The Blog
Stories from around Medina County.
Long-form local history, forgotten industries, and the stories most residents have never heard. Every story is assembled from named sources, footnoted where a detail sounds too neat to be true, and bylined to Medina Homes Guide.
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From Wadsworth
Ten-year-old Clarence Watkins went to work in the mines
The 1880 Wadsworth coal strike, and the community it left behind.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Brunswick Hills Township
Beebetown, the phantom town at the corner of three counties
In 1823, Abram Beebe crossed from New York with his wife, nine children, and an ox team, and bought fifty acres where Medina, Cuyahoga, and Lorain counties meet. Most of the town he founded is gone.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Chatham Township
Chatham was an oil boomtown, and almost nobody remembers
For about 40 years starting in 1894, Chatham Township was Medina County's oil town. The first well was drilled with a water-well rig powered by a horse. Most of the wells are capped and quiet now under the pastures.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Chippewa Lake Village
The amusement park they left in the woods for thirty years
Chippewa Lake Park ran for exactly one hundred years, from 1878 to 1978. When the last owner walked away, the rides stayed where they stood. Photographers came for the next thirty years.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Creston Village
The village Jay Gould put on the map
Creston exists in its current form because it was the linchpin junction in Jay Gould's failed transcontinental railroad scheme. The three-railroad convergence he engineered kept the village humming for a century.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Gloria Glens Park Village
The village built to house an amusement park's weekend guests
Gloria Glens Park was founded in 1924 as overflow lodging for Chippewa Lake Park. The park closed in 1978. The village kept going, turning bungalows into year-round homes.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Granger Township
Four farmers, one mortgage, and the land they lost back to the man Granger was named for
In October 1817, four New York farmers rode out in a two-horse carriage and bought three-quarters of Granger Township. Then Congress opened cheaper federal land south of the Reserve.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Guilford Township
The stone receiving vault Guilford built after the grave robbers of 1844
In 1821 the Wilson family buried a Revolutionary War veteran at Wilson's Corners. Twenty-three years later, after several grave-robbing incidents, the neighbors built a stone vault.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Harrisville Township
The first cabin in Medina County
Joseph Harris built the first cabin in what became Medina County in 1810. He arrived with his family and an 11-year-old boy named James Redfield on Valentine's Day 1811. The county grew from that homestead.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Hinckley Township
The bricklayer who chiseled his grief into the ledges
Noble Stuart married Nettie Worden in 1945 on the sandstone-ledge farm her father had homesteaded in 1860. She died within months. He spent the next two and a half years alone in the woods, carving faces into the rock.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Brunswick
The abolitionist on the township line, and the marker that finally came home
Hiram Miller, 55 years on the Underground Railroad, and the 1931 memorial that traveled less than a mile to reach Brunswick's Heritage Farm.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Homer Township
The passenger pigeon roost in Homer Township
For about 25 years starting around 1830, Homer Township was one of the annual spring nesting grounds for passenger pigeons. Market hunters from the East shipped them out by the thousand. The species went extinct in 1914.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Lafayette Township
One congregation, four buildings, 191 years in Lafayette Township
Rev. John Kellum organized Lafayette United Methodist in 1835, ten years after the township's first settler arrived. The congregation has met continuously ever since, through four buildings and a $15 land donation.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Litchfield Township
Litchfield's town band has led the Memorial Day procession for 125 years
In 1900, the Litchfield Cemetery and Park Association needed a band for the Memorial Day procession. Urial Crow put one together. It has never stopped playing.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Liverpool Township / Valley City
The five silver dollars, the fifty kettles, and the salt spring that named Liverpool
The 1810 handshake with a Potawatomi guide, the fifty boiling kettles of brine, and the Erie Canal that ended it all in 1825.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Lodi Village
Lodi's general store that became Higbee's on Cleveland's Public Square
In 1835, Jeremiah Higbee opened a mercantile in Lodi. Twenty-five years later, Edwin Converse Higbee co-founded a Cleveland retailer whose downtown building later starred in A Christmas Story.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Medina City
He lived with us until he died
A Union officer from Medina brought Thomas King home from Maryland in 1865. King lived with Congressman H.G. Blake's household until his death in 1875. His photograph, with a handwritten note on the back, was in the attic the whole time.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Medina Township
Weymouth, the village the railroad passed by
Weymouth was Medina Township's first commercial heart. Mills, a cheese factory, a general store, and Ohio's oldest surviving Congregational church building. Then the railroad went to Medina City instead.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Montville Township
Austin Badger walked from New York with a knapsack, and outlived four wives
The 24-year-old veteran who cleared the Medina Public Square, built the first courthouse, and became Montville Township's first Justice of the Peace.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Rittman City
The Loyal Oak farm boy who founded four companies and named a town
E.J. Young drilled a salt well in Rittman in 1897 and hit the halite deposit that underlies most of northeastern Ohio. The chain of companies he set off shaped this town for a century.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Seville Village
The coffin that came home wrong
When Anna Swan Bates died in her Seville home on August 5, 1888, the Cleveland undertakers assumed the wired dimensions were a mistake. Her funeral was delayed a full week.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Sharon Township
The 11,000-year-old Clovis camp in a Sharon Township hayfield
A plowed field near Sharon Center produced more than 10,000 Clovis-era spear points. About 80% were made from stone that only outcrops 500 miles south.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Spencer Township
Blue Mills — the river hamlet that Spencer's center replaced
Spencer Township's first settlement wasn't Spencer Village. It was a river-bend cluster called Blue Mills, where the first grist mill was cut from local boulders and shook when it ran.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Spencer Village
The $50 in lumber that bought Spencer its name
On February 18, 1832, 21 men gathered to organize a township. Calvin Spencer offered $50 in lumber toward a schoolhouse if they would name it after him. They did.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Wadsworth Township
The Pennsylvania Dutch farm belt around Wadsworth
In the 1830s, Pennsylvania Dutch settlers arrived in Wadsworth and sorted themselves out from the earlier Yankee arrivals. The two groups didn't mix. The pattern still shows on the map.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Westfield Center Village
The farmers who built their own insurance company over the general store
In 1848, seven Westfield Center farmers pooled their premiums above Ben Austin's store. The company they founded is still on the same village green almost 180 years later.
Published 2026-08-05
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From Westfield Township
April 2, 1817 — the first axes on Campbell's Creek
Nine years before the village existed, two families reached the west bank of Campbell's Creek and became Westfield Township's first permanent residents. Their year in the woods was hard, occasionally comic, and produced the township's first births.
Published 2026-08-05
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From York Township
Mary's Chapel — the 1877 brick church a widow's gift built
In 1877, the York Methodist congregation built a new brick sanctuary at Mallet Creek. Total cost was $5,000. Mary Ford put up $3,000. The building has been Mary's Chapel ever since.
Published 2026-08-05
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