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New Philadelphia

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A city and the county-seat of Tuscarawas county, Ohio, U.S.A., on the Tuscarawas River and near the Ohio canal, about 75 m. S. by E. of Cleveland. Pop. (18 9 o) 4456; (1900) 6213, of whom 554 were foreign-born. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio (the Cleveland, Lorain & Wheeling Division), and the Pennsylvania (Cleveland & Pittsburgh Division) railways, and by an inter-urban electric system. The city has a level site in the midst of a good agricultural country, which abounds in coal and fire-clay. In the public square is a soldiers' monument, and the city has a public library and a park. Its principal manufactures are steel, enamelled ware, clay goods, brooms, flour and carriages. The first settlement in the vicinity was made in May 1772, when Moravian Indian converts migrated from Pennsylvania (Friedenshiitten, Bradford county, and Friedenstadt, Lawrence county) to Schoenbrunn, called by the Indians Welhik-Tuppeek, a spring (now dry) a little south of the present New Philadelphia. Under David Zeisberger (1721-1808) and 1 In October 1890 the chief of police was assassinated, and before he died charged the crime to Italians. He had been active in proceedings against certain Italians accused of crime, and his death was popularly attributed to the Mafia. Nineteen Sicilians were indicted, and of nine put on trial six were acquitted and three escaped conviction on the ground of a mis-trial. On the 14th of March 1891 a mob broke into the jail and lynched eleven of the accused. The Italian government demanded that the lynchers should be punished, entered claims for indemnity in the case of the three Sicilians who had been Italian subjects, and, failing to secure as prompt an answer as it desired, withdrew its ambassador from Washington. In 1892 the United States paid an indemnity of $25,000 to Italy.

Johann Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder (1743-1823) other missionary villages were planted at Gnadenhiitten (October 1772); Lichtenau (1776) and Salem (1780), all in the present county of Tuscarawas. After the massacre of Christian Indians at Gnadenhiitten in 1782 the Indians removed to Michigan and in 1791 to Fairfield, Ontario; in 1798 some of them returned to Tuscarawas county and settled Goshen, where Zeisberger is buried. New Philadelphia was laid out in 1804 and was named by its founder, John Knisely, after Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; it was incorporated as a village in 1815, and was first chartered as a city in 1896.

See Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly for April 1909 (Columbus, Ohio) for several articles on the early settlement by Moravian Indians.