Urbancrest, Ohio

In eighteen eighty-nine, an African American couple named Samuel and Ella Quinichett built the first home in what would become Urbancrest, a small Franklin County village just south of Columbus. The community they helped establish grew into one of Ohio's earliest self-governed African American villages, platted in eighteen ninety and incorporated in nineteen forty-eight.

Decades later, Urbancrest made national history. In nineteen seventy-one, residents elected Ellen Walker Craig-Jones as their mayor. She was the first African American woman elected mayor anywhere in the United States. During her term through nineteen seventy-five, the village rebuilt its main streets, installed streetlights, and won approval for a three million dollar housing project. The village remains small, under a thousand residents, but its place in American political history is permanent.