Remarkable Ohio

Counties

Below is a complete listing of all Ohio Historical Markers. To find a detailed marker listing including text, photographs, and locations, click on a county below. Our listing is updated by the markers program as new markers are installed and older markers are reported damaged or missing.

6-29 Moncure Daniel Conway / The Conway Colony

Side A: Moncure Daniel Conway was born on March 17, 1832 in Stafford County, Virginia, the son of Walker Peyton and Margaret Daniel Conway. His father was a wealthy slaveholder and prominent state legislator and county court justice official while his mother, who opposed slavery, introduced her son to abolitionism. Conway graduated from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1849 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1854. Despite his southern aristocratic background, Conway, influenced by his mentor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, strongly opposed slavery and eventually religious orthodoxy. Much of Conway’s career was spent abroad, where he became a writer and scholar, writing such notable biographies as Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890), and Life of Thomas Paine (1892).
Side B: The cabin of Dunmore and Eliza Gwinn, the leading family in the Conway Colony, was located east of this site and overlooking Glen Helen. In 1862, Reverend Moncure D. Conway, who in 1858 had served as minister for the First Congregationalist Church in Cincinnati, established a colony here for former slaves from his family’s plantation in Falmouth, Virginia. Fighting between Union and Confederate forces near the plantation had displaced the family slaves and a large group of them assembled in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. to join Conway for the arduous journey through slave-holding states to Ohio. Conway believed that the colony would be accepted in Yellow Springs, a village known for its progressive ways, due partly to the influence of Horace Mann, the president of Antioch College for its first six years.
Sponsors: The Ohio Bicentennial Commission, The Longaberger Company, Yellow Springs Historical Society, and The Ohio Historical Society
Address: Corry Street, 
Yellow Springs, 
OH, 
45387
Location: E side of bike trail, just S of intersection of Corry Street and Grinnell Road
Latitude: 39.7939450
Longitude: -83.8832430