A Sedalia Convention & Visitor’s Bureau Blog
By L.C. Melton
I continue my cyber-pilgrimage seeking Sedalia shrines, this time with what I thought would be a brief stop in Ohio. I’m still on Dalia’s trail, too, so I may have to return to the Bluegrass State shortly.
When I began my Ohio visit quickly discerned that this Sedalia poses an interesting quandry. It is actually the U.S. Post Office name for the town of Midway in Madison County, population 322, 35 miles SW of Columbus. However, don’t send mail to Midway, send it to Sedalia 43151. Over the last fifty years or so, at least in local papers, Sedalia seemed to be the preferred name but recently Midway has emerged as the community’s preference.
Actually the place was originally called Crossroad and only adopted the postal name of Sedalia in 1883.1 Because of it’s central location between major commercial centers Midway just sort of caught on with the locals. But where did the Postal Service find Sedalia?
Before I assume the Ohio site also borrowed from our Sedalia I will mention that Glouster, Ohio over east in Athens County OH was also first known as Sedalia until the 1887 Glouster post office was established.2 And it’s in Glouster that my innocent pilgrimage, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s ceases to make progress and I find myself heading into a “Slough of Despond”!
It seems it is the Sedalia Coal Mining Company of Cleveland that is responsible for all the Sedalia place name locations here and so I leave the “Slough” to enter Bunyon’s “City of Destruction” where I must locate the corporate culprit before I can proceed to the “Plain Called Ease”.3 I hope you are still with me as, like Dorothy, I don’t seem to be in Kansas any more (er, Sedalia.)
1 ”A History of Madison County Ohio;” p. 731 W.H. Beers Company; 1883. https://archive.org/stream/historyofmadison00brow#page/730/mode/2up.
2 ”Glouster Ohio;” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glouster,_Ohio.
3 Bunyan, John; “Map;” http://sacred-texts.com/chr/bunyan/img/map.jpg.
