The city is named after its founder,
David Hudson, who settled there from
Goshen, Connecticut, in 1799, when it was part of the
Connecticut Western Reserve. The village of Hudson, located in the center of
Hudson Township, was incorporated in 1837. In Hudson, David Hudson built the first log house in
Summit County, Ohio. There is a marker at the intersection of Baldwin Street and North Main Street (
Ohio State Route 91), on the right when traveling east on Baldwin Street. The marker is embedded in the west face of the boulder. Hudson, which had a distinctly New England character from its early settlers, The railroad ended passenger service at Hudson in 1965. A former train station (built in the 1910s) that was located near the intersection of West Streetsboro and Library Streets was demolished in 2013. East of Morse Road, there is an unfinished Clinton Air Line Railroad bridge (over Hurricane Creek near the power line from Morse Road to W. Prescott Road). There was a fire on the west side of Hudson's Main Street in 1892. The fire destroyed the buildings between Park Lane and Clinton Street. A. W. Lockhart's saloon and the Mansion House [Hotel] burned. The Hudson-born Pennsylvania coal mine owner
James Ellsworth assisted in the rebuilding of Main Street after the street had been destroyed by fire in 1903. Ellsworth also refinanced the bankrupt Western Reserve Academy, housed on the former campus of Western Reserve College, which had been closed from 1903 until 1916. In 1882, Gustave H. Grimm established the G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Company to build and sell corrugated tin-pan evaporators for use in maple syrup production. That area, now called "The Evaporator Works", is on the south of Ravenna Street and just east of Ohio Route 91. The Hudson Clock Tower was built in 1912 by
James Ellsworth who was born in Hudson in 1849. The original clock movement was supplied by the
E. Howard Clock Company of Boston. The energy from 3000-pound weights powered the movement of the clocks and Westminster chimes. The town marshall was responsible for entering the tower every few days and winding (lifting) the weights.
Lincoln Ellsworth was the son of
James Ellsworth. Lincoln Ellsworth is the only Hudsonite on a U.S. postage stamp. The
Ellsworth Mountains are named after Lincoln Ellsworth. Lincoln was born in Chicago and lived in Hudson when he was a child. Lincoln was awarded two
Congressional Gold Medals. In 1941, John F. Morse, Jr. establish the Morse Instrument Company (later renamed Morse Controls), in Hudson. The company manufactured aviation, automotive, and maritime devices, and by 1969, employed over 600 individuals, with annual sales of $12 million. The plant closed in 2020. From 1957 until the late 1980s,
General Motors had a factory of almost one thousand workers in Hudson that built crawler tractor earth-moving equipment. The factory was beside and east of
Ohio State Route 91 and it was south of
Terex Road. The original 1958 factory had 660,000 square feet. In 1961, GM added 340,000 square feet for a total of 1 million square feet of factory. In 1970, GM renamed their earth-moving equipment division as
Terex. Currently
Jo-Ann Stores uses most of the former GM factory. Hudson had an airport from mid-1920s until 1957, known as the Hudson Mid-City Airport, near the former General Motors Euclid Division. On November 28, 1973, a large area of the village, "roughly bounded by College, Streetsboro, S. Main, and Baldwin" streets, was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places as the Hudson Historic District. The historic district was expanded on October 10, 1989, to also include the area "roughly bounded by Hudson St., Old Orchard Dr., Aurora St., Oviatt St., Streetsboro St., and College St. to Aurora (street)". In addition to the Hudson Historic District, there are several additional properties in Hudson listed on the Register. The City of Hudson came about in 1994 when voters approved the merger of Hudson Township and Hudson Village, which had previously been two separate governing entities. In July 2003, Hudson received over of rain from three storm events within 24 hours. Hudson had flood damage within all its three watersheds ... Mud Brook, Brandywine Creek and Tinker's Creek. The Brandywine Creek Watershed experienced the most flood damage in 2003. Two men drowned in an underground parking garage of a condominium complex on July 21, 2003.
State Routes 91 and
303 flooded where the highways dip low to pass under the train tracks and the highways were closed by 7:40 PM on July 21.
An abolitionist center Ohio's
Western Reserve "was probably the most intensely antislavery section of the country".{{cite book There is also a historical marker at the location of the first meetinghouse of the First Congregational Church, at East Main and Church Streets, reading: "In August, 1835, church members unanimously adopted a resolution declaring that slavery is 'a direct violation of the law of Almighty God.' At a November 1837 prayer meeting, church member and anti-slavery leader John Brown made his first public vow to destroy slavery."{{cite web Thousands of
fugitive slaves, heading for freedom in Canada, passed through Hudson; it was a stop on the
Underground Railroad. Owen Brown was very active in assisting the fugitives.{{cite web Hudson's period of anti-slavery leadership ended in the early 1830s.
Beriah Green, the lone professor of theology at the college, was influenced by
William Lloyd Garrison's new newspaper,
The Liberator, and his
Thoughts on African Colonization. He preached four fiery anti-slavery sermons, which so inflamed the college that nothing else was being discussed, the president said, and the town was torn apart. Green, expecting to be fired, left to become president of the
Oneida Institute, on condition Blacks be admitted on the same terms as whites. Oneida, near
Utica, New York, replaced Hudson as the nation's leading abolitionist center. ==Geography==