Wauseon ( WAW see on) is a city in and the county seat of Fulton County, Ohio, about 31 mi (51 km) west of Toledo. The population was 7,568 at the time of the 2020 census.
At a Glance
- County: Fulton County
- County seat of Fulton County
- State: Ohio
History of Wauseon
Wauseon was platted in 1853 when the Michigan Southern Air Railway was extended to that point. Land speculators bought 160 acres of land that would become the city of Wauseon. The original name for the city was "Litchfield" after Litchfield, New York, birthplace of many of the city’s settlers. Hortensia Hayes, the daughter of an early settler, suggested that the new village be named after an Ottawa tribe chief named Wauseon, who had been forced in 1839 by the federal government to forfeit the tribe’s land and move to Oklahoma. The village was incorporated in 1859. With the commercial success that the railroad brought, Wauseon grew larger than Fulton County’s original seat of Ottokee, and in 1869, Wauseon was named the county seat. The Fulton County Courthouse was built in 1871.
Between 1901 and 1939, the community was served by the Toledo and Indiana Railway, an interurban railway between Toledo and Bryan, Ohio. The construction of the Ohio Turnpike in the mid 20th century also helped the commercial growth of Wauseon.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Wauseon, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.