An 1860 map of southern Goshen Township shows just a handful of large landowners dominating this pastoral section of Mahoning County.
Fourteen years later, an entirely new picture emerges. An 1874 map of the same area – centered along what is today state Route 534, approximately 1 mile north of the Columbiana County line – displays a much larger population illustrated by smaller land parcels. In those intervening years, a whole new community had evolved.
By 1874, the town of Garfield – so named for James A. Garfield, the future 20th president of the United States, but then a congressman representing Ohio’s 19th District – boasted new streets, a schoolhouse, small businesses and proprietors – all drawn together by a commercial magnet of the 19th century, a railroad depot.
On Nov. 27, 1851, workers completed a section of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Railroad that extended west from Salem to Alliance, pushing through the pastures of Goshen Township. By January 1852, gaps in the rail line were filled, connecting towns such as Columbiana and East Palestine and then Pittsburgh. By 1853, the railroad expanded westward to Crestline, Ohio, in the central part of the state, intersecting with other tracks leading to Columbus and Cincinnati.
At the same time, work on the Ohio and Indiana Railroad began, running westward from Crestline to Fort Wayne, ultimately tying up by 1856 with the newly finished Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad. That same year, all three lines were consolidated as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Rail Road.
For farmers in southwestern Mahoning County, the proximity of the railroad meant access to markets across the entire Midwest, especially emerging commercial and transportation centers such as Chicago. As such, population in this portion of the county increased after the railway stop was built during the 1870s, along with a post office.
Garfield Gets Its Name
It’s unclear to what degree of influence, if any, James A. Garfield had in the decision to construct a station in this part of the county. Nevertheless, those establishing the small village felt that his work as a congressman warranted recognition and the town became his namesake.
“He was very well-known here,” says Bill Lawson, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society. Then, the 19th District encompassed most of northeastern Ohio, including Cleveland, Akron and as far south as Steubenville. “It also included Mahoning and Trumbull counties, and he had a lot of connections in the Republican Party,” he says, and was a staunch supporter of railroad expansion. In 1872, for example, Speaker of the House of Representatives James Blaine appointed Garfield as the powerful chairman of appropriations, where the congressman oversaw the country’s pocketbook.
Garfield, born in 1831 in Moreland Hills, Ohio, along Lake Erie, endured poverty during his youth. His father, Abram, died when Garfield was 18 months old, leaving his mother, Eliza, a widow with four children. Yet Garfield was both bright and ambitious, eventually attending Hiram College for two years before transferring to Williams College in Massachusetts and earning his degree, Lawson says. “Along the way, he worked on the canals, and he worked in one-room schoolhouses as a teacher,” he says.
His early work on canal boats would take him for the first time to the Mahoning Valley. Indeed, on his inaugural passage aboard the Evening Star, the vessel “stopped at Brier Hill on the Mahoning River, and loaded with coal at the mines of David Tod,” according to “The History of Mahoning and Trumbull Counties, Ohio,” published in 1882. The Evening Star made the journey between Cleveland and Brier Hill with cargoes of coal and iron throughout the 1848 season.
Once he finished his studies at Williams, Garfield joined the faculty at Hiram (he would eventually become the school’s president) and became actively engaged in local and national politics.
“He was a supporter in 1856 of John C. Fremont, who was the first Republican candidate for president,” Lawson says. His reputation as an eloquent speaker on the stump impressed party veterans and state Republicans began to take notice, he says. “He was seen as an up-and-comer and protégé within the Ohio party fairly early on.”
Meanwhile, the issue of slavery was ripping the country apart. Garfield had long opposed the institution and during the late 1850s was asked to deliver speeches at major Republican rallies across the region. Akron was among his first in 1859, where he met Salmon P. Chase, a former U.S. senator and then the governor of Ohio. Chase left that office in 1861 to become Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury and would eventually serve as chief justice of the United States. Garfield and Chase remained close friends until the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, whom Garfield wanted removed from office.
In 1860, Garfield was elected to the Ohio State Senate, elevating his stature within the Republican party. During his time in the legislature, Garfield also read law, began raising a family and passed the Ohio bar in 1861, just as civil war approached.
Initially, Garfield was awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel and saw action in the Kentucky and Tennessee theaters. His skill impressed superiors and he was promoted to brigadier general. But politics consistently followed.
“Even though he enlisted during the Civil War and rose very quickly to brigadier general, they encouraged him to run for the 19th District congressional seat in 1862,” Lawson says. “He won by a large margin.”
His victory conflicted with his desire to see the war through and he brought his situation to Lincoln, Lawson says. Lincoln replied something to the effect that the Union army had plenty of generals, but what he really needed was capable men in Congress. Garfield took his seat in the House.
Garfield’s tenure in Congress corresponded with a tumultuous period in U.S. history, as the war ended, Reconstruction policies were instituted in the South and then abandoned by 1875, as economic turmoil engulfed the country resulting from the Panic of 1873. He would serve nine terms as the region’s congressman.
Not all of it was pleasant. He took barbs from his own party for his lukewarm support of Lincoln in 1864, broke with Chase over the impeachment of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, and in 1872 become embroiled in the notorious Credit Mobilier scandal during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.
In that scandal, Vice President Schuyler Colfax, U.S. Sen. Henry Wilson, House Speaker Blaine and Garfield were accused of taking bribes in the form of stock from the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869.
Garfield was mostly exonerated, but some historians have since questioned his credibility during the affair.
To the High Court and Higher Office
Meanwhile, a schism was brewing in his home district. The formation of Mahoning County in 1846 brought with it a dispute over the location of the new county seat. Canfield, situated at the center of the county, was initially recognized as the site. Those in Youngstown, however, lobbied for the designation, citing its growing population, industrial base and railroad networks. The debate raged over three decades.
Finally, the Ohio General Assembly in 1874 voted to relocate the county seat to Youngstown. Canfield challenged the process in court, lost and then appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court. The decision was upheld and the seat was relocated to Youngstown. The last resort was bringing it before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1876. Representing Canfield was none other than Garfield, who had already argued several cases before the High Court, Lawson says.
“He wasn’t involved until the Supreme Court,” Lawson says of Garfield. “Thomas Sanderson, another Civil War officer, had represented Youngstown all the way through.” The court eventually upheld the earlier decision and the seat remained in Youngstown.
Garfield’s connection to the Mahoning Valley continued, when in 1880, the congressman was nominated by the Republican Party as its choice for president of the United States.
“His campaign started in Warren in September of 1880,” Lawson says. Garfield made it a point to address a large gathering there to make his case for the presidency, since an influential faction of the party still supported U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and fellow Ohioan John Sherman for the nomination. The gathering was attended by such powerful Republicans as Ulysses S. Grant, who threw their support behind Garfield.
Garfield – who mostly campaigned from his farm in Mentor, Ohio – was elected the 20th president of the United States in November 1880. His tenure was short. Just five months after taking the oath of office, a deranged office seeker named Charles Guiteau raised a revolver and shot Garfield in the back at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington as the president was preparing to depart. Among those who witnessed the shooting was Robert Tod Lincoln, who 16 years earlier lost his own father to assassination.
Garfield was taken to the White House, where doctors probed for the bullet, now lodged in his abdomen. Modern consensus is that the physician’s actions most likely exacerbated an infection, and the president lingered in and out of pain for the next two months. To provide comfort and hoping for a recovery, the doctors moved Garfield to a New Jersey mansion overlooking the ocean, but his condition worsened. He died on Sept. 18, 1881.
After Garfield’s death, towns across the United States were renamed in his honor. New Jersey, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Idaho, Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington, Virginia – all boast a village or hamlet that bears the president’s name. Garfield Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, was named in 1930.
Yet it’s the sleepy crossroads in southwestern Mahoning County, dedicated several years before his death, that was the first to recognize Garfield.
This community lauded him as an educator, lawyer, soldier and statesman. Not a fallen president.
Pictured at top: A sketch of Garfield served as the frontispiece to “A History of Trumbull and Mahoning Counties, Ohio,” 1882.