For the next few days I thought I would post a few of our Small town Downtown Willoughby, Ohio. I will start with the town Square that most small Ohio towns have.
Willoughby’s early history parallels that of many northern Ohio towns. The area, first inhabited by Native Americans, was explored by French trappers in the mid 1700s. In 1787, Yale graduate David Abbott made a trip west from Rome, New York. Eleven years later, Abbott acquired 200 acres including what is now Willoughby and assembled a group of pioneers to settle in the area of the Chagrin River, building a sawmill and gristmill.
In 1834 a local group of doctors established the Willoughby University of Lake Erie Medical College named after Dr. Westel Willoughby, their former professor at Fairfield Medical College in New York. That same year, Dr. John Henderson, who also served as postmaster for the Village of Chagrin, officially changed the name of the village to Willoughby.
