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Ripley was incorporated as the village of Staunton in 1812. Its name was changed in 1816 to honor General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley, a hero of the War of 1812. In the years before railroads, Ripley was a principal Ohio River shipping center. Also important were its extensive boat-building, tobacco, pork, and timber industries. Ripley too was the home of saw and planing mills, iron foundries, and a piano factory. Such varied commerce enabled Ripley to remain vibrant throughout the nineteenth century. Although noted as a port, Ripley is best remembered as an abolitionist stronghold. Many of its citizens, including Rev. John Rankin and John P. Parker, served as conductors on the famed “Underground Railroad.” The notoriety of Ripley’s anti-slavery network perhaps eclipsed that of nearby Cincinnati, earning the town a reputation as the “Black Hole of Abolitionism.” (Continued on side two)
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(1792-1862) A native of South Hadley, Massachusetts, he came to Gallipolis ca. 1818. An eminent lawyer and member of U.S. Congress 22 years, he was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Mexican War, founding father of the U.S. Department of the Interior, honored in his own time by the naming of Vinton County in 1850. Buried Pine Street Cemetery.
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Republican congressman William M. McCulloch was one of the architects of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first of three laws to recommit the nation to the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. “Bill” McCulloch was born near Holmesville to James H. and Ida McCulloch on November 24, 1901. Raised on the family farm, he attended local public schools, the College of Wooster, and, in 1925, earned his law degree from the Ohio State University. He married his childhood sweetheart Mabel Harris McCulloch (1904-1990) in 1927, after settling in Jacksonville to start his career during the Florida land-boom of the 1920s. It was in Jacksonville that the Deep South’s racial intolerance seared him. (Continued on other side)
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The author of fifteen novels, ten plays, and more than 100 stories, Dawn Powell was born in 1896 in Mount Gilead at 53 West North Street and grew up in Shelby. She graduated from Lake Erie College in Painesville and moved to New York in 1918. Although some of her early works, such as She Walks in Beauty (1928) and The Bride’s House (1929), draw from her life in small-town Ohio, she is best known for her satiric portrayals of life in New York, including A Time to Be Born (1942) and The Wicked Pavilion (1954). Often compared to Dorothy Parker and associated with contemporaries John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, and Gore Vidal, Powell received the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifelong achievement in literature in 1964. She died in New York in 1965.
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Built in 1807. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Trumbull County Historical Society Museum.
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The town of Providence was born, thrived and died with the Miami & Erie Canal. It was platted in 1835 by French trader Peter Manor, swept by fire in 1846, ravaged by cholera in 1854, and finally unincorporated in 1928. Today, only the Irish builders’ St. Patrick’s Church (1845), the oldest in the Toledo Diocese; the cemetery; and Peter Manor’s house (1845) remain. The Providence Dam, built in 1838 to create a water supply for the canal’s remaining 25 miles to Toledo, was rebuilt in 1908. Peter Manor’s mill stands downstream one-half mile at Canal Lock #9, where it was built in 1822, rebuilt in 1846, and operates today as the Isaac Ludwig Historic Mill. The National Historic Register of Historic Places listed this district in 1975, the mill in 1974.
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Ephraim Root (1762-1825), a wealthy Connecticut lawyer, was one of 57 investors in the Connecticut Land Company and served as its secretary and agent. In 1795, this group purchased three million acres of land in the Western Reserve. Root held interest in 100,000 acres, including Township 2 in Range VIII, which he named Rootstown. In 1800, Root traveled by horseback with his helper Henry Davenport and surveyor Nathaniel Cook to divide the township into 48 sections, reserving Lot 6 for his own use.
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Dinsmore Township School District #4 was formed in 1865following a decision by the township’s board of education that a school would be built in the center of every four sections of land, or every four square miles. This placement of school buildings gave township children the opportunity to attend school close to home and the chance at receiving a public education up to the eighth grade, Nine districts were created for the children of white households, and an additional district was formed to educate the children of the African American families, for a total of ten districts in the township. On June 11, 1866, the Dinsmore Township School Board purchased land from George Wenger to build the District #4 school near the intersection of Ohio Route 274 and Wenger Road. (Continued on other side)
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