Newspaper clippings, essays, and written accounts of local history.
Spencer Lighthill (b. 1836) recalls settling in Brown Township as a boy in the 1850s — earning his first half-dollar at age seven, tracking game for pelts to pay taxes, discovering a skeleton with a suspected bullet hole while helping cut Oakwood's first street, and Civil War service in the 38th and 100th O.V.I.
A county history overview covering the Great Black Swamp, Celeron De Bienville's 1749 expedition, the War of 1812, early settlement, the county's formation and county seats, the canal era, and the 1887 'Reservoir War' that gave the county its motto, 'No Compromise.'
An overview of the Indigenous peoples with historical ties to Paulding County — early post-glacial hunters, then successive Huron/Wyandot, Ottawa, Miami, Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Mascouten presence through the 1830s — combining a 1993 historian's account with a modern native-land.ca lookup.
How settlers cleared and drained the heavily forested Great Black Swamp, turning present-day Paulding County into some of Ohio's most fertile farmland.
A compilation of early Antwerp history: Dr. John Lincoln's 1899-published history of the town's Methodist Episcopal church (1842-1871), a 1907 pioneer letter from T.W. Lincoln recalling 1840s Carryall Township settlers, and a short unattributed "Early History of Paulding and Paulding County" summary.
A crop circle discovered near Paulding in July 1996 drew regional media attention and became a local sensation, covered in a series of Crescent-News articles.
A Fort Wayne Journal Gazette feature on the John Paulding Historical Society Museum, its all-volunteer origins, and its collection — from a hand-woven blanket to a 1928 Farmall tractor.
Mrs. Isaac Thomas traces the layers of nominal claims over what became Paulding County — New France, Connecticut, Virginia, the Northwest Territory, Wayne County — before its 1820 formation and later county-seat moves.
A Paulding Progress feature on Worstville, a near-ghost-town on the Nickel Plate Railroad near Payne and Briceton, including longtime resident Charlie Cline's memory of a grain-elevator fire he watched as a boy.
A 1978 Paulding Progress feature on the county's railroad history, from the failed 1870s attempts through the Nickel Plate's completion in 1881, told partly through Payne station agent Keith McCullough.
An unsolved 1960 abduction and murder of a 14-year-old Paulding girl that remains a live cold case — a running list of reporting and other sources on the crime, not a full account.
Mrs. A.M. Pursel's reminiscence of arriving in Paulding as a young girl in 1850, when the county seat was moved from Charloe, originally printed in the March 27, 1924 Paulding Democrat.
The July 24, 1917 roster of Company B, 2nd Ohio Infantry — Paulding County's World War I company — plus a list of men who enlisted elsewhere from Payne, Harrison, and Benton Townships.
Jesse B. Jackson, born in Paulding, Ohio in 1871, was appointed American Consul in Aleppo, Syria in 1908 and is credited with saving thousands of Armenian lives during the Armenian Genocide of WWI. This entry also recounts how his family's letters and artifacts were reunited with the museum in 2025-2026.
A 1906 letter to the editor, written from Oklahoma on hearing of her mother's death, recalling the hardships of settling Paulding County around 1852 — no roads, digging the first ditch from Payne to Antwerp, and a barrel of Christmas goods that nearly cost her mother her feet to frostbite.
A local-news column from the Latty Herald's November 8, 1901 issue — visits, moves, farewells, and small-town happenings around Latty, Ohio.
Construction of the Wabash & Erie and Miami canals through Paulding County in the mid-1840s, and how their meeting point at Junction briefly rivaled Fort Wayne as a center of commerce.