Salem: A Quaker City History

Truly a model community of the best that small-town America offers, Salem, Ohio, represents good values, a peaceful setting, and a host of men and women grounded in prudence, integrity, and resolve. The combination of Quaker spirituality and pioneer resourcefulness helped its first settlers in the beginning of the nineteenth century to carve out a lasting home in America’s beckoning wilderness. Against a backdrop of two centuries, Salem evolved from a simple Quaker outpost into a thriving community–one that would participate and influence many major events in our nation’s history. Salem: A Quaker City History documents the town’s unique story over the past 200 years, beginning with Elisha Schooley’s cabin in 1801 and spanning the town’s evolution over the succeeding decades. Within these pages, readers meet the town’s earliest citizens and its founding fathers, Zadok Street and John Straughan, and experience firsthand the changing landscape through the struggles and triumphs of Salem’s new settlers seeking opportunity and freedom. This devotion to freedom is at the very heart of the town’s identity, having served as an outspoken advocate for emancipation and woman’s suffrage and providing legions of its young men in service to the country in times of military conflict.