Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near South Ada Ada, OH

Ada is a village in Liberty Township, Hardin County, about 69 miles southwest of Toledo, and it is the second-largest incorporated community in Hardin County.

Ada was originally called Johnstown - it was platted in 1853 by S. M. Johnson when the railroad was extended to the site - but its post office took the name Ada, after the postmaster's daughter, and the village followed.

The village of Ada was incorporated in 1861, and its three-letter name is among the shortest place names in Ohio.

Ada's growth is owed largely to Ohio Northern University, founded in 1871 by Civil War veteran Henry Solomon Lehr as a normal school for training teachers.

Lehr arrived in Ada in 1866 as the local schoolmaster and ran an after-hours 'select school' so successfully that the townspeople helped him buy land for a campus; his school took the name Ohio Northern University in 1903.

Ohio Northern is a private university made up of five colleges, and its students dominate village life - in the 2010 census, nearly half of Ada's residents were between 18 and 24 years old.

Every leather football used in the NFL - the Wilson ball known as 'The Duke' - has been handmade in Ada since 1955 at the Wilson Sporting Goods factory, the only leather football manufacturing plant in the United States.

More than 120 craftspeople turn out over 500,000 footballs a year in Ada, and Wilson opened a new, larger factory on the same street in May 2024, nearly doubling its capacity.

President William Howard Taft visited Ada in 1910 to give Ohio Northern's fall commencement address - still the only presidential visit in the village's history - and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the university in January 1968, three months before his assassination.

The 2020 census counted 5,334 people in Ada, down from 5,952 in 2010, when the village had 1,729 households.