Remarkable Ohio

Results for: city-founding
420 Superior Avenue
Cleveland

, OH

Designed by John M. Eisemann and George H. Smith as a big city mercantile center. The five-story galleries connect the ten story towers facing the city’s two main thoroughfares. Of unique architectural design and of daring construction, its exterior is Romanesque Revival, a popular Victorian style from 1875-1900.

27 S. Main Street
West Salem

, OH

The West Salem City Hall reflects a late-1800s municipal trend to house many civic functions under one roof. The fire station, jail, and council chambers occupied the ground level, while the second floor hosted a public auditorium, or “opera house.” Designed by native son William K. Shilling, later an internationally prominent architect, the Romanesque-style building was completed in 1899 at a cost of $9,077 and soon became the center of civic life in West Salem. Band concerts, vaudeville shows, town meetings, and graduation ceremonies were conducted in the opera house during its heyday before World War II. During the Cold War it was designated as a Civil Defense emergency field hospital. It remains a focal point of the West Salem community.

123 West High Street
Hicksville

, OH

Born in Hicksville in 1862, Daeida H.W. Beveridge co-developed and named, in 1887, the Los Angeles, California, suburb of Hollywood, since the early 1900s a world center of the film and television industry. With first husband H.H. Wilcox, she led development efforts there, and was instrumental in establishing much of the civic infrastructure, including the city hall, library, police station, primary school, city park, and much of the commercial district. Remarried to the son of a California governor after Wilcox’s death, she continued to promote Hollywood until her death in 1914.

139 E. Main Street
Hebron

, OH

Located at the crossing of the Ohio and Erie Canal and the National Road, Hebron was a favored commercial and agricultural center for Licking County in the nineteenth century. Only four miles north of the city Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York turned the first spadeful of dirt for the Ohio and Erie canal on July 4, 1825. The canal was completed through Hebron in 1828. Nearby Buckeye Lake served as a reservoir and feeder for the canal until 1894 when it was set aside for park purposes. The National Road was completed through Hebron in 1834.

2nd Avenue / OH 7
Gallipolis

, OH

Its location and the tides of war established Gallipolis, then a town of some 3,000, as a point of strategic military importance to the Union upon the outbreak of the conflict in 1861. It was destined during the next four years to play a role without counterpart in Ohio. Here through this troop concentration area passed thousands of soldiers to the great campaigns. Here the traditional peacetime activity of the town, long a depot of supplies for the Kanawha Valley, was turned to military purposes for maintaining armies in the field. Here riverside warehouses held vast military stores to be transported by steamboat. Here newly-mustered troops set up Camp Carrington in a wheat field on the upper side of town. Here the women of Gallipolis helped minister to thousands of wounded and sick in an army hospital

117 S. Fountain Avenue
Springfield

, OH

The Old City Building and Market, also known as the Municipal Building or Marketplace, was designed by local architect Charles A. Cregar. It was completed in 1890 at a cost of $250,000. Vendors, who sold meats, fish, provisions, vegetables, and other products, used the first floor of the building as a city market. The second and third floors accommodated city offices, the police department, the City Council Chamber, and City Hall, which doubled as an opera house. The Old City Building and Market, built in the Richardson Romanesque architectural style, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. In March 2001, it became the home of the Clark County Historical Society and renamed the Heritage Center of Clark County.

935 Wheeling Avenue
Cambridge

, OH

The first Scottish Rite body of Free Masonry west of the Alleghenies was formed in Cambridge, Ohio, in 1852 by Killian H. Van Rensselaer, an honorary 33rd Degree Mason. He lived in this city from 1851 to 1867. Van Rensselaer was superintendent of construction of the present railroad tunnel west of Cambridge. He died in Cincinnati in 1881 at the age of 80.

NW Corner of OH 109 & OH 120
Seward

, OH

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 defined the boundary of the northern and southern tier of states to be carved out of the Northwest Territory, as a line drawn east from the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan until it intersects Lake Erie. Controversy over the exact location of that line led to the 1834-1837 boundary dispute between the State of Ohio and Michigan Territory. Passions ran high as everyone on both sides of the boundary knew that a great port city (Toledo) would emerge in the disputed territory. President Andrew Jackson settled the dispute in 1836 when he signed an act that recognized the current border between Ohio and Michigan, giving Michigan 9,000 square miles of Upper Peninsula land and awarding the disputed strip of approximately 470 square miles to Ohio. Michigan then joined the nation as a state the following year.