Milan, Ohio: Where Edison Began

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February eleventh, eighteen forty-seven, in a small brick cottage here in Milan, Ohio. His family had fled Canada after a failed rebellion, and his father built this house in eighteen forty-one. At the time, Milan was booming, briefly the second-largest inland grain port in the world thanks to a canal opened eight years before Edison's birth.

The family left for Michigan when Thomas was seven, but he never forgot this place. He bought the cottage back from his sister in nineteen oh-six, and his daughter opened it as a museum on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth in nineteen forty-seven.