The following spring, John Starke Edwards, just out of college, journeyed alone on foot, carrying an ax and knapsack, across the Pennsylvania frontier into the tangled forest. He cut the first tree that ever felled by an ax upon his father's land.  The fragrance which the sunshine drew out of a rich forest floor set him agog with plans to get a settlement started. He offered a hundred acres of free land to the first five families to come and stay five years, and fifty acres to the first five single men.
These men were Seth Tracey, Capt. Hezekiah Sperry, Joseph Noyles, Otis Guild, and Dr. Joseph Clark.
 

Beginning in 1809, mail was brought on foot from Warren and left in Seth Tracy's hat.  Our town  was then in the District of Troy, but mail mix-ups with the other two Troys in Ohio bothered residents. To resolve this, the name Mesopotamia, meaning "land between two rivers" was chosen in 1819.  Like the biblical land of that name, it is located between two fertile streams: the Grand and the Cuyahoga river.
 

Today, Mesopotamia encompasses 36 square miles. The population is 2600 with about 60% of the population being the Amish community.