Sidney: A Town Named for a Poet

The county seat of Shelby County takes its name from Sir Philip Sidney, the sixteenth-century English poet and soldier, making it one of the more literary place names in Ohio. It was chosen as the county seat in eighteen nineteen, when state commissioners selected a seventy-acre parcel along the Great Miami River that a man named Charles Starrett donated for the purpose.

What made Sidney grow was water, then steel. The Miami-Erie Canal reached here in the eighteen thirties, linking the town to Cincinnati and the Ohio interior and bringing settlers up from the south. After the canal era ended, the railroads kept commerce moving. By the twentieth century Sidney had become home to Emerson Electric's Copeland compressor division, a major manufacturer of refrigeration and air conditioning compressors. The elegant courthouse square the canal era built is still the heart of a small industrial city that has been making things continuously since before Ohio had paved roads.