The Loyal Oak farm boy who founded four companies and named a town

E.J. Young was born in 1857 in Loyal Oak, Ohio, a hamlet just east of Wadsworth. He worked as a schoolteacher, then a clothing clerk, then in a flour mill, then in a lumber yard. In 1883, at age 26, he founded the Ohio Injector Company in Wadsworth. It made valves for railroad locomotives.¹

In 1895 he incorporated the Ohio Match Company, also in Wadsworth. It grew to be the largest match manufacturing plant in the world on an 18-acre site.²

Two years later, in 1897, Young needed better packaging for his matches. Wood for match boxes was getting expensive. He also needed cheap salt for the manufacturing process. He decided to drill for salt himself. He picked Rittman for the well, near the Erie Railroad and Chippewa Creek. The first well struck the halite deposit that underlies most of northeastern Ohio.³ He incorporated the Wayne Salt Company. It was renamed Ohio Salt Company, and in 1948 sold to Morton Salt. The Morton plant still stands on Salt Street in Rittman today. It's on the Wayne County Historical Landmark Registry as of 1976, citing the direct Wayne Salt / Ohio Salt / Morton lineage.⁴

In 1903, Young founded the Ohio Boxboard Company in Rittman to package the matches and the salt. At its peak it employed more than 1,200 people. Packaging Corporation of America bought it in 1965. It closed in early 2006. Demolition of the plant began October 2013.

The 210-acre Ohio Boxboard site is now the William J. Robertson Nature Preserve, named for the longtime Rittman mayor who led the reclamation. It has 7.2 miles of trails.⁵ If you walk them today, you're on the same ground where a Loyal Oak schoolteacher's fourth company employed generations of Wayne and Medina County families.

The town Rittman itself is named for Frederick B. Rittman, a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad treasurer who never lived here. Rittman is reportedly the only town of that name in the United States.