Genoa, Ohio: The Straight-Line Decision
Near Toledo, Ohio
Genoa, Ohio exists because railroad executives in the eighteen fifties decided to save money by drawing their route in a straight line. The Toledo, Norwalk, and Cleveland Railroad chose to run directly from Fremont to Toledo rather than bend the tracks to connect Woodville and Perrysburg, and that decision put a depot in what had been wilderness southeast of Lake Erie. The area was first settled in eighteen thirty-five by Timothy Sherman, who hauled a yoke of oxen into the Great Black Swamp to clear land in a place known as Stony Ridge.
The railroad transformed the settlement into a commercial hub. It took the name Genoa in the eighteen fifties, after the Italian port city, and it incorporated as a village in eighteen sixty-eight. Brick and tile manufacturing, using clay from the lake plain, became the town's main industry alongside grain trade.
The straight line saved eleven miles, and the first passenger train ran on December twenty-second, eighteen fifty-two. Stony Ridge got its name from limestone sticking out of the Great Black Swamp, and local quarries later sold Genoa White Lime across the region. When the Civil War came, more than one hundred residents joined Union regiments, and the Toledo Blade wrote in eighteen sixty-two that few towns had done as well as Genoa in furnishing troops.
In eighteen eighty-three and eighty-four the village and Clay Township built a town hall and opera house. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, was restored in nineteen seventy-eight and seventy-nine, and still houses village offices and the Genoa Civic Theater. Genoa today is a village of about two thousand three hundred in Ottawa County.
