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“Wind increasing in volume. Get no chance to . . . ” These were the last words from the doomed Navy airship Shenandoah, caught in a violent storm and crashing 7 miles southwest of this spot near Ava at dawn, September 3, 1925. Fourteen of its crew were killed. While souvenir hunters stripped the wreckage, a nation questioned the value of huge, rigid dirigibles, the last crashing in 1935. Smaller blimps replaced the dirigible as America’s lighter-than-air sentinels of the sky.
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“Wind increasing in volume. Get no chance to . . . ” These were the last words from the doomed Navy airship Shenandoah, caught in a violent storm and crashing 7 miles southwest of this spot near Ava at dawn, September 3, 1925. Fourteen of its crew were killed. While souvenir hunters stripped the wreckage, a nation questioned the value of huge, rigid dirigibles, the last crashing in 1935. Smaller blimps replaced the dirigible as America’s lighter-than-air sentinels of the sky.
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Salt was an important commodity to early settlers because of its use in daily living. In 1814 Silas Thorla and Robert McKee dug a well in search of salt brine. They discovered salt and, by accident, discovered oil. Oil’s value was known to them so they had to separate the oil from the salt water by soaking the oil up from the surface with blankets. The oil was wrung from the blankets, bottled as “Seneca Oil,” and sold as a “cure all.” The remaining brine was boiled down to extract the salt.
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On a stormy autumn morning in 1925, the giant Navy airship, christened Shenandoah, crashed near this site. Initially, the Shenandoah was commissioned to perform scouting missions for the Navy; however, she would soon be flying promotional missions. The Shenandoah had recently begun a six-day publicity tour across the Midwest when she crashed. The turbulent weather of late summer created strong winds, which ripped the 680-feet long Shenandoah in two and tore the control car from the keel. A majority of the 14 crewmen who died in the crash, including the captain, Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne of Greenville, Ohio, were killed when the control car plummeted to the ground. The stern section fell in a valley near Ava and the bow was carried southwest nearly twelve miles before landing near Sharon, Ohio. The Ohio National Guard was called in to control the crowds of spectators who traveled to the crash sites.
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Platted by educator and abolitionist Cyrus McNeely in 1849, Hopedale was the site of McNeely Normal School, later Hopedale Normal College, the first coeducational college for teachers in eastern Ohio. It operated from 1849 to 1902. Among its graduates was George Armstrong Custer in 1856. Hopedale served as an important stop on the Underground Railroad for slaves fleeing bondage in the southern states. Local tradition notes several “stations” in the village, three at private homes and one at a hotel.
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Here, on September 6, 1918, Bryan’s Air Mail Field began operations as one of Ohio’s first official airfields with the arrival of a survey flight to establish air mail service between New York and Chicago. Scheduled service began on July 1, 1919, and stretched west to San Francisco on September 8, 1920, completing the 2,666 mile U.S transcontinental air mail route. Flying the Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny,” R-4, Standard JR-1B, and later, the De Havilland DH-4, aviators pioneered cross continental flight in open cockpit biplanes without radios or electronic navigational aids and reduced coast to coast mail delivery from 87 hours by rail to 33 hours by air.
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On February 10, 1899, a United States Weather Bureau Station, operated by Steve Eveland, in the small hamlet of Milligan, Ohio, now part of McLuney, reported a temperature of 39 degrees below zero. To date, this is the lowest temperature officially recorded in Ohio. Milligan’s location in the flat valley of the Moxahala Creek made it susceptible to cold air masses drained from surrounding elevations. The record-breaking temperature in Milligan was recorded in the midst of a severe cold spell throughout Ohio that began on February 8 and ended on February 15, 1899 when temperatures reached a few degrees above zero. While Milligan can no longer be found on a map, it has been known as the coldest spot in Ohio for over one hundred years.
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Colonel John J. Voll from Goshen, Ohio, was the highest scoring ace of the 15th U.S. Army Air Force in the Mediterranean theater of World War II. As a Captain flying a P-51 Mustang fighter plane, he was credited with twenty-one aerial victories. His superior skill in one particular battle enabled him to maneuver three enemy aircraft into crashes without firing a shot. On a separate mission, while flying solo, Captain Voll had four confirmed kills, two probables, and damaged two additional enemy planes. (continued on other side)