Canton Culture

Canton’s cultural life is anchored by two institutions and a surprisingly strong arts scene for its size.

Football as heritage

The Hall of Fame is not simply a museum of a sport but the place the sport organises its own memory: the bronze busts, the enshrinement ceremony, the gold jacket. Canton competed for it in the early 1960s on the strength of the 1920 founding meeting and the Bulldogs, and won partly by raising local money.

The McKinley memorial

A domed granite mausoleum 29 metres high on a hill, approached by 108 steps with a bronze statue of the president halfway up, designed by Harold Van Buren Magonigle and dedicated in 1907. It is a genuine piece of American civic architecture and the city’s most striking building.

Music

The Canton Symphony Orchestra dates from 1937 and is among the more substantial regional orchestras in the Midwest, with a full season and a youth programme.

Arts district

Downtown’s First Friday has run monthly since the mid-2000s, closing streets for galleries, music and food, and has been central to the city centre’s recovery.

Hoover and Timken

Both companies shaped the area’s civic culture as well as its economy, funding parks, a library, an auditorium and a technical school. The Hoover company town at North Canton and the Timken family’s endowments are still visible in the buildings that carry their names.

Amish country

The largest Amish settlement in the world lies in the counties immediately south, and its presence shapes the region’s markets, furniture trade and food as much as its roads. Cheese houses, bulk-goods stores and furniture workshops sell to the wider area, and the quilt and produce auctions are working trade events rather than displays.