Famous Citizens:

Neil Armstrong
Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, Neil Armstrong was the first astronaut to walk on the moon. Armstrong made the famous statement, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

 

 

Thomas Edison
Born in Milan, Ohio, Thomas Edison is the only American inventor with more than 1,000 patents. Some of his most famous inventions include the light bulb, the phonograph and the stock ticker.

 

 

James A. Garfield
James Garfield, the last of the log cabin presidents, was born on a frontier farm in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 1831. While a young boy, he worked on the family farm and earned money as a carpenter’s apprentice to support his widowed mother and three siblings. At the age of sixteen, he left home to work on the Erie Canal as a bargeman.

He entered Hiram College at the age of 20, worked as a janitor to pay his expenses, and then transferred to Williams College, from which he graduated in 1856. Garfield returned to Hiram as a classics professor. Within a year, he became president of the school.

Garfield was elected to Ohio senate in 1859 and served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. He became a brigadier-general at the age of 31 and was appointed major general two years later.

President Lincoln, recognizing Garfield’s legislative talents, persuaded him to resign his military commission after he was elected to Congress in 1862. He repeatedly won reelection for the next 18 years and became the leading Republican in the House of Representatives.

At the 1880 Republican Nation Convention, Garfield became a “dark horse” nominee on the thirty-sixth ballot. He went on to win the election by a margin of only 10,000 popular vote and became the twentieth president.

Less than 4 months after his inauguration, Garfield was shot by a disgruntled office-seeker while waiting for a train in Washington, D.C. He never recovered from the wound and died on September 19, 1881, at the age of 49.

 

 

Ulysses Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was born in 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio. He entered the military academy at West Point in 1839, but disliked military life and had no intention of making the army his career. He hoped to teach mathematics after his commission was up.

When the Mexican War began in 1844, Grant was sent to the southwestern frontier and fought under General Zachary Taylor. He won praise and promotions for his skill and bravery but he resigned from the Army in 1854 when he found it nearly impossible to support his wife and family on a military salary.

Over the next six years, Grant tried to make a living farming, selling real estate, and storekeeping, but each attempt was unsuccessful. At the age of 39, he appeared to be a failure.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Grant accepted command of the 21st Illinois Regiment. Within five years, he had become the most celebrated general in the nation’s history. At the Republican Convention in 1868, he was unanimously nominated as their presidential candidate and became the nation’s eighteenth president in 1869. He was reelected for a second term in 1873.

Although Grant was scrupulously honest, he was politically very naïve. His second term was marked by a series of scandals. Although Grant was never implicated in any of them, he refused his party’s nomination for a third term and returned to private life.

In 1884, after losing nearly all of his savings in a bad investment, Grant turned to the writing of his memoirs to earn money for his family. He died on July 23, 1885, just four days after completing his book.

 

 

Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding was born on his family’s farm near Marion, Ohio, in 1865. After working as a reporter for the Marion Star, Harding purchased the newspaper and became its owner, publisher, and editor. When he was 26, he married Florence King De Wolfe, a wealthy divorcee who exerted a great deal of influence over her husband.

Harding soon became a prosperous businessman, church trustee, and director of both charitable and fraternal organizations. He even founded a cornet band that played for both Democratic and Republican rallies.

At the age of 35 Harding began his political career. He served in the Ohio State Senate from 1900-1904, was lieutenant governor from 1904-1906, and even made an unsuccessful bid for governor. In 1914, he was elected to the U.S. senate.

At the Republican National Convention in 1920, Harding was nominated on the tenth ballot with Calvin Coolidge as his running mate. He won the election by an unprecedented 60% of the popular vote.

Under Harding’s administration, taxes were slashed, limits were imposed on immigration, and a federal budget system was created. But his presidency was marred by a long series of bribery scandals involving members of his cabinet.

Deeply distressed and fearful of the political repercussions these scandals would cause, Harding left Washington on a speaking tour in the summer of 1923. He suffered a heart attack in San Francisco and died on August 2, 1923.

 

 

Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison, the twenty-third president, was born in 1833 on a farm at North Bend Ohio. His grandfather William Henry Harrison was the ninth president of the United States.
Harrison graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 1852 and went on to study law in Cincinnati. He married Caroline Lavinia Scott in 1853. After working as a court reporter, and attorney, Harrison served as colonel of the 70th Indiana Volunteers in the Civil War.
Harrison was defeated in his run for governor of Indiana in 1876, but was elected to one term in the U.S. Senate in 1881. At the 1888 Republican Convention in Chicago, he was selected to run against Grover Cleveland. Cleveland won the popular vote, but Harrison won the election with a majority of electoral votes.
As president, Harrison signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a piece of legislation designed to limit the growth of monopolies and trusts. During his administration, Congress adopted the first billion-dollar budget in American history.
Harrison failed to win re-election in 1892 and his wife died just a few months before he left the White House. Harrison returned to Indianapolis and married the widowed Mrs. Mary Dimmick in 1896. He died in Indianapolis at the age of 67.

 

 

Rutherford B. Hayes
Born in Ohio in 1822, Rutherford B. Hayes attended Kenyon College and Harvard Law School. After five years of law practice in Lower Sandusky, he moved to Cincinnati, where he flourished as a young lawyer and member of the Whig Party.
Hayes fought in the Civil War, was wounded in action, rose to the rank of brigadier general in 1864, and received a promotion to major general a year later. While he was still in the Army, Cincinnati Republicans nominated him for the House of Representatives. Elected by a heavy majority, Hayes entered Congress in December 1865. Between 1867 and 1876 he served three terms as Governor of Ohio.
Hayes was nominated as the Republican candidate for President in 1876 against Samuel Tilden, governor of New York. When election results were tallied, Tilden had won the popular vote. But Hayes’ supporters contested the electoral returns and months of uncertainty followed. In January 1877 Congress established an Electoral Commission to decide the dispute. Two days before the inauguration, the final electoral vote was determined by the Commission to be 185 to 184 in favor of Hayes.
As the nineteenth president, Hayes brought a strong and independent attitude to the White House. He selected his own cabinet without consulting his supporters and attempted to reform the entire civil service system. He was financially conservative and did much to reconcile the differences between the North and South.
Despite his popularity, Hayes refused to run for a second term. After leaving the White house in 1881, he retired to his home in Fremont, Ohio. He died in 1893.

 

 

William McKinley
William McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843. He briefly attended Allegheny College, and taught at a country school until the Civil War broke out. He enlisted as a private in the Union Army. After the war, McKinley studied law, opened an office in Canton, Ohio, and married Ida Saxton, daughter of a local banker.
McKinley’s political career began at age 34 when he won a seat in Congress. His personality, character, and intelligence contributed to his political success. During his 14 years in the House, he became the leading Republican tariff expert. The next year he was elected Governor of Ohio, serving two terms.
The Republican Party needed a strong candidate to run against William Jennings Bryan in 1896. McKinley was nominated and won the election, becoming the twenty-fifth president of the United States.
McKinley entered the White House at the end of a period of economic depression. His administration saw the return of prosperity to the US, but it was foreign policy and the Spanish-American War that dominated his presidency. In February of 1898, McKinley sent a single battleship, The Maine, to Cuba to protect Americans living there. The ship was destroyed by a submarine mine and 266 American lives were lost. On April 11, 1898, McKinley asked congress to declare war for the liberation and independence of Cuba.
The conflict came to end on December 10, 1898 with a peace treaty signed in Paris. Cuba was granted independence from Spain, and Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were given to the United States.
In 1900, McKinley won a second presidential election against William Jennings Bryan. But his second term came to a tragic end in September 1901. He was standing in a receiving line at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition when an assassin fired two bullets into him. He died eight days later.

 

 

William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on September 1857. His father had served as secretary of war and as attorney general during President Grant’s administration. Taft graduated from Yale in 1878 and returned to Cincinnati to study and practice law. He was appointed a Federal circuit judge in 1892.
At the end of the Spanish-American War when the Philippines were given up to the United States, President McKinley appointed Taft governor of the islands. Taft was called home in 1904 when President Roosevelt asked him to serve as Secretary of War. By 1907 Roosevelt had decided that Taft should be his successor. The Republican Convention nominated him the next year. Taft ran against Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan and was elected twenty-seventh president of the Unites States in 1908. At 6’2’’ and more than 300 pounds, Taft was the largest man to ever serve as president.
Taft remained loyal to Roosevelt’s Square Deal program. He also sponsored the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution, and established the Federal Children’s Bureau. Taft did not believe in stretching the powers of the presidency and commented that former President Roosevelt "ought more often to have admitted the legal way of reaching the same ends." Near the end of Taft’s term, Roosevelt described him as “useless to the American people.”
In the presidential campaign of 1912, the Republicans re-nominated Taft, but Roosevelt, seeking to block Taft’s reelection, organized the Progressive Party, which split the Republican vote and led to the election of Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.
After leaving the While House, Taft served as Professor of Law at Yale. In 1921, President Harding appointed him Chief Justice of the United States. He resigned his position in February of 1930 because of illness and died one month later.

 

 

Wilbur and Orville Wright
Born in Indiana and Dayton, Ohio. The Wright brothers operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, but they earned fame when their airplane was the first to sustain flight.