Barberton: The Magic City O.C. Barber Built
Near Akron, Ohio
In eighteen ninety-one, a man named Ohio Columbus Barber purchased open farmland just southwest of Akron and began building a city from nothing. Within a decade the population had grown from eighteen hundred to more than four thousand. Within three decades it exceeded eighteen thousand. People called it the Magic City, because the transformation from cornfields to an industrial metropolis happened so fast it seemed like something that could not be real.
Barber's given name told you something about him. Ohio Columbus Barber was born to the state and named for ambition, and he channeled both into business. By eighteen eighty-one his Diamond Match Company controlled roughly eighty-five percent of the American match market, producing two hundred fifty million matches a day. After the economic panic of eighteen ninety-three shook his Akron operations, Barber decided to consolidate and expand, not in Akron, but in his own city, where he controlled the land, the infrastructure, and the terms.
He moved the Diamond Match plant to Barberton in eighteen ninety-four and then kept going. The Sterling Boiler Company arrived. The Columbia Chemical Company, later absorbed into PPG Industries, opened one of the first synthetic soda ash plants in America here in nineteen hundred. Barber's National Sewer Pipe Company followed. Within a few years, Barberton was producing matches, heavy boilers, industrial chemicals, rubber goods, and metal pipe, a dense industrial economy conjured from bare ground by one man's will and capital.
Barber was also a showman. He built Anna Dean Farm outside the city as a model agricultural estate, raising purebred livestock and demonstrating scientific farming to a skeptical public. He wanted to prove that industry and agriculture could coexist in his planned community.
The industries that Barber built faded through the twentieth century, but Barberton held on. Its residents still call it the Magic City, honoring the speed with which a single ambitious man remade this corner of Summit County.
