1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Tiffin

TIFFIN, a city and the county-seat of Seneca county, Ohio, U.S.A., on the Sandusky river, about 40 m. S.S.E. of Toledo. Pop. (1900), 10,989, of whom 1168 were foreign-born; (1910 census), 11,894. Tiffin is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis and the Pennsylvania railways, and by an electric line to Fostoria, about 12 m. west. It is the seat of an Ursuline College for girls, founded in 1863 and incorporated with power to confer degrees in 1878; and of Heidelberg University (Reformed Church), founded in 1850, incorporated as Heidelberg College in 1851 and reincorporated under its present name in 1890. The Heidelberg Theological Seminary was conducted here from 1850 to 1907, when it was combined with the “School of Theology” of Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, to form the Central Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in the United States, which in 1908 was removed to Dayton, Ohio. In Tiffin are the St Francis Home (1869), and the National Orphans' Home (1897). The city had 87 factories in 1905, of which 54.2% were owned by individuals, and the value of the factory products was $2,434,502. Tiffin was settled in 1817, incorporated as a town in 1835, and chartered as a city in 1850, when the village of Ft. Ball, on the opposite side of the Sandusky, was consolidated with it. It was named in honour of Edward Tiffin (1766-1829), a native of Carlisle, England, who emigrated to the United States. He graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1789, removed in 1796 to Chillicothe, Ohio, where he practised medicine and was a local Methodist preacher. He was speaker of the House of Representatives of the Northwest Territory in 1799, president (1802) of the convention which framed the first constitution of Ohio, the first governor of the state (1803-1807), a Democratic member of the United States Senate in 1807-1809, first commissioner of the United States General Land Office in 1812-1814, and surveyor-general of public lands north-west of the Ohio River in 1814-1829.