Wadsworth: The Match Capital of the World
Near Akron, Ohio
Wadsworth, Ohio, sits in Medina County about twelve miles southwest of Akron, and for most of the twentieth century it had a claim almost no other city could make: it was the match capital of the world.
The story starts in eighteen ninety-three. In Akron, the Diamond Match Company, then controlling roughly eighty-five percent of the American match market, moved its operations to a newly built industrial city called Barberton. That freed up a gap in the local match supply chain, and two years later a local businessman named E. J. Young founded the Ohio Match Company in Wadsworth.
What Young built grew into something extraordinary. At its peak the Ohio Match plant covered eighteen acres and produced more than three hundred million wooden and paper matches every single day. The company employed sixteen hundred people, more than six hundred of them women, making it the largest employer in the city by a wide margin. Its signature product was the Ohio Blue Tip, a strike-anywhere kitchen match that became familiar in American households across the country for decades.
The Ohio Match Company changed hands several times over the twentieth century, absorbed by Diamond Match in nineteen twenty-eight, reorganized in nineteen thirty-six, independent again by nineteen forty-eight, then passing through Hunt-Wesson Foods and eventually Bradley Industries. Through all of it, the Wadsworth plant kept making matches. It finally closed in nineteen eighty-seven.
The city still honors its past. A Blue Tip Festival has run annually since nineteen seventy-two, celebrating what Wadsworth calls its match heritage. The city also keeps a replica of the world's largest matchstick, a monument to the improbable thing that once made this Ohio town famous.
