Canton, city, seat (1808) of Stark county, northeastern Ohio, U.S. The city lies approximately 60 miles (100 km) south-southeast of Cleveland. It is the focus of a metropolitan area that includes the cities of North Canton and Massillon and the village of East Canton. Laid out in 1805, it was probably named by its founder, Bezaleel Wells, for his friend Capt. John O’Donnell’s estate, Canton, in Baltimore, Md., which was built with profits from trade with China.
The community developed from a manufacturer of plows, reapers, and farm equipment into an important industrial centre. Diversified products now include electric sweepers, alloy steel, tapered roller bearings, automatic teller machines, safes and bank vaults, heavy-duty floor coverings, turbine parts, streetlight standards, heavy steel presses, water softeners, voting machines, internal combustion engines, rubber products, and bricks and ceramics.
William McKinley opened (1867) a law office in Canton, from where he later conducted his “front-porch campaign” for the presidency. After his assassination in 1901 his body was returned there for burial. He, his wife, and two daughters are now entombed in the McKinley National Memorial in Westlawn Cemetery. The American Professional Football Association (later the National Football League) was formed in Canton in 1920 with Jim Thorpe of the Canton Bulldogs as its first president. To honour the city’s role in organizing the sport, the Pro Football Hall of Fame was established there in 1963.
Canton is the seat of Malone College (a Quaker institution founded in 1892 in Cleveland), the Stark Campus of Kent State University (1946), Walsh University (1958, Roman Catholic), and Stark State College of Technology (1960). The Cultural Center for the Arts (1970) houses the Canton Art Institute, the Players Guild, and the Canton Symphony Orchestra, Civic Opera, and Poetry Society. The McKinley National Memorial is part of a complex that includes the McKinley Museum, the Ramsayer Research Library, and the Hoover-Price Planetarium. Inc. village, 1828; town, 1834; city, 1854. Pop. (2000) 80,806; Canton-Massillon Metro Area, 406,934; (2010) 73,007; Canton-Massillon Metro Area, 404,422.