Tales from the Firelands

You don't see many blogs with footnotes, but Dave Barton's four-month-old Firelands History Blog is the better for them. He's posting about once a week and documenting the history of what is now mainly Huron and Erie counties in north central Ohio, which were set aside for those whose towns were burned during the American Revolution. (Justice was significantly delayed in this case, as the lands didn't begin to settle until after the War of 1812.) Most of the settlers were from New England.

"With this blog," writes Barton, "I intend to tell the stories those who settled in the Firelands; people like Platt and Sally Benedict, who founded Norwalk, Ohio; Samuel Preston, who founded the Reflector, Norwalk’s present-day newspaper; his daughter Lucy, who persuaded a ship captain named Frederick Wickham to marry her, leave the sea and become a newspaperman with her father; Henry Buckingham, a failed businessman who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad; and many more."