Norton Strange Townshend: Agriculture, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Ohio
By Kelly Boyer Sagert, local author, scriptwriter and historian based in Lorain County, January 2026.
From England to Avon: An Immigrant’s Ohio Roots
From agriculture to politics, and from education to abolitionism, the military, and more, Norton Strange Townshend served as a true Renaissance man in the nineteenth-century United States.
Born on December 25, 1815 to Joel and Rebecca Townshend in Clay-Coton, Northamptonshire, England, he began to attend the Bitteswell Academy at the age of five. Five years later, the Townshend family immigrated to the United States, settling on an Avon, Ohio farm. Once an adult, Norton’s innovational field drainage tile additions greatly improved his farm’s productivity.
Medicine, Cincinnati, and the Underground Railroad
Joel Townshend served as one of the founders of the First Congregational Church of Avon in 1836, and Norton became a member. This is the same year that the Townshend family earned their citizenship to the United States and that Norton began to teach at the district school. A year later, Norton began to study medicine in Elyria with Dr. Richard Howard before advancing his studies that fall and winter at the Cincinnati Medical College. While in Cincinnati, he met politician Salmon P. Chase and joined him in working on the Underground Railroad to help people escape slavery. Cincinnati’s location along the Ohio River, placed right in between the state of Kentucky where slavery was legal and Ohio where it wasn’t, made it a vital throughway on the Underground Railroad.
A Worldly Education and Healing a Community
In 1839, Norton started his studies in New York City at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating one year later. The following year, he traveled to England where he visited family and observed surgeries, also watching them in Paris, France. While in London, he also attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention, allowing him to further both his medical career and his advocacy of abolitionism.
On this overseas trip, Norton added to his medical knowledge in Edinburgh, Scotland; visited Dublin, Ireland; and then returned to the United States in April 1841. Residents of Avon then benefited from the medical expertise he gained when he opened a practice in July 1843, the same year that he organized the Oberlin Peace Society.
Family, Farming, and Life in Elyria
Marrying Harriet Newell Wood on December 27, 1844, the couple kept their farm in Avon but moved to Elyria so that Norton could take over Dr. Howard’s medical practice. On November 11, 1844, they had their first baby, Arthur Smith. On September 28, 1846, their second son, James Houghton, was born.
Oberlin and an Agricultural Vision
In 1845, Norton became a trustee of Oberlin College, located in the “town that started the Civil War” for its defiant anti-slavery activities. He tried to establish an agricultural college in Oberlin, but this didn’t happen.
Free Soil Politics and the Fight Against Ohio’s Black Laws
Then, as if Norton weren’t busy enough with his own education, farming endeavors, teaching, board appointments, and work on the Underground Railroad, he ran for the Ohio General Assembly as a Free Soil candidate. This short-lived political party was at the intersection of Free Soil Democrats, Barnburners, Conscience Whigs, and Library Party members with one interest in common: to keep slavery from becoming legal as more states became established in the western part of the country.
He won this office in 1846, adding politics to his many activities. In this position, he helped to repeal certain discriminatory Black Laws through strategic collaborations with other politicians. This was an era of both triumph and tragedy for Norton, however. Although he and Hannah had their first daughter, Mary Rebecca, on December 21, their son Arthur had died.
From Statehouse to Capitol Hill
Norton nevertheless pushed ahead with his political career, elected to the U.S House of Representatives in 1850, being a representative at an Ohio Constitution Convention in 1851 where he advocated for the voting right of African Americans and women. When he lost his Congressional seat in 1853, he wasn’t daunted, instead being elected to the Ohio State Senate.
Loss, Resilience, and Renewal
The following year saw more tragedy, though, when Harriet died of tuberculosis on January 24. He married again just months later, on October 17, perhaps in part to give his children a mother. He and Margaret Bailey, a math teacher, then had their own son on July 20, 1855—Arthur Bailey—and a daughter, Harriet Norton, on September 12, 1857. In 1860, Alice Margaret was born.
Building Ohio’s Agricultural Future
In that interim period, Townshend didn’t rest on his laurels, founding the Ohio Agricultural College and teaching animal anatomy courses alongside ones on veterinary medicine and livestock feeding and breeding. He resigned from the Oberlin College Board of Trustees but took on new positions: a trustee of the Ohio State Asylum and a position on the State Board of Agriculture.
Once again not slowing down, he accepted an appointment from his friend, Salmon Chase, to analyze coinage purity on the U.S. Assay Commission—and then as the Union Army Medical Inspector.
Laying the Foundation for Ohio State University
In 1869, he became the first professor of agricultural at Iowa State Agricultural College with relatives watching over his family. Just a year later, though, he returned to Ohio, appointed to the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical Board of Trustees by Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes. He assisted in curriculum development and, in 1873, became the chair of the agricultural department. He then moved his entire family to Columbus, except for James who was in Minnesota, enrolling Harriet, Arthur, and Alice as early students at the university.
This school ultimately became Ohio State University in 1877, the year that Norton became the superintendent of the farm at Ohio State University. In 1886, he also became the director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the university, granted the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree the following year.
Sadly, Norton survived yet another of his children when James died of tuberculosis on June 26, 1888. Then, his sister-in-law Miriam, who lived with the Townshend family, died on April 18, 1889.
In contrast to personal tragedies, Norton continued to garner professional honors, becoming the first professor emeritus at Ohio State University in 1891.
A Legacy Etched in Stone: Townshend Hall
He then died on July 13, 1895 at the age of seventy-nine and, three years later, the agricultural hall at the university became named Townshend Hall in his honor.