Ashland, Ohio: The Balloon Capital of the World

There is a city in northern Ohio, about halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, that once produced more than half of all the toy balloons in the world. That city is Ashland, and if the claim sounds improbable, it points to something true about how the American economy worked in the early twentieth century: odd concentrations of small manufacturers in unlikely places, building clusters of expertise so deep that they dominated global markets without anyone outside the county ever noticing.

Ashland was first settled in eighteen fifteen as a hamlet called Uniontown, then renamed in eighteen twenty-two. The name was a tribute to Ashland, the Kentucky estate of Henry Clay, the statesman whose vision of a self-sufficient American economy through manufacturing sat well with settlers in a county trying to do exactly that. The city was formally incorporated in eighteen forty-four.

By the early nineteen hundreds, five rubber manufacturing companies had set up operations in and around Ashland, drawn by cheap land, decent rail connections, and a workforce willing to learn specialized trades. Their specialty was latex rubber goods, including toy balloons, and the cluster became so dominant that Ashland earned the informal title of Rubber Capital of the World. At the peak, a majority of toy balloons sold anywhere on earth were inflated, painted, and packaged within a short drive of this courthouse.

The city is also home to Ashland University, founded in eighteen seventy-eight as Ashland College by the Brethren Church, a branch of the German Baptist tradition, and elevated to university status in nineteen eighty-nine. The institution now enrolls several thousand students and operates graduate programs in education, business, and nursing.

The rubber industry has largely faded, but the city of roughly twenty thousand keeps the old manufacturing identity close. Ashland's story is a reminder that the Midwest's industrial geography was never just steel and automobiles. Sometimes it was balloons.