LISBON — Columbiana County commissioners received a lesson in history Wednesday from Lisbon resident Stevie Halverstadt regarding local men who helped unite the country celebrating 250 years.

“These are people that impacted our past to create what we have now,” she said.

The Fighting McCooks, undertaker Erastus Eells, farmer Joseph Scroggs who was the namesake for Scroggs Road and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Hessin Clarke, all Lisbon natives, also known as New Lisbon during its infancy in 1803.

She also told about the Blocksom family tradition of firing off a cannon on the Fourth of July, with plans to do the same this year. The Blocksoms are one of the founding families of the town which shares its birth year with Columbiana County and the state of Ohio and is celebrating its 223rd anniversary.

According to Halverstadt, the McCook family all joined in the war effort during the Civil War, with the father of the group, George, and one son both serving as doctors on the front lines of combat. One was an attorney who practiced law in Lisbon with Edwin Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Their home was on East Washington Street and there’s a historic plaque that reads Dr. George McCook.

Erastus Eells was an abolitionist and part of the Underground Railroad, driving coffins to Canada during numerous trips at the time of the Civil War. Joseph Scroggs was a farmer who pushed for a black militia during the Civil War.

Then there was John Hessin Clarke, the lawyer from Lisbon who went to Washington, D.C. as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court but quit as he campaigned for the United States to join the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations.

“Those are all people from Lisbon who have contributed to Lisbon’s history,” she said.

She also talked briefly about the cannon on the square, which was donated by President William McKinley, whose grandparents were from Lisbon.

According to Halverstadt, a building on the corner of Park Avenue and South Market Street which has been sitting empty for several years now, has a connection to the Revolutionary War through the man who built it, David Scott. Scott came to New Lisbon after the war and constructed the building in 1807. The street at that time was called Park Place.