Christmas Lighting Installation in Poland, OH

Poland is small in a way that changes the work. The village covers 1.63 square miles of land, which is dense enough that a display is seldom seen on its own. It is seen in a row.

Being seen in a row rewards consistency and punishes drift. On a street of tightly spaced frontages the eye compares one eave line against the next automatically, and small differences become the thing people notice: a run that sags at the third bay, a warm white beside a cool white, a spacing that changes halfway along.

None of those are visible on a single isolated house. All of them are obvious in a terrace of village frontages seen from across the street.

Poland sits at roughly 1,040 feet, about 180 feet above Youngstown at roughly 856, and the nearest long term station at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport averages 67.8 inches of snow a season with 43 days a year at or below freezing.

In December the Poland Junior Women's League holds the free Lighting of the Village at Village Hall, with carriage rides, Santa arriving on a fire truck and the lighting of a large tree.

Poland Township was surveyed in 1796 as township 1, range 1 of the Connecticut Western Reserve, and Turhand Kirtland is considered to have founded the community in 1798. Jonathan Fowler built a grist mill on Yellow Creek in 1802, and Poland became a village in 1866.

The Hopewell Furnace Site on Yellow Creek, below Lake Hamilton, was the first blast furnace west of the Appalachians and the first industrial operation in the Western Reserve. It was listed in 1975.

The South Main Street District, listed on the National Register in 1974 and extended in 1984, runs along both sides of South Main Street. The Jared P. Kirtland House at 113 West McKinley Way is listed as well. So is the White Bridge over Yellow Creek, just east of State Route 616, and so is Lake Hamilton Dam, about a mile and a half northeast of the village.

Poland is named for the country of Poland, in thanks for its help in the American Revolutionary War, though a legend from 1905 credits an original proprietor named George Poland. The village and its township lie in the eastern part of Mahoning County along the Pennsylvania border. The earliest settlers came mostly from Connecticut and Pennsylvania.