Christmas Lighting Installation in Canfield, OH

Canfield sits at about 1,116 feet at the intersection of U.S. Routes 62 and 224. Youngstown, roughly eight miles away, sits at about 856 feet. That 260 foot difference is small on a map and large in December.

The nearest long term weather station, at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, averages 67.8 inches of snow a season and records January at a mean of 26.8 degrees. Canfield sits above that station, not below it, which is why the same afternoon storm can arrive as rain on the valley floor and as wet snow on the higher ground here.

For a holiday install that difference decides the calendar rather than the design. Wet snow freezes into a fixing rather than around it, so lights hung in dry weather before the first freeze come down more easily in January than lights hung after it.

Canfield's classic revival houses include the mid-19th-century Ruggles and Newton houses. On a house of that age the fixing method has to be chosen for the surface that is actually there, which is something you establish by looking, not by assuming.

The Rotary Club of Canfield runs the Lighting of the Green in late November, with carriage rides around the Village Green. A display that is already lit by then has the whole season in front of it, since our removal does not start until after January 1st.

Canfield Township was bought from the Connecticut Land Company in 1798, and most of it belonged to the land agent Judson Canfield, whose name it took in 1800. By 1805 the settlement had about 17 homes, a store and a school. Goods first came by horse and wagon from Pittsburgh, about 55 miles away, until the Beaver Canal took over, and Canfield was the county seat from 1846 until the legislature moved it to Youngstown in 1874.

The Old Mahoning County Courthouse at 7 Court Street is on the National Register, and so is the Charles Ruggles House at 17 Court Street. The Judge Eben Newton House stands at 105 North Broad Street, and the Conrad Neff House on Boardman-Canfield Road is listed too. Waves of German settlers around 1805 and Irish settlers around 1852 added to the village.

Loghurst, a farm museum, occupies the oldest remaining log cabin in the Connecticut Western Reserve. The War Vet Museum sits in the oldest structure in the city that is still on its original site. After the county seat left, Canfield became the center of the farming community in central Mahoning County.