Ashland County, Ohio: History
Ashland County was formed on February 24, 1846, from portions of Huron, Lorain, Richland, and Wayne counties. Like the county seat, it was named after Ashland, the Lexington, Kentucky-area home of Henry Clay, a Kentucky senator. Henry Clay was very popular in the area of north-central Ohio due to the role he played in defusing the secession crisis of 1820 and the Nullification crisis of 1833. The region was settled overwhelmingly by migrants from New England and was culturally continuous with early New England. Part of this meant political support for Henry Clay, opposition to slavery and opposition to secession during the aforementioned crises.
Similarly, this meant the Whig Party was very popular in the region during that era. The first non-Native American settlers in the area that became Ashland County were a group of families from Windham County, Connecticut. Subsequent migration from 1800 to the mid-1820s came almost exclusively from the regions of rural Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.