Information abstracted from 200 rare county histories & atlases published between 1876 and 1916.

The Great Black Swamp may have slowed the settlement of northwest Ohio, but it couldn't stop a little town south of Toledo called Bowling Green. It blossomed into an agricultural gold mine with natural gas and oil booms that prospered the modest Wood County seat late in the Nineteenth Century. Now as the home of internationally known Bowling Green State University, the National Championship Tractor Pulling Competition, and the Black Swamp Arts Festival, this formerly uninhabitable swamp continues to attract its fair share of attention. In this pictorial history you will learn how Bowling Green beat the odds to become the city everybody wants to revisit.