, OH
This hamlet, located one mile southwest from here, was never platted, but was named after William Woods, president of the three-story brick Woodsdale paper mill constructed in 1867. Flanking the mill were the company office and store and several workers’ houses. Previous to this, the area flourished from the presence of two grist mills on the Great Miami River and from the Miami & Erie Canal. Additional enterprises such as a stone quarry, ice cutting company, and grain elevator operated here during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Woodsdale was also known for the Woodsdale Island Amusement Park and the LC&D Railroad depot. The park, established on an island between the Miami & Erie Canal and the Great Miami River in 1891, was the site of picnics, political rallies, a large dance hall, and amusement rides–including a beautiful swan boat. The great flood of 1913 completely destroyed the park.
, OH
Platted in 1881 by Isaiah Custer at the junction of Zane’s Trace (1796-97) and the Cincinnati and Eastern Railway (1881). Incorporated 1886. Named after John G. Peebles, Portsmouth, Ohio, businessman. David Nixon constructed the first house in town, operated for many years as the Nixon Hotel. Annual chautauquas were conducted on grounds south of the railroad beginning in 1906 and continuing through 1917.
, OH
This site, at the head of the Great Rapids of the Maumee, has been a major river crossing for centuries. The village was platted in 1833 as Gilead but was overshadowed by rival Providence during the canal era. In 1868 the name Grand Rapids was adopted, and the town prospered with the arrival of the railroad in 1877. Fires ravished the village in the late 1890s and spring floods have remained a threat. Restoration of the Victorian architecture began in 1975 and has helped revitalize this village along the historic Maumee.
, OH
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.
, OH
Born in Lancaster, Fairfield County, John Sherman moved to Mansfield to practice law and was elected to Congress in 1854 as one of the first Republicans. In 1861, Sherman was elected to the U.S. Senate. An authority on finance, Sherman was instrumental in shaping federal financial policy in the years following the Civil War, and President Rutherford Hayes appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1877. During the “Greenback” debate, he re-implemented the gold standard, stabilizing the currency during an inflationary period. Sherman returned to the Senate in 1881 and served until early 1897 when President McKinley appointed him Secretary of State; in declining health, he resigned in 1898. He died in Washington, D.C. and is interred in the Mansfield Cemetery.
, OH
The Muskingum River forms at the confluence of the Tuscarawas and Walhoning rivers at Roscoe Village and flows south approximately 100 miles to the Ohio River at Marietta. During the first half of the nineteenth century, fugitive slaves from Virginia crossed the Ohio River and followed the Underground Railroad lines north toward Canada. Four Underground Railroad lines converged in Roscoe Village on the Muskingum River. The first followed the river north out of Marietta through Rainbow and Waterford. An Ohio River crossing at Belpre connected runaways with the Muskingum River at Putnam in Muskingum County. Two others came from the west through Granville in Licking County and New Concord in Muskingum County. From Roscoe Village, fugitive slaves sometimes traveled from station to station along the Ohio-Erie Canal that was completed in 1825. The canal ended at Lake Erie where the runaway slaves were assisted in crossing into Canada.
, OH
Born in Steubenville in 1814, Edwin McMasters Stanton studied at Kenyon College and opened his law practice in Cadiz in 1836. The grandson of North Carolina slaveholders, Stanton opposed slavery. A successful railroad attorney and War Democrat at the beginning of the Civil War, he accepted the challenge of reorganizing President Abraham Lincoln’s War Department. Stanton enforced unpopular draft laws, fought draft, restricted the press, and nationalized the railroads. An effective planner and logistician, Stanton moved 20,000 soldiers more than 1,200 miles in a week by railroad to relieve the siege of Chattanooga in 1863. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Stanton clashed with President Andrew Johnson and provoked the act that led to Johnson’s impeachment. He died four days after President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1869.
, OH
New Haven, Ohio, was the mercantile center of southwest Huron County during the first half of the 19th century. Residents described immense wagons, or “land schooners,” lined up for miles on the New Haven-Worthington Road traveling from Columbus to the Lake Erie ports. Organized in 1815, New Haven was one of the early townships formed in Huron County and the Firelands. The village was platted, with streets at right angles around a diamond-shaped town green, after the plan of New Haven, Connecticut. When, in the 1840s, New Haven rejected the railroad’s direct route through the village, the Sandusky & Newark was routed to the west and through Plymouth taking with it the shipping business. Subsequently, New Haven began a steady economic decline into a small crossroads village.
614.297.2300
Contact Us
