew of Lucy and her husband Thomas A. Whyte (1845-1919), purchased the land and developed it as “Lucy Depp Park” in the mid-1920s. The park became a popular vacation spot as well as home site for African American families from Columbus and elsewhere in the segregated America before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. According to a brochure Goode used to promote the development, “Lucy Depp Park…For People Who Care; by the Beautiful Waters of O’Shaughnessy Resevoir and Twin Lakes.”