High Point of the Ohio to Erie Trail
Hilliar Township, Knox County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
High Point on the Heart of Ohio Trail Elev. 1285 feet C., A. and C. Railroad (ca. 1873)
The Story
This modest marker crowns the highest point—1,285 feet—along a former rail line that dates to about 1873, the era when a dense web of railroads was being stitched across Ohio during the post-Civil War industrial boom. The initials "C., A. and C." stand for the Cleveland, Akron and Columbus Railroad, one of the many lines that hauled coal, farm produce, and passengers through the state's interior in the Gilded Age. Long after the trains stopped running, the graded railbed found a second life: it became the Heart of Ohio Trail, a segment of the cross-state Ohio to Erie Trail that now carries cyclists and walkers where locomotives once labored uphill. The marker turns an ordinary summit into a quiet monument to that transformation from rail to trail.
Why it matters
It captures a distinctly American story of reinvention—the great Gilded Age railroads that opened the country's interior giving way, a century later, to the rail-trail movement that reclaimed those corridors for recreation and community.
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