Caledonia

How Caledonia began

Caledonia is a village in Claridon Township, Marion County, set on the Whetstone River amid one of Ohio's few surviving post-glacial prairie remnants, the Sandusky Plains. It is named for the ancient Roman name of Scotland, the ancestral home of many of its first settlers. Two future national figures spent childhoods here: novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose earliest memories and the 1926 novel "Tar: A Midwest Childhood" grew out of his family's years in the village, and future president Warren G. Harding, who from age 11 learned the newspaper trade at his father's weekly, The Argus, before leaving for college in 1879; the family moved on to Marion during his final college year, before his 1882 graduation. A relocated 1873 bowstring bridge and a row of early-1900s commercial buildings survive on the National Register of Historic Places.

Where the name comes from

The village was named Caledonia, the ancient name for Scotland, because a large share of its first settlers traced their ancestry there.

Before the town

No Native village, mound, or trail specific to the village site itself is recorded in the sources checked. Caledonia sits in the Sandusky Plains, a natural prairie along the Whetstone River that predates European settlement and would have been familiar hunting ground to the Wyandot and other nations who used the county before the line fixed by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville was pushed back around 1819.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot.

Timeline

1. 1870 — The Harding family, abolitionists, moved to Caledonia, where father Tryon Harding bought the weekly newspaper The Argus.
2. 1873 — The Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton built the bowstring arch bridge later moved to Caledonia, originally spanning elsewhere in the county.
3. 1876 — Eleven-year-old Warren G. Harding began learning the newspaper trade at his father's Argus office in Caledonia.
4. 1881-1882 — The Harding family left Caledonia for Marion, about six miles away, during Warren Harding's final year at Ohio Central College; he joined them there after graduating in 1882.
5. 1976 — Marion County engineers relocated the 1873 bowstring bridge to Caledonia rather than demolish it, placing it to give access to a new community park.
6. 1978 — The relocated span was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Caledonia Bowstring Bridge, north of the village in Claridon Township.
7. 2021 — The Temple and Masonic Block Buildings, four connected commercial buildings at 107-127 East Marion Street, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

The boy at the Argus

In 1870, when Warren Harding was about five, his abolitionist family settled in Caledonia after his father Tryon bought the village's weekly newspaper, The Argus. By age 11 the boy was setting type and running errands around the shop, absorbing the trade that would define his career. In late 1879, at 14, Harding left for Ohio Central College in Iberia, and during his final year there the family moved on to Marion, six miles away, where Tryon's son would eventually buy and build up The Marion Star and, in 1920, be elected the 29th President of the United States. The Argus office where he learned the business no longer publishes, but the connection is why Marion County's history and Harding's are so tightly bound together.

A bridge that came from somewhere else

The bowstring arch bridge now called the Caledonia Bowstring Bridge was not built for Caledonia at all. The Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton built it in 1873, with lattice bracing over the deck that let the arched truss carry both vertical and horizontal loads cheaply, a common design for county road bridges of the era. It crossed the Scioto River elsewhere in the county until 1976, when Marion County engineers, unwilling to simply scrap a sound piece of 19th-century engineering, moved it to Caledonia so village officials could use it to open a new community park across the river. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, the bridge had fallen into disrepair and stood abandoned and overgrown by 2011, a preservation success turned into a preservation problem.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Every historic place in Marion County on the full map

Del-Co's East Knox wellfield at Bryant and Lucerne Rds, Wayne Twp, about 5 miles WSW of Fredericktown The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.74% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Aqua Ohio - Marion26% of residentsScioto River and Little Scioto River intakes, blended with local groundwater wells

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Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2022: 1 of 1 passed.

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