Massillon, Ohio

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Massillon, Ohio sits along the Tuscarawas River in western Stark County, roughly 8 miles west of Canton. A city of just over 32,000 people at the 2020 census, it occupies a modest patch of the American Midwest that has, improbably, shaped the country in ways that reach far beyond its borders. A French bishop named by a wife's request gave the city its name. A steel joist invented there is still holding up buildings around the world. A band director created a marching step that high school bands still imitate. And the man who invented professional football's greatest early rivalry came out of a town that had started, just decades before, as a Quaker settlement on a canal. What made this particular stretch of river such a crucible? The answer begins not with football or steel, but with a plot of land recorded on the 6th of December, 1826.

• 2. Canal Town Origins

  ›

  James Duncan of New Hampshire was the man who recorded that plot on the 6th of December 1826, establishing the town along the east bank of the Tuscarawas River. He named it after Jean-Baptiste Massillon, a French Catholic bishop, at the request of his wife. The location was not accidental. The Tuscarawas ran along the surveyed route for the Ohio and Erie Canal, a massive engineering project meant to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River. The canal section from Cleveland to Massillon was completed in 1828, and by 1832 the full route made Massillon a major port, known as the Port of Massillon.

  Before Duncan arrived, the site had been a Quaker settlement called Kendal, founded in 1812 by Thomas Rotch, originally of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. Rotch's home, Spring Hill Historic Home, still stands today and tells a different story about Kendal's role in American history. Thomas and his wife Charity were active in Underground Railroad work, and a letter preserved there from a freedom seeker named George Duncan, still on the run, asked the Rotches to help reunite him with his companion Edy. That letter is among only a handful written by a formerly enslaved person while still in flight.

  Among the leading merchants of the young canal town were the Wellman brothers, Hiram and Marshall. Marshall Wellman's grandson would become the American author Jack London. The first telegraph lines reached Massillon in 1847, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad extended its rails to the town in 1852. Massillon incorporated as a village in 1853 and as a city in 1868, when its population crossed 5,000.

• 3. Steel and Industry

  ›

  The first sheet of steel rolled in Massillon came out of the Massillon Rolling Mill Company in 1909, and some say that moment marked the true beginning of the city's steel age. The Rolling Mill merged into the Central Steel Company in 1914, which lit its first open hearth furnace in 1915 and eventually became known as Central Alloy Steel Company. In April 1930, Central Alloy merged with Republic Steel, becoming what was then the third largest steel company in the world. By 1959, Republic's Massillon operations employed nearly half of the city's entire workforce.

  One engineer at Central Steel changed how buildings are made everywhere. Stanley Macomber designed the open-web steel joist in 1921 while working in Massillon, then left to found the Massillon Steel Joist Co. in 1923. His joist was patented in 1924 and provided a revolutionary way to support floors, ceilings, and roofs using an assembly of steel with a top slab. The basic design is still in use today, and in 2011 Macomber was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame.

  Steel was not the only heavy industry Massillon produced. Charles M. Russell and his brothers Nahum and Clement formed the C. M. Russell and Company in 1848 to manufacture threshing machines and agricultural equipment. By 1884 it was producing steam traction engines and had grown into one of the largest makers of industrial and agricultural machinery in the country. A 1912 merger created the Griscom-Russell Company, which went on to produce heat exchangers for the United States Navy during World War II before the company closed in 1962.

  Also operating out of Massillon was the Massillon Bridge Company, founded in 1869 by Joseph Davenport, who had moved from Boston to work at Russell and Company. Davenport invented and built the first locomotive cowcatcher and cab in Massillon. The company he founded designed and built steel truss bridges through the mid-1900s, and many of those structures still stand.

• 4. Labor, Protest, Violence

  ›

  On the night of the 11th of July 1937, a car failed to dim its headlights as it approached a police barricade near a picket line at one of Massillon's Republic Steel plants. What followed became one of the most tragic instances of anti-union violence in American labor history. City police, assuming the worst, opened fire with rifles and shotguns without warning. They then used the incident as justification to raid a peaceful crowd gathered outside the union headquarters, pumping tear gas and firing into fleeing people. National Guardsmen joined in. The union hall was destroyed. Every suspected unionist within reach was arrested. Three men were killed and hundreds were injured.

  The Steel Workers Organizing Committee had begun trying to organize Republic Steel workers in the spring of 1937, following successful unionization at US Steel and Jones and Laughlin Steel. Republic retaliated by expelling over 1,000 union supporters at its Canton and Massillon plants. On May 26 of that year, the union called a strike involving workers at Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Inland Steel, the group known collectively as Little Steel. The July night at the Massillon plant was the brutal result. Ohio Historical Marker 18-76 was erected in 2004 in front of Massillon City Hall in memory of the strike.

  Massillon also produced a very different kind of protest. Jacob S. Coxey, Sr., known as General Coxey of Massillon, twice led groups of unemployed men on marches from Massillon to Washington, D.C., in 1894 and 1914. He called these marches a "Petition in Boots" and demanded that Congress allocate funds to create jobs. The marches did not succeed, but Coxey's Army was an early attempt to put unemployment on the national political agenda, a cause that gained force over the following decades. Coxey was elected mayor of Massillon in 1931.

• 5. Football as Civic Identity

  ›

  Paul Brown played and then coached at Massillon Washington High School before building some of the most successful franchises in football history. The Tigers, as the team is known, are historically among the winningest high school programs in the United States, second in all-time victories only to Valdosta High School in Valdosta, Georgia. As of 2012, the Tigers held an overall record of 837-249-35, a number no other Ohio high school program has approached. In July 2008, Massillon was nominated as one of twenty finalists in ESPN's Titletown U.S.A. contest and finished fourth, behind Valdosta, Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  The stadium that bears Paul Brown's name was completed in 1939 through the Works Progress Administration and holds 16,884 people. The Paul L. David Athletic Training Center, built in 2008 by philanthropist Jeff David in memory of his father, is an 80,000-square-foot indoor practice facility, 20,000 square feet larger than the facility used by the Cleveland Browns. The Tigers have won 25 state AP championships and 9 national AP championships. On the 30th of November, 2023, the Tigers beat Archbishop Hoban High School 7-2 to claim the OHSAA Division II state football championship, ending a 53-year drought.

  The Massillon-Canton rivalry predates the NFL itself. From 1903 to 1906 and again from 1915 to 1919, the Massillon Tigers and Canton Bulldogs ran what the Professional Football Researchers Association describes as perhaps the first great professional football rivalry. The nicknames carried forward and the high school teams still carry them today. Both the rivalry and the city are the subject of the 2001 documentary film Go Tigers!

  The Tiger Swing Band was formalized in 1938 by George "Red" Bird, who created its distinctive swing style during the Paul Brown coaching era. Bird invented the 6-to-5 marching step that became the band's signature. The band opens every home game with "Massillon Will Shine," "Stand Up and Cheer," the National Anthem, "Eye of the Tiger," and the WHS Alma Mater, and performs a new show for every home game. A note from the 1915 Washington High School annual already references students bringing instruments to games to cheer on the team.

• 6. Culture and Memory

  ›

  The Massillon Museum was established in 1933 to preserve the city's history and was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1972. It is now housed in the historic Gensemer Brothers Dry Goods building downtown. Its collection spans roughly 100,000 objects across 94 categories, 60,000 photographs, and 18,000 archival and reference documents.

  One of the museum's most unusual holdings is the Immel Circus, a 100-square-foot miniature containing 2,620 pieces: thirty-six elephants, 186 horses, 102 assorted animals, ninety-one wagons, seven tents, and 2,207 human figures. Most of the pieces were hand-carved by Dr. Robert Immel of Massillon using tools from his dental practice.

  The Lions Lincoln Theatre, designed by Guy Tilden and built in 1915, was saved from demolition by a local Lions International club in 1982. It is thought to be one of the oldest purpose-built movie houses in the country still in operation. One of its two arc-lamp 35mm projectors was replaced by a digital projector in 2013. In 1989 the theatre hosted the debut of Dear Mother and All, a World War I play drawn from the letters of Massillon native Charles Vernon Brown and his friends and family.

  The Ohio Women's Convention met in Massillon on the 27th of May, 1852, with Hannah Tracy Cutler presiding, in the Massillon Baptist Chapel. Attendees voted to establish the Ohio Women's Rights Association, which held its first meeting the following year in Ravenna. The city also holds St. Mary's Catholic Church, which housed the U.S. shrine to St. Dymphna until a fire on the 4th of August, 2015 destroyed a baptistery and the shrine. The building survived and reopened on the 25th of December, 2016.