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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Paulding County, Ohio.
History
The county was created in 1820 and later organized in 1839. It is named for John Paulding, one of the captors of Major John André in the American Revolutionary War.
1825, entrepreneurs promoted other canals, including the Miami and Erie Canal and the Wabash and Erie Canal. The Miami and Erie ran from Lake Erie to the Little Miami River near Cincinnati, through Paulding County, and the Wabash and Erie Canal went west into Indiana, meeting the Miami and Erie in Junction, a community in Auglaize township. The canal excitement was so great that people were leaving Fort Wayne, Indiana for Junction, feeling that it had a much brighter future. Canal workers choosing Paulding County as their tax home built the county's population to 25,000 people in 1835, a number it has never approached since.
The combined canal system was the largest canal system in the world - but was only profitable for a short period. The canal was useless in winter, and the banks were constantly caving in, requiring constant dredging to remain passable. To protect the banks, canal boats had to operate at extremely slow speed - and the canal system started being abandoned even before it was completely built. The coming of the railroad quickly supplanted the canals as the primary means of long-haul travel.
A relic of this era is the Furnace Farm near Cecil. Ore was brought in by canal, where it was turned into iron using the ample local fuel. One furnace remains, where it was allowed to cool without being emptied, there being no point in pouring iron that could not be shipped economically to market.
Built in the 1910s, the Paulding County Carnegie Library was the first Carnegie library to serve an entire county instead of a single city. In addition to the library, Andrew Carnegie matched local funds to install a pipe organ inwhat is now known as Paulding United Methodist Church.
In the early 20th century, Paulding had the highest unsolved murder rate of any county in the USA. The Purple Gang was thought to be exporting the corpses of their victims to the rural countryside, where they could be dumped without being seen. The sheriff argued that they were not local people, not murdered locally, and it was not worth spending large sums of tax dollars on what was essentially a littering problem.
Adjacent Counties
Villages
- Antwerp
- Broughton
- Cecil
- Grover Hill
- Haviland
- Latty
- Melrose
- Oakwood
- Paulding (County Seat)
- Payne
- Scott
Other Townships & Communities: Arthur, Auglaize, Batson, Benton, Blue Creek, Briceton, Brown, Carryall, Charloe, Crane, Dague, Emerald, Emmett, Fort Brown, Harrison, Hedges, Jackson, Junction, Knoxdale, Mandale, McGill, Renollet, Roselms, Tipton, Washington and Worstville
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