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Worthington (1773-1827), land developer as well as statesman, laid out the village of Logan, beginning on June 27, 1816, while he was Governor of Ohio. This lot was set aside by him to be used as a public market place. Worthington became a member of the Masonic Lodge in Cincinnati in 1799. He later helped to organize the first Masonic Lodge in Chillicothe. [Masonic Emblem]
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Ross County’s first courthouse was Ohio’s first statehouse. The courthouse was erected on the Public Square in 1801. Thomas Worthington, one of the building’s superintendents, laid out the foundation. Chillicothe was the last capital of the Northwest Territory, and the final session of the territorial legislature met in the courthouse in 1801. Ohio’s first constitution was written here in 1802. On March 1, 1803, Ohio’s first General Assembly convened in the building, making it the statehouse. During a time of strained relations between Native Americans and settlers in Ohio, the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh delivered a speech here in 1807 to reassure citizens that the Indians would remain peaceful. The courthouse served as the statehouse from 1803 to 1810 and from 1812 to 1816. The building was razed in 1852 to make way for the present courthouse.
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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.
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The state’s oldest private institution of higher education, Kenyon College was founded in 1824 in Worthington by Philander Chase, first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, and relocated to Gambier four years later. Both college and village are named for British benefactors, statesman Lord Kenyon and naval hero Lord Gambier. Throughout its history, Kenyon has prepared men and women for leading roles in society, including nineteenth-century graduates Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, and Rutherford B. Hayes, Ohio governor and U.S. president. In the twentieth century, Kenyon educated such literary luminaries as poet Robert Lowell and novelist E.L. Doctorow. Kenyon has also been an innovator in education-the Advanced Placement Program began as the Kenyon Plan in the 1950s.
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Worthington was the center of Masonry for the central Ohio area in the early years of the nineteenth century. New England Lodge, with its original charter from the Grand Lodge of Connecticut dated 1803, is the oldest lodge in continuous existence in Ohio. This building, erected in 1820, is the oldest Masonic Temple west of the Allegheny Mountains. [Masonic Emblem]
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The first Northwest Territory assembly formally met in Cincinnati in September 1799 to initiate self-government. The legislators were deeply divided politically. The Republicans (antifederalists or “Jeffersonians”), led by Thomas Worthington and Edward Tiffin of Chillicothe, opposed the appointed government headed by the Federalist governor, Arthur St. Clair. They saw it as arbitrary and autocratic and recognized that change could occur only with statehood. To deter the movement, the St. Clair faction in 1801 divided the territory and removed the capital from Chillicothe to Cincinnati. Their actions triggered a violent confrontation led by the antifederalist Michael Baldwin who incited the local rabble-rousers, known as “the Bloodhounds,” to riot in the streets of Chillicothe. Both political unrest and advancing settlement accelerated the Chillicothe faction’s campaign for Ohio statehood.
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Anson Williams visited Ohio in 1834 before he moved to Orange Township. A former resident of New York State, Williams purchased this site and the surrounding 1,000 acres of U.S. Military District lands and hoped to find opportunity for himself and his family. He bought the land for $6.00 an acre from James D. Wolf, who owned the 4,000-acre section three of Orange Township. The Village of Williamsville was laid out with 80 lots in 1836 on both sides of the Columbus and Sandusky Turnpike. Williams built his home and a hotel with a store and tavern. A hotel and tavern, owned by George Gooding and where the stage changed horses, had already been established north of Williamsville. Competition may have led to Williamsville’s decline. A church was built in 1845 and remained until 1900. Anson died in 1847, and his wife Hannah passed away in 1851. Both are buried in nearby Williamsville Cemetery.
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The hills before you were inspiration for the design of The Great Seal of the State of Ohio. The seal, first depicted in 1803, was often reconfigured until the present image was sanctioned by the Ohio General Assembly in 1967 and modified in 1996. In 1803 the law prescribed the sheaf of wheat to represent Ohio’s agricultural roots and the bundle of seventeen arrows to symbolize Ohio’s place as the seventeenth state in the Union. In the background is a range of hills, including Mount Logan, as viewed from Thomas Worthington’s estate, Adena, now a state memorial. (continued from other side)
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