Mogadore, Ohio

Mogadore is a small village in the Akron orbit of Summit and Portage Counties, settled around eighteen oh seven and named, rather exotically, after the Moroccan port city of Mogador, today called Essaouira. One theory holds that the name was inspired by a popular memoir about a Connecticut ship captain held captive at Mogador. It is the kind of naming that was common on the early American frontier, where veterans of the Atlantic world dropped Mediterranean and Biblical names on cornfields and creek crossings. Mogadore grew as a rubber and tire-industry satellite of Akron in the early twentieth century, and today it remains a tight-knit village of about four thousand, carrying its improbable Moroccan name into the twenty-first century.