Vandalia, Ohio - History

History

On August 17, 1838, Benjamin Wilhelm, a settler from Pennsylvania, settled in Vandalia on his way to Vandalia, Illinois near the intersection of U.S. Route 40 and US Route 25-A. He stopped here and named his new town after his original destination. He built his home and a small general store as a stop and resting place for travelers heading west. The small town began to attract travelers and entrepreneurs, and on February 7, 1848 the town was incorporated as "The Village of Vandalia" with Benjamin Wilhelm as its first mayor. The village was laid out in 38 lots including a church, hotels, blacksmiths shops, a steam sawmill, meat markets, and a carriage shop. The first church was started by the United Brethren congregation.

By 1959, Vandalia was outgrowing its "village" status, and its citizens voted to make it a council-manager form of government, effectively making the village into a municipal corporation. On January 2, 1960, Vandalia became a Charter City of the State of Ohio.

Read more about this topic:  Vandalia, Ohio

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
    —Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)

    “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
    —Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
    —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)