Rossford, Ohio
Near Toledo, Ohio
Rossford is a company town whose very name is a love story. In eighteen ninety-eight, glassmaker Edward Ford purchased one hundred and seventy-three acres along the Maumee River south of Toledo to build the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company. When he named the resulting settlement, he blended two words: Ross, the surname of his wife Caroline Ross Ford, and Ford, his own.
The plant began casting plate glass at the close of the eighteen nineties and grew into one of the nation's major flat-glass makers. Ford recruited workers from Pennsylvania glasshouses and Eastern Europe, building homes and stores for them on company land. Many distinct ethnic communities settled in the few square miles along the Maumee, making Rossford a diverse small industrial town.
