Mackinaw Historic District

West of the Great Miami River in Franklin, Ohio, a five-block residential neighborhood holds about thirty notable houses built between 1847 and the early twentieth century. Most are frame buildings from the late 1800s, and few have been greatly altered. Styles include Queen Anne, Italianate, French Second Empire, Shingle, Stick, and Colonial Revival. The oldest survivors, the Chamberlain house of 1847 with its cast iron portico and the Anderson farmhouse of about 1860, date from the early farming settlement on the west bank. Development accelerated after a railroad reached Franklin in 1887 and Lewis G. Anderson and others platted the Mackinaw Subdivision. Many houses were built between 1887 and 1893 for prominent townspeople tied to Franklin's paper mills, grain and lumber trade, and other industries. The district is valued for its architecture and for what it shows of the town's economic growth after the Civil War.