Twenty two years after the 1848 fire, the unthinkable happened.
On the night of April 14th, 1870, according the the “1881 History of Medina County and Ohio”,  “The alarm sounded…calling the people unceremoniously from their virtuous couches and in a few short hours, almost the entire business district of Medina was in ashes, much of it [...]

The story goes like this:  On the evening of April 11, 1848, two young men — drifters, probably — were playing cards in the back room of Barney Prentiss’s shoe store.  One of them blew out a candle and tossed it into a pile of trash in the corner. But he was careless — the [...]

Harrison Gray Blake (1819-1876) routinely ignored the Fugitive Slave Laws and hid runaway slaves in his handsome home home on East Washington Street. It was a terrible risk in those days to harbor slaves — the fines were prohibitive and could bankrupt a family.  Blake had a great deal to lose. He had come to [...]