Delaware Today and Tomorrow

Delaware today has a booming economy.  It has more than doubled in size since 1980.  This is probably for two major reasons.  One reason is that there are many job opportunities available.  Many of these are laborer jobs, which pay well enough to raise a family on.  There is a plethora of jobs, including many restaurants as well as factories that provide these important jobs to the town.  Another, and possibly bigger reason, is because of Delaware’s proximity to Columbus.  You can get to Columbus as quickly as fifteen minutes if you want to, taking 23 or 71.  Obviously there are many job opportunities in Columbus that can be taken advantage of, just like living opportunities just like shopping.  At the same time, you can avoid all of the major things people dislike about cities, just like the traffic and much of the crime.

That being said, crime is a problem in Delaware.  Drugs have become more and more numerous in Delaware.  Much of this comes from neighboring counties.  Marion especially has had a major increase in drug crime as well.  There have been multiple major roundups of drug users and dealers, both in Delaware and in Marion. Despite these large roundups, more seem to keep on coming.

The future of Delaware looks very bright.  Delaware keeps annexing and buying out land that is near it so that Columbus cannot expand and make Delaware just another neighborhood.  Our growth and proximity to Columbus also add to the desirability of Delaware.  The only bad part of Delaware’s growth is the continued expansion into farmland.  This is just something that I personally do not desire, but it will be good for the city itself.

Development Outside of the Downtown

     To see someplace other than the historic downtown of Delaware, I walked east from Sandusky Street.  I ended up at the intersection of Troy Road and Central Avenue.  One of the biggest things here is the hospital, Grady.  It is a large hospital and the only one in Delaware.  I had to spend an entire week here when I had blood clots and had to wait for them to dissolve.  It wasn’t a fun experience to lay in bed for a week, but the hospital itself was very nice.  This area looks somewhat like the downtown area of Delaware, but it is a lot less fancy.

     Here we have the same type of buildings, made of brick and touching each other with no space in between.  They are set up in more of a shopping square rather than the way the downtown is set up.  The types of shops here are the biggest difference.  The main downtown area has mostly fancy shops, especially the restaurants.  There are nice sit down restaurants in the downtown, but out here there is a gas station right in the center of everything with McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants.  There is also a Hobby Central and a medical store.

     One of the nicer places is the Final Score, which is a sports bar.  It is a pretty nice place even though it has more people from Columbus now than from Delaware on a usual Saturday night.  It is a fun place to go.  Next door to it is a karate studio that complains about the smoke coming from the bar.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me I feel like that’s a risk of renting a place next to a bar, but the keep complaining.

     The houses nearby are a lot different from downtown.  They aren’t brick like everything else around, but normal modern looking houses.  These houses nearby have space between them and yards unlike the downtown houses and apartments.  These are usually considered in a nicer area than right downtown.

Memoirs of my Town

The town of Delaware was a very different place fifty years ago than it is today.  Talking to my grandpa is an easy way to see that.  The actual area that we live in has not changed very much.  All of the houses that were there, besides the house that I live in which is built on my grandparent’s property, have been there for a very long time.  These are all farms and the buildings and land aren’t going to change a whole lot.  One of the cool things that my grandpa had to say was that they built a railroad through part of his land, and he had them use some of the dirt to stack under the railroad.  He used the hole leftover from the dirt to have a pond so we can fish and for the horses to drink out of.  There is a picture up of an aerial view of the house and it was interesting to see the land without my house or the pond being there.

The biggest difference is closer to town, where some of the farmland has become subdivisions.  Some of this has been done in my lifetime, and some was done before that.  It is weird enough seeing some of the land that used to be completely flat or corn is now a bunch of houses packed together.  The town used to be a fairly small town as well, being a city of almost 40,000 people now, it had less than 20,000 in the 1980s, and much smaller before then.  There have been numerous restaurant changes and storefronts changing, but that has not really effected him much.

On top of farming, my grandpa also worked for the county.  He was the county roads commissioner at one point.  One of the funniest stories that he told me was when someone got a job with the county and came in with long hair.  My grandpa made him go get a haircut before he could work for him.  When he came back the next day, my grandpa said it was still too long and drove him to the barber and made him get it cut even shorter.

Main Street, or Sandusky Street

     There isn’t a Main Street in Delaware, Ohio, the major roads are three going east and west, Winter, William, and Central.  I didn’t know how to decide between these so I focused on Sandusky Street, which runs north and south through Delaware and intersects all three.  It is the closest thing to a main street that Delaware has.  Sandusky Street runs all the way through Delaware.  Sandusky is littered with places throughout downtown Delaware.  Many restaurants are located here as well as many stores.  The restaurants on the south side of town are more fast food places, including McDonalds, Wendy’s, and KFC.  There are much nicer restaurants closer to central Delaware. 

    Some of these restaurants include Brooklyn Heights, a nice restaurant run by one of my high school teachers and his partner.  When my father and I went out for my 21st, this was the last stop after a multitude of bars to grab a burger and a last beer before we went home.  Another restaurant that used to be located on Sandusky Street was The Little Brown Jug.  This restaurant tied right in with Delaware’s famous horse race The Little Brown Jug.  This has since moved into another part of Delaware and this restaurant keeps changing.  This was the second area that the Jug had been.  When it first moved, my great uncle was one of around twelve people who pushed the old full bar down through Delaware’s streets to its new home.  The Mean Bean is a great coffee shop on Sandusky Street that is a friendly hangout place.

 

     All of the buildings in downtown Delaware are brick buildings, and most are pretty old buildings that have been restored.  City Hall is on Sandusky Street and William Street.  Another restaurant is the Hamburger Inn, which is kind of like the Waffle House of inside the city.  Really early or really late, it is the place to go.  Delaware keeps its downtown busy with lots of activities.  These include farmer’s markets I think once a week.  There is also an arts festival once a year that attracts a very large crowd.  Sometimes festivals occur in Delaware as well with live bands playing.  The Delaware car show is another huge attraction in Delaware.  This car show brings in over 600 antique vehicles and thousands of people.  It is these things that keep downtown Delaware thriving and alive.

Delaware in the Civil War

     Delaware, Ohio played an important role in the American Civil War.  There were actually two training camps in Delaware for Union forces.  One of these camps was on the West side of Delaware, which is the nicer side of town, and was a camp for white soldiers.  The other camp was on the East side, which is the poorer side of Delaware, and was a training camp for black soldiers.  This sign in Delaware tells about the camps and tells which regiments were trained there.

     Another important contribution to the Civil War, and to the United States as a whole, from Delaware was Rutherford B. Hayes, who would become the 19th president of the United States.  Hayes was born in Delaware and lived there in his early years but left.  He later returned to attend Ohio Wesleyan University.  After this, Hayes became a congressman and then the governor of Ohio.  Many politicians got their start in war, and Hayes was no different.  In the war Hayes was wounded five different times and was considered very brave in combat.  To this day, the city school in Delaware, and also my high school’s rival school, is named after him, Delaware Hayes High School. 

     I also learned two things that I thought were really cool, though one doesn’t directly pertain to the civil war itself.  These are the plaques commemorating history in Delaware.  One is on the East side of Sandusky St. and is about  about the black troops who fought in the civil war from Delaware, and it says that four of them were awarded the Medal of Honor for their service in the war.  An award that high is something to be proud of knowing that these people came from Delaware as well.  The other plaque is on the West side of Sandusky St. and tells that Frederick Douglas, a famous ex-slave and abolitionist, spoke in Templar Hall about the evils of slavery.  They charged money to get in and listen to him speak, which they then donated to the underground railroad.  This was another really cool thing to learn, that not only did soldiers from my town get awarded a high honor in the military, but hearing people come to speak about abolition in Delaware makes me think that the people were accepting of the idea, if not fully supportive of it.  The plaque also says that after he spoke, William Tecumseh Sherman spoke, another famous civil war commander.  It was really great finding all of the historical things that make Delaware such a rich place.

     One of the final things that I found was a plaque in the cemetery commemorating the black troops that fought there.  the inscription reads “BENEATH THIS SOD LIE THE REMAINS OF FIFTEEN BLACK UNION ARMY SOLDIERS OF THE UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR WHO SHALL FOREVER REMAIN UNKNOWN TO ALL BUT GOD.”  I thought this was very interesting as well.  The history of Delaware is tied to the civil war in important ways and it is great to feel like my town is so connected with history.

1850 Census of Delaware, Ohio

      Ohio was a varied place during the mid 19th century.  You can find out an almost limitless amount of information about your town and county by using the census data collected during the time .  One of the things that I was curious about was the amount of adults who could not read or write.  I used the 1850 census information.  Delaware, Ohio was a very literate place.  Only 348 people out of over 21,000 could not read or write during this time period.  This was very surprising to me as I thought it would be much higher.  I would have honestly thought that there would be more people than that in todays time that could not read or write.  Looking at the rest of Ohio, however, the census shows that Ohio was an extremely literate place and that Delaware was not an out of the ordinary place in this category.

      After looking at this, I decided that since I lived in a pretty rural area I would check out how many farms there were.  There were a good number, over 1800, but once again this was not unnatural during this time and Delaware was fairly normal in the amount of farms that it had compared to the amount of people that lived in Delaware at this time.

     Even though we already did a post about religion, I looked up how many Presbyterian churches were located in Delaware during the 1850s.  There were 13, which was a fairly high amount for the population of Delaware.  This was more just for fun but coming from a Scottish and an Irish family, though not necessarily Scotch-Irish, it is always interesting to me to learn about this since the amount shows the heavier population of Scotch-Irish in the area.

     Delaware did not have a very high population of African Americans.  This did not surprise me as the ethnicity in Delaware is mostly white.  We did, however, have a training camp in the civil war for African American troops that fought for the Union.  I am assuming that this means Delaware had people coming from more than one county around it to fight.  This does not surprise me either.  Even though Columbus is near us and is obviously a large city nowadays, Delaware is still the center for the surrounding counties other than Franklin for quite a bit.

County History of Delaware

      There are many interesting things that you can find in a county history.  In a county history of Delaware, the very beginning of the town was discussed, dating back to 1808.  At this point in time, Delaware was barely even a village, whereas in present day it has grown to a population of nearly 40,000 people.  I am not sure if this quote was actually about Delaware, but it was used to describe it when it first began. 

     “It was then a city only in name,

      The houses and barns had not yet a frame,

      The streets and the squares no mortal could see,

      And the woodman’s ax had scarce hit a tree.”

     I definitely thought that this was an interesting quote and description of the town.  I come from a rural area north of the city with smaller towns like Kilbourne being closer to me.  Delaware is pretty large to me, even though I know it’s no New York City, and it is still strange to think of how it had to have started as so small. 

     The county history talks about the natives in Delaware.  It calls them savages, but gives almost a sad respect for them.  It states that the Indians knew they were going to lose and could not compete against the white man, yet many fought on anyways.  The history talks about how their ways of living were simple and could be appreciated, but were outdated and no longer working.  The natives are referred to as being no more, “the hero of the pathetic tale.” 

     One of the most interesting things I learned that I have always wondered about is why Delaware Township is shaped differently than just a regular square.  I discovered this when reading about it in the county history.  Delaware began as a regular 5 square mile area just like any other regular township.  Apparently, in 1826 a square mile of land from Delaware Township was ceded to Concord Township to the southwest, in compensation for land surrendered to the Scioto.  This is why Delaware Township is in the irregular shape that it is in today. 

     Some of the important people mentioned in the history were some of the first ones there.  Benjamin Ives Gilman, of Marietta, bought a tract of land in southern Delaware and this helped to form the southern border in 1807, before Delaware was even built.  Ira Carpenter was another of the first citizens settling in Delaware, and he was also said to have been the first to cut down a tree in Delaware.  Ira was also said to have built the first dam across the Olentangy River.  The biggest industries in Delaware were the farms that people were working individually, but also a large sawmill and paper mill that were erected in Delaware. 

     I found the county history to be very interesting and informative, but, as always, you have to take all of the information with a grain of salt.  The county history that I looked at was made in 1880 and is always going to have different opinions and views than we do in modern times.  The way native Indians were talked about is a large giveaway to the differing viewpoints of the times.

     Religion is very important in my life and in the lives of many people.  It was even more popular and important in the past.  What many people do not realize about religion is just how useful it can be in a historical study.  It can show many things about people, one of the most important things being where people came from ethnically.  This can also be seen from the setup of the town itself.  

     Delaware, Ohio has more than 70 churches in the county.  Some of these are located in the nearby small towns of Kilbourne, Ashley, Radnor, and Ostrander, but many are inside of the city of Delaware itself.  The first church established in Delaware was the First Presbyterian Church, located on West Winter and Washington St.  This church was established in 1810, with the town being established just a little before then, in 1808.  St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church of Delaware are also some of the older churches established in Delaware, Ohio.  

     The way the town is set up is not the way German settlement would have had it set up, with a town square in the middle of the city.  Methodist Churches converted many and make it hard to see an ethnicity of the town through religion.  The Episcopal church broke away from England and its church.  This shows that there could have been a large population of English in Delaware.    St. Mary’s is an Irish Catholic church that is one of the largest in Delaware.  This one obviously shows that there was a population of Irish in Delaware in the early 1800s.  The Presbyterian church is one of the largest indicators of ethnicity.

    

     Many people hear the term Scotch-Irish and believe that it is just a combination of Scottish and Irish heritage, when in fact it refers to those people in Northern Ireland, controlled by the U.K.  Scots who were Presbyterian were considered to be friendlier towards England than Catholic Irish so they were offered benefits if they would move into Northern Ireland.  It is immigrants to America from Northern Ireland that are one of the biggest groups to move into and settle Ohio, especially Delaware.  I am Irish, Scottish, and German, which is kind of a combination of the biggest groups that moved into Ohio and, specifically, Delaware.  

Delaware Land Division

     Delaware County fit into two different land grants when Ohio was originally divided up in the late 18th and early 19th century.  The first one is the Virginia Military District.  This land was used to pay off the debt to Revolutionary War soldiers of Virginia.  The people who settled had to pay Virginia which they then used to pay their soldiers.  This was one of the only ways to raise revenue for these fairly newly formed states.  This was, however, only the Western part of Delaware County.
     The rest and majority of Delaware County, including the City of Delaware itself, was in the United States Military District, containing parts of central and Eastern Ohio, reaching to Tuscarawas County.  This land was given to soldiers as payment.  The amount of land that they received was based on the rank of the officer or soldier.  Non commissioned officers only received 100 acres of land for their service.  This went all the way up to 1100 acres of land for a major general in the army.  This land was divided in much the same way as the Public Land Survey System, the difference being that this was the only district to be divided up in areas five miles square rather than six.  This was divided up into smaller and smaller squares which were then sold off or given to soldiers as payment as used as farmlands.
     One of the main reasons that the colonists rebelled in the first place was because of the taxes that England was forcing them to pay.  Because of this, the Americans at this time were very wary of powerful national government and made it difficult to raise taxes on its citizens.  This made selling land or using money from those producing on the land one of the best ways for the government to actually make money for itself.
This division definitely shows in Delaware today.  It is still great farming area and most of where I live is covered in corn and beans.  The areas that are used for farmland are not jagged and divided by landmarks, but are almost all square or rectangular and very evenly cut off.  These areas of land go around railroads, woods, and bodies of water.  This could have been very different if Delaware had been somewhere else and not been divided up in this manner.

Delaware, Ohio Indians

There were multiple tribes of Indians that used or lived in Delaware over the years.  The Delaware, or Lenni Lenape Indians, were obviously one of these tribes.  They had been driven here from the state Delaware by Europeans and other Indian tribes.  The Mingo also had a settlement here, which is what the water park located in central Delaware City right by the Olentangy River is located at.  Delaware was built nearly right where the Mingo settlement had been located.  Two major Indian settlements were said to have been inside the Delaware City limits, one on East William Street and another towards the Western end of the city.  A large battle was also fought here between the Delaware Indians and the Shawnee Indians.  This battle occurred on what is today the campus of Ohio Wesleyan University and was thought to have been fought over the sulfur springs that are located on the property.  The Indians of the time called this spring “Medicine Waters” and it was thought of as being very important.

To be careful of the threat of Indian attacks, there were 4 blockhouses near Delaware, one inside the now city limits located on the corner of Sandusky and William Street.  While there was never any battles between the Europeans and the Indians in Delaware, the wife of the founder of Delaware did get robbed of a barrel of whiskey in which natives said that they would leave peacefully after receiving it, which they did.

One great story relating to Indian and European relations is one that all started with a joke.  Worried of an attack, a company of men was placed under the command of a Captain Drake and located near Delaware.  As a joke, Captain Drake yelled out one night that the Indians were upon them.  This led to some people arming up and forming into position as they were supposed to, and others running away screaming into the night.  One lieutenant apparently had his screams misheard as the war whoops of Indians.  Once he got farm enough that he could not hear anyone else, he assumed that they had all been scalped by the Indians and were now dead.  This lieutenant went all the way to the settlement of Radnor and told everyone there the same thing, that they had just been attacked by Indians and defeated.  This caused the citizens of Radnor to take full flight and passed Delaware in fleeing telling them that the Indians were coming as well.  This caused Delaware to fortify their defenses and prepare for an attack that never came and would never come.  Still remembered as a joke gotten out of hand, it could have been much worse.  This is one funny story to look back on between the “Indians” and the Europeans.

(Mingo Park)