Seville, Ohio

In late eighteen sixteen a group of New England pioneers, said to have been led by Henry Hosmer, pushed into Guilford Township in what is now Medina County. They settled near a dark, slow-moving creek so gloomy that someone named it after the river of the underworld in Greek mythology: the River Styx. The community around it was called the Burgh informally, until eighteen twenty-eight when Henry Hosmer platted the village and gave it a name from the other end of the cultural spectrum entirely: Seville, after the ancient Spanish city.

The contrast could hardly be sharper, a hamlet next to the River Styx named for one of Europe's grandest cities. Local tradition holds that Hosmer's family and neighbors survived their first Ohio winter in a log cabin east of the present railroad tracks. A post office called Seville followed in eighteen thirty.