Findlay, Ohio

Findlay takes its name from General James Findlay, a War of eighteen twelve officer who built a log stockade here in eighteen twelve. The town was platted in eighteen twenty-one and grew slowly until eighteen eighty-six, when drillers punched into the Trenton limestone and struck natural gas. The boom was so intense that Findlay piped free gas to any factory willing to relocate, and within a few years it had added glass works and iron foundries.

Decades later, in the early twentieth century, Cooper Tire and Rubber moved to Findlay and grew into one of the nation's largest tiremakers. The gas field exhausted itself by the eighteen nineties, but the manufacturing base it seeded carried Findlay forward. Today it is the county seat of Hancock County with roughly forty thousand people and a strong corporate presence anchored by Marathon Petroleum.