Canton historical timeline

Canton’s significance comes from two men and one meeting.

Founding

Laid out in 1805 by Bezaleel Wells and named after a trading firm’s vessel connection to the Chinese port — a fashion of the period for naming American towns after distant places. It grew as a county seat and a milling town, and then on coal, clay and the canal.

Industry

Agricultural machinery, then steel and, from 1899, the Timken company, which brought tapered roller bearing manufacture here and built a substantial steelmaking operation alongside it. Hoover made vacuum cleaners in North Canton from 1908.

McKinley

William McKinley practised law here, was elected to Congress from the district and served as governor of Ohio. In 1896 he ran his presidential campaign from his Canton front porch, receiving some 750,000 visitors brought in by special trains while his opponent toured the country. He was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901 and buried here under a memorial funded by public subscription.

Professional football

On 17 September 1920, representatives of a dozen teams met in a Hupmobile car showroom in Canton and formed the American Professional Football Association, which became the National Football League two years later. The Canton Bulldogs, with Jim Thorpe, were the dominant early club. The Hall of Fame opened on the site in 1963.

Jim Thorpe

The Canton Bulldogs signed Jim Thorpe in 1915, paying him an enormous sum for the period, and crowds followed. Thorpe — an Olympic decathlon champion from the Sac and Fox Nation who had been stripped of his medals over a technicality — was the sport’s first genuine star, and his presence here is much of why professional football organised itself in Canton rather than somewhere larger.

Since

Manufacturing decline from the 1970s, and a downtown arts-led recovery since the 2000s.