, OH
In the years leading to Ohio statehood in 1803, Ames Township citizens decided to establish a stock-owned circulating library. Since cash was scarce during Ohio’s frontier era, some citizens paid for their $2.50 shares by the sale of animal pelts, which were taken to Boston for sale in the spring of 1804 by merchant Samuel Brown. There he acquired fifty-one volumes, primarily books on history, religion, travel, and biography, as the first accessions for the Western Library Association. Senator Thomas Ewing later related that he paid his share with ten raccoon skins, thus suggesting the collection’s popular name “the Coonskin Library.” Judge Ephraim Cutler was the first of many librarians who kept the library until 1861.
, OH
Smith’s Burying Ground was established in 1814 when John Smith (born 1742), Revolutionary War Veteran, died and was buried here. John Smith and four of his sons and their families made the six week, six-hundred-mile journey from New Jersey with ox teams the previous year. John Clouse (1758-1822), Dutch immigrant and Revolutionary War veteran, is also buried here. (Continued on other side)
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