Middletown, Ohio: Midway Between Two Cities

Middletown most likely got its name from geography. When Stephen Vail helped plat the town in November eighteen oh two, the settlement sat almost exactly halfway between Dayton to the north and Cincinnati to the south, about twenty miles from each. Daniel Doty had first settled here in seventeen ninety-one, and the town incorporated in eighteen thirty-three.

The Miami-Erie Canal brought water power along the Great Miami River, and paper mills rose to use it. In nineteen hundred Armco Steel broke ground on what would become a massive steel works, employing tens of thousands and anchoring the city for most of the twentieth century as one of the significant industrial centers of southwestern Ohio.