Sunbury, Ohio

Sunbury was built around a crossroads and an inn. In eighteen sixteen, brothers William and Lawrence Myers platted the village at the intersection of two major stagecoach routes: the Old Walhonding Trail and the Delaware Newark Pike. Lawrence Myers built his inn right there, anticipating the traffic, and he was right.

By eighteen twenty stagecoaches were rolling through regularly. The guest list over the following decades reads like a textbook: William Henry Harrison stopped here, as did Rutherford Hayes, Henry Clay, and, by some accounts, Johnny Appleseed. The Myers family had come from Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania and brought the name Sunbury from there.

The stagecoach era ended when railroads arrived, and the last coach rolled out of Sunbury in eighteen seventy-three, fifty-three years after the first. Today Sunbury is a city in Delaware County, a quiet marker at a junction that once connected early Ohio.