There was no media coverage. There were no websites teeming with information. Not a single pair of paper eclipse glasses were handed out for safe viewing.
The last time Kent experienced a total solar eclipse was nothing like the lead up to this year’s April 8 event.
The year was 1806.
Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States.
Ohio, founded in 1803, was just an infant state, and mostly still wilderness when darkness spread across the land on the morning of June 16, 1806 – the last date a total solar eclipse could be observed in Kent.
Wilderness territory
Most of those around to witness the phenomenon would have been indigenous people, likely members of the Seneca and Wyandot tribes, and a handful of early white settlers.
What we know today as Kent, Ohio, was barely a crossroads in the northeast corner of a region of the Northwest Territory known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. The land had been awarded to the colony of Connecticut by King Charles II of England in the 1600s, long before the Revolutionary War. After the war, the state of Connecticut sold the land to a group of speculators who formed the Connecticut Land Company.
The company sent its surveyors into the western wilderness and carved out parcels of land for settlers, leading to the founding of many Northeast Ohio cities, including of Youngstown in 1796, Warren in 1798, Hudson and Ravenna in 1799, Ashtabula in 1803 and Stow in 1804. Warren was the capital of the territory.
Ohio wasn’t exactly unpopulated at the time of the last total solar eclipse. Census records from 1800 show the Ohio territory had about 45,000 inhabitants. Many were clustered further south, near Marietta, Ohio’s first city, and Cincinnati, both founded in 1788. The state was on the verge of a population boom; by 1810, Ohio’s population had exploded to roughly 230,000.
So, who was in Kent?
Kent’s first settlers, the Haymaker family, had arrived in November 1805, just months before the 1806 eclipse.
“ details the arrival of the city’s earliest settlers:
“Jacob Haymaker, a millwright and carpenter of German descent who prospected through the county in the spring of 1805, seeking a homesite in the vast and practically unsettled wilderness. When he saw the waters swirling between the narrow banks, he realized that here would be a fine spot for the erection of a gristmill. Returning to Warren, he made arrangements with the agent of Aaron Olmstead, owner of the entire township of Franklin, for purchasing eight township lots, containing 2,093 acres.”
In October 1805, Haymaker sent his son, John, to make a clearing through the forest along the riverbanks to prepare for the building of their homestead.
“John left Warren late in October and with him came his wife, Sally, and their three children, Jacob, Eve and Catherine. They traveled by ox cart and their progress was slow. Arriving at the river about the middle of November,” Grismer’s history notes.
Jacob and another son, George, arrived in the spring of 1806, so they, too, would have been witnesses to the eclipse.
No transportation
It would be another 25 years before Zenas Kent, father of Marvin Kent, the city’s namesake, would arrive in town.
As the previously mentioned ox cart voyage indicates, getting to Kent at the time was no easy task.
The 1806 eclipse was 30 years before the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal was established along the Cuyahoga River to open the area for trade and transportation, and more than 55 years before tracks for the Atlantic & Great Western Railroad were laid in Kent in 1863, thanks to the efforts of Marvin Kent.
Luckily, today travelers have state routes 59 and 43 to make the journey to Kent an easy one.
Spreading the news
The science of astronomy had developed well before 1806, so those in the more populous New England states were aware the eclipse was taking place, but it is questionable whether word had reached the Haymakers.
At the time, Ohio had just one operating newspaper, the Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, which was published in Cincinnati from 1799 to 1822. The Scioto Gazette, in Chillicothe, had ceased publication at the end of 1803, and the Trump of Fame, the newspaper in nearby Warren, regarded as the first newspaper in the Western Reserve, wasn’t founded until 1812.
The first camera wasn’t invented until 1816, so there were no photos of the phenomenon.
The eclipse did garner some coverage in New England newspapers, including this account that appeared in the Hampshire Federalist:
And of course, all this happened 104 years before the Kent Normal School, the precursor to , was established in 1910.
Who will be here in 2099?
After the April 8 eclipse, the next total solar eclipse visible in Ohio will be 75 years from now in 2099, according to information from the
Interesting to note, a total a solar eclipse often wakes up nocturnal wildlife creatures who think it is nighttime, and non-nocturnal wildlife might think it is time to head to sleep, according to
Among the wildlife who may have been confused back in June 1806, were Kent’s iconic black squirrels. The creatures were native to the region, created by a gene mutation in the common Eastern gray squirrel.
By the mid-1900s, however, black squirrels had become all but extinct in Ohio. That’s what prompted Kent State’s grounds superintendent Larry Wooddell and retired Davey Tree employee Biff Staples, in 1961, to import black squirrels from Canada and release them on the Kent Campus, effectively re-introducing the species to the region and thus ensuring they would be here to experience yet another total solar eclipse.
Photo credits: William Sumner/Cleveland Public Library, Kent Historical Society, , Michael Zeiler/ GreatAmericanEclipse.com