Berea, Ohio
Near Cleveland, Ohio
For about a century, Berea was the grindstone capital of the world. In eighteen thirty-eight a Connecticut-born settler named John Baldwin noticed a gritty slab of local stone and shaped it into a grindstone. It worked beautifully.
Within a decade, quarries had opened across two hundred fifty acres of the Cuyahoga County ridge, and Berea sandstone was being shipped to sharpen tools on farms from Maine to California. At its peak, Berea supplied more than eighty percent of all American grindstones. The stone also trimmed the windows and doors of Canada's Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.
Baldwin plowed his quarry profits into founding what became Baldwin Wallace University, still anchored in Berea today. The last quarries closed in the middle of the twentieth century, and the vast pits were gradually filled. The town's name came from the Bible, chosen in eighteen thirty-six from the Bible, after founders settled a choice between Berea and Tabor with a coin toss.
