New Concord, Ohio

New Concord, Ohio came into being in eighteen twenty-eight when a town was laid out as the National Road pushed west through Muskingum County. The settlers were mostly Scots-Irish families who had come down from western Pennsylvania, and in eighteen thirty-seven they chartered Muskingum College to educate their sons and daughters in the classical tradition, a school that became coeducational in eighteen fifty-four. The village became famous nationally for a very different reason in the twentieth century.

Astronaut and senator John Glenn grew up here. Glenn's family moved to New Concord soon after his birth, and he attended the local schools, and returned to town after his historic orbital flight in nineteen sixty-two as the most celebrated person ever to come from this small place.