Canton Audioguides

Canton, Ohio was founded in 1805, and surveyor Bezaleel Wells likely named it after the Chinese port city of Guangzhou, though the connection remains somewhat speculative. What is certain is that on September 17, 1920, representatives from eleven professional football teams gathered in a Hupmobile automobile showroom on Tuscarawas Street and founded the American Professional Football Association, which became the National Football League two years later. That meeting, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame built to commemorate it, define how most Americans think of Canton today, but the city's history runs considerably deeper.

President William McKinley campaigned from his front porch at 723 Market Avenue North in 1896, winning the presidency against William Jennings Bryan in one of the most consequential elections of the Gilded Age.

McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and his remains, along with his wife's, are in the McKinley National Memorial, a domed granite rotunda on Monument Hill above the city. The National First Ladies Library, housed in a restored Italianate mansion on Market Avenue that was McKinley's wife Ida's family home, is the only institution in the country dedicated solely to the lives and history of presidential spouses.