Milan, Ohio: The Canal Boomtown That Made a Genius

In the eighteen forties, Milan, Ohio was briefly one of the most important grain-shipping ports in the world. A hand-dug canal linking the village to the Huron River made it the second-largest inland grain port on earth, behind only Odessa in Ukraine. Grain barons built fine Federal-style homes on the ridge above the canal basin.

Into this unlikely prosperity, on February eleventh, eighteen forty-seven, Thomas Alva Edison was born in a modest brick house on Edison Drive. The family moved to Michigan when Thomas was seven, and the canal era ended soon after with the arrival of competing railroads. The Edison Birthplace is a National Historic Landmark.

Today Milan is a quiet village of about one thousand four hundred people, its canal long gone but its most famous son remembered.