Ashtabula ( ASH tə BYU lə) is the most populous city in Ashtabula County, Ohio, United States. It lies at the mouth of the Ashtabula River on to Lake Erie, 53 miles (85 km) northeast of Cleveland. The city had 17,975 people at the 2020 census. Like many other cities in the Rust Belt, it has lost population because of a decline in industrial jobs since the 1960s. It is part of the Cleveland metropolitan area.
At a Glance
- County: Ashtabula County
- State: Ohio
History of Ashtabula
This area had long been inhabited by indigenous peoples. After the American Revolutionary War, the United States mounted the Northwest Indian War to push Native American peoples out of what it then called the Northwest the area of the Midwest south of the Great Lakes and west of the Appalachian Mountains. The success of this military effort resulted in more European Americans entering Ohio and nearby territories.
The site of Ashtabula was settled by such European Americans beginning in 1803. The city was incorporated in 1891. Located directly on Lake Erie and developed as a port for trade, the city contained several stops on the Underground Railroad. This informal, secret system was the means by which anti slavery supporters helped escaped African American slaves reach freedom in Canada in the years before the American Civil War. While Ohio was a free state, many refugee slaves still felt at risk of slavecatchers here, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed. It required enforcement and cooperation by residents of free states to return escaped slaves and was biased toward slavecatchers, requiring little documentation of their claims. Among the Underground Railroad sites in Ashtabula is Hubbard House, one of the handful of former surviving termination points. Refugee slaves stayed in a basement of the house adjacent to the lake and then left on the next safe boat to Canada, gaining their freedom once they arrived in Ontario. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Ashtabula, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.