Route Descriptions: Ohio and Pennsylvania

 Route descriptions courtesy of Mark Hansen

Richmond to Marysville, Ohio: Today’s route angles east across west central Ohio through small towns and unincorporated communities, bypassing many of the county seats and skirting north of Dayton (home of the Wright Brothers) and Columbus (the state capital and home of the Ohio State University). The little farming town of New Paris in Preble Co was the home of the abolitionist preacher Benjamin Hanby at the time he composed the popular Christmas song "Up on the Housetop" in 1864. New Madison and Gettysburg (named for the town in Pennsylvania, long before the battle) are in Darke Co. Gettysburg was the home of Ira Petersime, who in the twenties established a company in the town to manufacture his invention, an electric incubator used in the poultry industry. His son and successor Ray was active in the resettlement of "DPs" -- "displaced persons" made refugees during and after World War II -- many of them brought to the area to work in the family enterprise. The famous sharpshooter Annie Oakley (nee Phoebe Ann Mosey), a star performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, was born about 15 miles north of Gettysburg. She learned to hunt while still a girl and by the time she was in her teens she had paid off her widowed mother's mortgage from the proceeds of her game sales. 

The county seat, Greenville, was the location of Fort Greenville, where in 1795, at the conclusion of the Northwest Indian War, Gen. "Mad Anthony" Wayne forced a treaty on the defeated tribes of the Northwestern Confederacy (Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa), Potawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo, and Kaskaskia), limiting Indian Country to a portion of northwestern Ohio. Miami Co, to the east, was named either for the Great Miami River that passes through it or for the Native American people of the region. In 1749, a mile north of Piqua (just north of the ride route), the British built Fort Pickawillany to protect a British trading post in a Miami village of the same name. Three years later, an Odawa (Ottawa) chief of mixed Native and French descent attacked the fort and the village along with his Ojibwe (Chippewa) allies, one of the many skirmishes between the British and French and their Native allies and proxies that led up to the French and Indian War (1753-1762) and the surrender of French claims to the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. Piqua was named for a Shawnee village 25 miles south near Springfield that was site of 1780 battle between American and Shawnee forces. After the battle, the Shawnee founded a satellite village near the town of Piqua. By the 1790s, they had moved west. Piqua also incorporates the town of Rossville, a free Black community settled in the late 1840s by slaves manumitted by the Virginia planter and politician John Randolph (of Roanoke) upon his death in 1833. 

Next east, Champaign Co and its county seat Urbana are the namesakes of the Illinois county and seat, which means the route has now passed through the original and its doppelganger. During the War of 1812, the American Army of the Northwest was for a time billeted in Urbana. It was also the site of a council in 1812 between Ohio governor Return J Meigs Jr and leaders of the Wyandot, Shawnee, and Mingo (Seneca and Cayuga) nations. In the thirties, Warren G Grimes established a company in Urbana to manufacture the lights used on the bellies, wingtips, and tails of airplanes, on aircraft instrument panels, and on landing fields. Every American plane flown in World War II used Grimes lights. He is known as the "Father of the Aircraft Lighting Industry." The company was later acquired by AlliedSignal and then Honeywell, which maintains a presence in Urbana.  In southeastern Champaign Co, Mechanicsburg was the home of William B. Saxbe, Republican US Senator from Ohio and the US Attorney General after President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox and AG Elliot Richardson in 1973 in the "Saturday Night Massacre." As Attorney General, Saxbe brought the antitrust suits that broke up the Bell Telephone monopoly. 

The destination today, Marysville, is the seat of Union Co. Union was the northern-most whole county in the Virginia Military District, a 2.4 million acre tract encompassing more than half of southwestern Ohio. Virginia's colonial charter gave it claim to most of the former British territories to its west and northwest (recalling that West Virginia was part of Virginia at the time). In 1784, as part of a compromise to secure ratification of the Articles of Confederation, Virginia conceded its claims in return for land in Ohio to give to its Revolutionary War veterans in compensation for their service. Settlement on the bounty claims began in 1794 and continued until Ohio became a state in 1803. Union Co was also transected by the Greenville Treaty Line, the southern boundary of Indian Country established in 1795 by the Treaty of Greenville, as noted earlier. The town of Unionville (just off the route) was the home of Charles Fairbanks, Theodore Roosevelt's vice president, and his wife Cornelia Cole Fairbanks, a suffragist and the president-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In Marysville, Orlando M Scott began a business in 1868 selling agricultural seed to home gardeners. In the early 20th century, his company started to sell grass seed for lawns. Scott's company is now ScottsMiracleGro and it is still based in Marysville. Marysville’s city motto is "Where the Grass Is Greener."

Marysville to Wooster: Ohio still calls itself the "Mother of Presidents," despite that the last Buckeye president served more than a century ago. Ohio was the birthplace or residence of eight chief executives – Whig William Henry Harrison (1841) and Republicans Ulysses S Grant (1869-1877), Rutherford B Hayes (1877-1881), James A Garfield (1881), Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893), William McKinley (1897-1901), William Howard Taft (1909-1913), and Warren G Harding (1921-1923) – more than any other state. Today's route passes near the birthplaces of two presidents, Hayes (born in Delaware) and Harding (born in Morrow Co). Tomorrow's destination, Niles, was the birthplace of a third, McKinley. Once again, the route follows back roads, brushing by Columbus and Mansfield (Mansfield tires, Westinghouse appliances, Tappan stoves) in the general direction of Akron. It passes through Delaware on Central Ave. The sign marking President Hayes's birthplace stands in front of a BP station two blocks south on William St near the corner of Sandusky St. Hayes won the office in 1876, defeating Samuel J Tilden in what may count as the dirtiest presidential election in American history, marked by fraud and violence. Although Hayes lost the popular vote, an electoral commission appointed by Congress gave him disputed electoral votes from Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina and the presidency by a single electoral vote. As a concession to Democrats and the South, Hayes and congressional Republicans recalled the last federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and clearing the way for "Jim Crow," the disenfranchisement and segregation of Black citizens in the region. Derided by his critics as "Rutherfraud" Hayes, he did not seek reelection in 1880. 

Delaware is the home of Ohio Wesleyan University. Among its alumni is Branch Rickey, who in 1947, as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, brought Jackie Robinson onto the team and integrated major league baseball. Rickey played catcher for the Red and Black of Ohio Wesleyan as a student and coached the team early in his career. The poor treatment of a Black player on his squad, he later said, heightened his awareness of the effects of racial bigotry and steeled his determination to make change. The half-mile Delaware County Fairgrounds Track is the host of the Little Brown Jug, a harness race for 3-year-old standardbred pacers and the concluding race in the sport's Triple Crown. (Pacing horses move their legs on the same side forward together, trotters the legs diagonally opposite.) The track opened in 1937 and the race began in 1946. The race is named for a pacer that won nine consecutive races on the sport's grand circuit. The winners' names are enameled onto a little brown jug. 

Six or seven miles southeast of Delaware in southern Delaware Co is an unincorporated community called Africa. It is named for the Underground Railroad that operated in the community, originally applied as a term of derision. A local settler, a Methodist, began to harbor fugitive slaves in the 1820s. The runaways came up from Westerville through the station of Benjamin Hanby, already introduced as the composer of "Up on the Housetop." In 1856, while a student, Hanby composed "Darling Nelly Gray," an anti-slavery ballad inspired by a story told him by a fugitive whose beloved had been "sold South." The road to freedom continued east to a station in Mount Vernon in Knox Co. In an earlier day, its stationmaster, Dan Emmett, was the founder of the Virginia Minstrels, considered the first blackface minstrel troupe. He is credited as the composer of "Dixie" (and said to be the composer of other songs, like "Turkey in the Straw" and "Polly Wolly Doodle," that were probably merely in the Virginia Minstrels' repertoire). He reportedly expressed dismay that "Dixie" became an anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the same area as Africa, a small part of Westerville (and Columbus) protrudes into Delaware Co from Franklin Co. 

In the early 20th century, Westerville was the headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League, which led the campaign for national Prohibition and its enforcement. The quintessential single-interest group, the League succeeded in securing the passage and ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1917 and 1919 and the Volstead Act in 1919 but failed to prevent its repeal by the 21st Amendment in 1933. Warren Harding's birthplace in Morrow Co is about 15 miles north of Chesterville (on the ride route). Harding became president in 1920 promising a "Return to Normalcy" after World War I. (His Democratic opponent, James Cox, was also an Ohioan.) He died in office in 1923. Popular in his day, his reputation has suffered from the involvement of two cabinet members and other administration officials in the Teapot Dome scandal (involving kickbacks for Navy oil leases in Wyoming) and his flagrant affair with a mistress in the White House (which gave rise to the scurrilous rumor that he was poisoned by his wife Florence). 

In Richland Co, around Butler, the route enters the watershed of the Mohican River, crossing southern Ashland Co and passing out of it in Wayne Co near Blachleyville. The Mohican Valley was an area of activity of Jonathan Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, the early 18th century promoter of pomiculture. He established several nurseries in the area. Chapman is reputed to have voted in 1806 in Mount Vernon in Knox Co (7 miles south of Fredericktown, on the route) and owned two properties there. He once purchased 160 acres in Ashland Co, five or six miles northeast of Perrysville (the second SAG stop), but failed to record the deed. A farm in the unincorporated community of Nova in Ashland Co (25 miles north of Perrysville) claims to have an apple tree that is the last one alive that Johnny Appleseed planted. The village of Apple Creek in Wayne Co, five miles southeast of Wooster, holds an annual Johnny Appleseed festival. High schools in the region used to compete in a Johnny Appleseed League. Further afield, on yesterday's route, a college in Urbana, Ohio, has a Johnny Appleseed Museum. 

The day's destination, Wooster, is the seat of Wayne Co. Its namesake is Gen. Anthony Wayne, known as "Mad Anthony." From 1786 to 1795, he commanded American forces in the Northwest Territories (and chiefly the Ohio Country) during the Northwest Indian Wars, recalled to service by George Washington. The conflict culminated in the army's decisive victory over an alliance of Native American tribes in 1794 in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near Toledo, and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 (already mentioned) that pushed the First Nations still further west. A native of Pennsylvania, Wayne served with distinction in the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. The origin of his nickname is uncertain: some historians say it honored his bold tactics in a battle against the British in Virginia in 1777, others say it referred to his use of "off-color language." 

Wooster is the home of the College of Wooster, a liberal arts college founded by Presbyterians in 1866. Among its alumni are Karl, Wilson, and Arthur Compton. The sons of a philosophy professor at Wooster, they all went on to receive doctorates at Princeton, all three in physics. Arthur Compton received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for experiments that confirmed the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. During World War II, he directed the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, part of the Manhattan Project, where in 1942 Enrico Fermi led the team that achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction, beginning the Nuclear Age. All three brothers also became university presidents, Karl at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wilson at the State College of Washington (now Washington State University), and Arthur at Washington University in St Louis. 

South of Wayne Co is Holmes Co, the center of the largest community of Amish in the world. (Lancaster Co, Pennsylvania, has a larger Amish population but the Amish community in the region is larger in Ohio.) 42% of the population of Holmes Co is Amish, concentrated in the east around Berlin, Walnut Creek, Charm, Mt Hope, Trail, and Winesburg. The Amish are an Anabaptist sect, distinguished from their Mennonite kin more by practice than belief. The Amish in central Ohio had their origins in Switzerland, although many migrated to Ohio from Pennsylvania along with other Pennsylvania Dutch who settled the area. The community dates its settlement in Ohio to 1808.

Wooster to Niles: Today brings another ride on the backroads of Ohio, threading between Akron and Canton and glancing past Youngstown on the way to Niles. It takes us into what was the industrial heartland of America, the band of urban centers on and near the Great Lakes from Buffalo through Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago to Milwaukee. Akron, 10 miles north of today’s route, was the "Rubber Capital of the World," the headquarters of the four major US car and truck tire manufacturers, B. F. Goodrich (1870), Goodyear (1898), Firestone (1900), and General (1915). (Goodyear was named for but not founded by Charles Goodyear, who in 1839 invented the vulcanization process that made rubber durable enough for vehicle tires. He lived in Woburn, Massachusetts, at the time. Blame Akron for all the flats in the Southwest.) 

At the Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, the Black abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth gave her famous address, "Ain't I a Woman?" (although her actual words are disputed, including the indignant refrain that became its title). 

Youngstown, on the Pennsylvania border in Mahoning Co, five miles east of the route, was, along with Pittsburgh and Cleveland, in the heart of the steel industry. Youngstown had mills operated by United States Steel, Republic Steel, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. The collapse of the heavy industrial sector in the seventies and eighties devastated Youngstown, which has lost 60 percent of its population. 

As the route crosses into Portage Co north of Limaville, it enters the Western Reserve claimed by Connecticut under its colonial charter. The boundaries of the claim were the northern and southern borders of Connecticut, projected west through New York and Pennsylvania all the way to the Mississippi. Connecticut settled its claims in New York and Pennsylvania during the colonial period or the early federal period and ceded most of its western claims in 1786, in exchange for the assumption of its Revolutionary War debt by the U.S. government. Connecticut retained, as the Connecticut Western Reserve, a 5260 sq mi tract in the Ohio country extending west 120 miles from the border with Pennsylvania. It sold the land in 1896 to an investor group, the Connecticut Land Company, which in turn sold land to settlers, often from Connecticut. 

Youngstown was founded in 1796 from a land purchase and Canfield in 1798. Warren, founded in 1898, northwest of Niles, was the county seat of the Western Reserve. Connecticut ceded the remainder of its claims to the Western Reserve in 1800. It lives on in the names of companies and institutions in northeastern Ohio, for example, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Taking the route from the start, five miles east of Wooster, just south of the route, is Orrville. In 1897, Jerome Monroe Smucker began to make apple butter and sell it out of a wagon in Orrville. His enterprise grew into the J. M. Smucker Co, the maker of jams and jellies and other fruit preserves (and now much more). An $8 billion company, it is still headquartered in Orrville, a town of 8400. In 1962, a Cleveland ad agency came up with its famous slogan, "With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good." 

Ten miles further, in Stark Co, the route crosses the Ohio and Erie Canal in the town of Canal Fulton. The 308 mi waterway connected Lake Erie at Cleveland to the Ohio River at Portsmouth, fed by rivers in between. Construction began in 1825 and the first segment, from Cleveland to Akron, was completed in 1827. It reached Massillon, nine miles south of Canal Fulton, the next year. (Massillon was the home of Jacob S. Coxey, who in 1894 led an "army" of unemployed men on a march from Massillon to Washington, D.C. to present a "Petition in Boots" to the government for relief, the first protest march on the nation's capital in history.) 

The first SAG stop just east of I-77 is about halfway between Akron and Canton. The seat of Stark Co, Canton was (and is) a steel products manufacturing center. In 1898, Henry Timken perfected a tapered roller bearing and founded a company to produce it. In 1901, the Timken Roller Bearing Axle Co moved to Canton from St Louis to be closer to the centers of automobile manufacturing. Now diversified, it is still headquartered in Canton and a major employer. In the aughts, teens, and twenties, Canton had a professional football team, the Canton Bulldogs. In the teens, its marquee player was Jim Thorpe. In 1920, representatives of four Ohio professional teams met in the Hupmobile showroom of the Bulldogs' owner and coach and formed a professional football conference. The next month, the four Ohio team agents and representatives of six more teams from New York, Indiana, and Illinois held a conclave in Canton and chartered the American Professional Football Association. In 1922, it became the National Football League. The Canton Bulldogs were the NFL's first repeat champions, going 10-0 in 1922 and 11-0-1 in 1923, but the team folded in 1927. (Of the charter members, only the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals (originally Chicago) still play.) In 1963, however, in honor of the city's professional football history, the NFL chose Canton as the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. 

Earlier, Canton was the home of William McKinley, the 25th president (1897-1901). In 1896, he conducted his "front-porch campaign" from his home at 715 Market Ave N in Canton. (It has been demolished but a local craftsman has constructed a miniature replica that is displayed in a building at that address.) McKinley won reelection in 1900 but he was assassinated in 1901. His presidency is remembered for his policy of trade protectionism, his commitment to "hard money" (the gold standard), and above all, the Spanish-American War, which added Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as United States territories. His tomb in Canton is part of an elaborate McKinley Monument. In 1918, the labor leader and socialist politician Eugene V Debs delivered a speech in Canton denouncing U.S. involvement in the Great War in Europe and urging young men not to comply with the draft. For this, Debs was arrested and convicted of sedition. He conducted his 1920 campaign for president on the Socialist ticket from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, receiving 914,000 votes (3.4%). In 1921, the winner of the presidential race, Ohio native Warren Harding, commuted his sentence to time served. Further on, the route enters the Connecticut Western Reserve upon turning left off German Church Rd onto Atwater Rd north of Limaville, entering Portage Co. It passes through the Reserve for the remainder of the ride. Canfield was formerly the seat of Mahoning Co, but now it is Youngstown. 

In the early 20th century, the Mahoning Valley received an influx of immigrants from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. In the early twenties, their presence evoked a surge of nativist activity led by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had a parade ground called Kountry Klub Field in Canfield. Clashes between the Klan and Irish and Italian Catholics in Niles led Ohio's governor to declare martial law in the town. 

Niles is the birthplace of William McKinley. In the center of town, on the site of his birth home, is the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial. (It is a block west (straight) of where the route emerges from Niles Trailhead Park on Church St.) The marble memorial fills a city block, its colonnaded courtyard featuring a statue of the former president. Congress authorized its construction in 1911, during the administration of the next Buckeye in the line of presidents, William Howard Taft. Warren, four miles northwest of Niles, was the county seat of the Western Reserve from 1798 to 1800. It is now the county seat of Trumbull Co, named for Jonathan Trumbull, the colonial governor of Connecticut from 1769 to 1776 and the governor of the state of Connecticut from 1776 to 1784; Trumbull was the only one of the 13 colonial governors to take up the cause of independence from the start of the Revolutionary War in 1776. In 1899, brothers James and William Packard and a partner chartered the Packard Motor Car Co. They built 400 Packards in Warren before moving the company to Detroit in 1903.

Niles to Erie, Pennsylvania: Lake Erie bears the name of the indigenous people who populated the region south of the lake in the 17th century. Although speakers of an Iroquoian language, they allied with the Huron (Wyandot) and northern Algonquins against the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca) during the Beaver Wars (1609-1701), the Iroquois' war of westward conquest to control the fur trade with Europeans. (The Iroquois were supplied with weapons by the English and the Dutch, their opponents by the French.) The Erie were virtually exterminated, their place taken by the Senecas and then by tribes of Algonquian speakers forced west by the conflict and the encroachment of European settlers. The name of the northeast-most county in Ohio, Ashtabula, means " always enough fish to go around" in the Algonquian language of the Lenape (Delaware) people, who made a stop in the area during their forced migration west. (Isn't that a lovely phrase?) 

As noted, the region was later the Connecticut Western Reserve, which left a distinct cultural and political legacy in northeastern Ohio. Settled by emigrants from Connecticut and other states in New England, the area was a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment and action in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In 1831, Joshua Giddings and Benjamin Wade opened a law partnership in Jefferson, the seat of Ashtabula Co. Together they formed a local anti-slavery society. They both entered politics and were elected to Congress, Giddings to the House (1838-1859), Wade to the Senate (1851-1869), where they were leaders in the fight to end slavery. The militant abolitionist John Brown, born in Connecticut, grew up in Summit Co, a few miles northeast of Akron, and lived into middle age in Franklin Mills (now Kent) in Portage Co. The influence of New England ideas persisted after the Civil War. Clarence Darrow, the "Attorney for the Damned," was born and raised in the northeast corner of Trumbull Co. His father was an abolitionist and religious freethinker, the "village infidel," his mother a suffragist. 

Today's route proceeds north through Trumbull Co and Ashtabula Co, then turns northeast into Erie Co, Pennsylvania. As it proceeds north, Ridge Rd bulges around the runway of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, built in the thirties by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The route turns east after it enters Ashtabula Co (in Wayne Twp), then back north (in Williamsfield Twp). Andover, the first SAG stop, was named for a place in northwestern Connecticut, the origin of the early settlers. Clarence Darrow established a law office in Andover and later in Ashtabula (on Lake Erie, 10 miles west of Conneaut) in the 1880s, before moving to Chicago in 1888. Jefferson, the seat of Ashtabula Co and the home of Joshua Giddings and Benjamin Wade, is 8 miles west of the little crossroads of Pierpont. 

In addition to its other distinctions, Ashtabula Co has 19 covered bridges, including the longest (613') and the shortest (18') in the United States. Five of them are within 3 miles of the route. The most accessible from the route is the 136' single-lane Middle Rd Bridge, built it 1868 over Conneaut Creek (go 1.1 mi east (right) on South Ridge Rd East (first right after crossing Conneaut Cr), south (right) 200 yds on Middle Rd). 

Conneaut, the last town in Ohio and the second SAG stop, was the home of Mildred Gillars (nee Sisk) in her teenage years. During World War II, she spouted Nazi propaganda to American soldiers on German radio; the GIs called her "Axis Sally." The lakefront portion of Erie Co, Pennsylvania, occupies the “Erie Triangle." New York and Pennsylvania disputed its possession, and so did Connecticut and Massachusetts, which had claims on the land under their colonial charters. Finally, in 1792, the federal government persuaded the four states to quit their claims, then sold the parcel to Pennsylvania, which was desperate for access to the Great Lakes. (The federal government and Pennsylvania also bought out the claims of the Iroquois Confederacy and the Seneca nation.) 

The city of Erie is protected by a sandspit peninsula called Presque Isle, which was left by glaciers as they receded 12,000 years ago. In the 1720s, the French named it – in French, "presque isle" means "almost (an) island" – and constructed a fort inside its harbor, on the site of today's Erie, in 1753. They abandoned and burned Fort Presque Isle six years later during the French and Indian War. The British rebuilt it but then lost it in 1763 during Pontiac's Rebellion, an uprising of the region's Native American nations led by the Odawa (Ottawa) chief Pontiac. The United States purchased the rights to the land from the Iroquois in 1784; in 1795, General "Mad Anthony" Wayne erected a new fort and established the town nearby that became the city of Erie. 

During the War of 1812, the Navy used the safety of the harbor to build and outfit four schooners and two brigs, including the Niagara, which became the flagship of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry ("Don't give up the ship"). In September 1812, Perry's fleet fought the Battle of Lake Erie, defeating a British force off South Bass Island, about fifteen miles northeast of today's Port Clinton, Ohio. After the war, in 1820, the Navy scuttled the Niagara in the Presque Isle harbor to preserve it. Decades later, it was raised and refurbished in Erie, where it is now usually on display at the Erie Maritime Museum. So many of its timbers have been replaced that it is debatable, like Locke's socks, whether it is the original or a replica. 

Today there is a state park on Presque Isle, which curves majestically into Lake Erie. It is noted for its two lighthouses and the variety of its flora and fauna. In the early days of railroading, before the United States adopted a standard track gauge (width) of 56.5", railroad companies set their own gauges. In 1849, the line that crossed Pennsylvania into Erie had a 72" gauge while the lines that emerged from Ohio and New York used a 58" gauge, meaning that passengers (and freight) passing from Buffalo to Cleveland via Erie had to change trains twice. Although aggravating to passengers and shippers, the situation was agreeable to Erie's hoteliers and transfer companies, so much so that when in 1853 the companies agreed to fix the problem, city officials balked and residents rioted, attacking trains and tearing up track. The "Erie Gauge War" sputtered for three more years before it snuffed out. Like its neighbors in the region, Erie was an iron and steel manufacturing center and a haven for immigrants. Now it too is hollowed out. In the area, 35 miles south of Erie in Crawford Co, is Titusville. In 1859, Edwin L Drake drilled the first successful oil well (to a depth of 69' (!)) on Oil Creek south of Titusville, touching off the Pennsylvania oil rush and birthing the American petroleum industry. One of the men in the area who prospered in the oil boom was the father of Ida Tarbell. Tarbell lived in Titusville and Erie during her youth. In 1904, then one of the best known of the "muckraker" journalists, she wrote an expose of John D Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Co that contributed to the breakup of the Standard “Oil Trust" in 1911.