North Baltimore, Ohio: Swamp, Railroad, and the Oil Boom

North Baltimore sits on the southern edge of Ohio's Great Black Swamp, one of the last parts of Ohio settled because the land was so heavily forested and waterlogged. The village came into being after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad arrived in eighteen seventy-three, and it was incorporated in eighteen seventy-six, named for the railroad that made it possible. Then in December of eighteen eighty-six oil was struck on a nearby farm, unleashing a six-hundred-barrel-a-day well. Within a decade the population had more than quadrupled, gas wells attracted three glassworks to town, and North Baltimore briefly blazed with the energy of a boomtown punched into former swampland.