Hebron: Historic Crossroads of Ohio

Explore the stories and sites of Hebron, "Historic Crossroads of Ohio," with this tour designed by the Hebron Historical Society in partnership with Licking County Library. The village of Hebron was founded in 1827 by John Smith to capitalize on an important confluence of two milestones in transportation that would meet in the settlement: the Ohio and Erie Canal (1828) and the National Road, or the Old Pike (1835). Hebron, incorporated in 1835, was a popular center for business and industry, and it grew rapidly. The village first thrived as a transshipping point for grain and pork and a producer of lumber and spirits during the nineteenth-century height of the Canal and National Road. The decline of the Canal in the late nineteenth century threatened Hebron's prosperity, yet the village reinvented itself as a commercial stop and waypoint on the National Road when the automobile roared to prominence in the early 1900s. Transportation remains a defining feature of the area's past and future, as expressways and highways bring new forms of economic development and growth.