Canton Geography

Canton sits in Stark County in north-east Ohio, on the Nimishillen creek, at around 320 metres above sea level.

Rolling country

The land here is glacial till shaped into low rolling hills, more varied than the flat plain of central Ohio and less dramatic than the country further south-east. The city occupies a shallow basin with suburbs spreading onto the surrounding rises, and the ground is high enough to catch more winter snow than the Ohio lowlands.

The edge of the plateau

A short distance south and east, the land rises into the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau — steeper, wooded, cut by creeks, and the beginning of Appalachia. That transition is why Holmes County, with its Amish farms on small hilly holdings, looks and works so differently from the flat commercial agriculture of western Ohio.

Water and industry

The creeks powered early mills, and the Ohio and Erie Canal passed a few miles west, which connected the town to Cleveland and the Ohio river and made its nineteenth-century growth possible.

Coal and clay

The local sedimentary rock carries coal seams and good brick clay, both worked from the nineteenth century and both part of why heavy industry established here.

Amish country

Holmes and eastern Tuscarawas counties hold the largest Amish settlement in the world, around 40,000 people. The hilly, broken land suited small family farms and was cheap when the community expanded into it in the nineteenth century, and the topography is part of why horse-drawn agriculture remained viable there long after it stopped being so on the flat.

Position

Between Akron and the Pennsylvania line, on a north-south interstate, which keeps it accessible.