05/25/2026
Day 153 - Charles E. Dougherty
Sometimes I wonder what my “mark on the world” is going to be. The older I get, the more I wonder that. There are some days when I feel like nothing I do can make much of a difference at all in the big picture of things.
But as I’ve been working on The Freeda Project this year, I’ve realized that many of the people whose names come up time and time again in these stories were just regular people, just like you and I. Yeah, some went on to amass great wealth, but largely, they started out with not very much at all, often as a new immigrant or someone that moved to Canton with not much of anything.
Today I wanted to talk about Charles Dougherty… a name that I honestly had never thought about or even heard about before.
He was actually born in Greentown, Ohio in 1850. When he was nineteen years old, with just $2 to his name, he walked to Canton. At the time, Canton was the place to be, because of its access to the railroads.
Now, I used to work in Green. It’s a pretty good hike even by car when I was commuting there every day. But Charles walked.
He had a dream of going to dental school, and his plan was to work until he had saved up enough money to do so. It took him ten years, but he finally was able to go to Philadelphia to go to school to learn oral surgery. After he graduated, he returned to Canton and set up his oral surgery practice, which he worked at for the next three years.
Then, as sometimes happens in life, he had a personal setback. He had a nervous breakdown, after which he was told by a doctor in 1882 that he was only expected to live another year, maybe less.
But did he give up and accept that fate? Nope. He did, however, leave the field of dentistry, which had been his “dream job” from the time he was young, and made a drastic career change to real estate and insurance.
He ended up bypassing that “one year to live” by decades. While his career in oral surgery was short, his second career spanned over sixty years. And during that time, he brought major factories and industries to Canton, which contributed to the population of the city increasing from 30,000 to 130,000 during his lifetime.
He served as president of Canton's Board of Trade, organized in 1885 (which was the predecessor to the Chamber of Commerce,) working to bring new industry to the city. He used his own money to travel around the country, meeting with business leaders with the goal of convincing them to relocate to Canton.
He personally worked to raise the $100,000 required to bring the Dueber-Hampden watchworks factory to Canton.
He negotiated the deal with Henry Timken that brought the Timken Company here.
He convinced John Carnahan to build a rolling mill in Canton, which was ultimately purchased by the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, and also to build a tin plate mill and the Canton Stamping and Enameling Company.
He personally contacted William W. Irwin, who as a result became an important industrialist in Canton, bringing a rolling mill to Canton and largely contributing to the city's iron and steel industry. William Irving helped found the United Steel Company in Canton, later becoming superintendent at Berger Manufacturing.
In 1906, Charles Dougherty launched a campaign to raise $20,000 to purchase three manufacturing plants to donate to new businesses.
He passed away on January 23, 1944… over 60 years after being told in 1882 that he had a year or less to live.
From walking to Canton with $2 in his pocket to being the driving force that brought companies and industries to Canton… companies that have touched all of us, and probably employed many of our family members.
He was quoted once as saying, "I bid you welcome to this, the best city on the American continent."
So when we think “I don’t have enough money or importance to make a difference in my community”… let’s remember Charles Dougherty. If he could start out with $2, devote over a decade to his dream career only to have to abandon it, have a mental breakdown, be given the news of only a year to live and still he kept going and still considered Canton to be “the best city”… well, then so can we.
