Canfield, named for the area's primary landowner Judson Canfield, is one of the earliest examples of a New England town plan in Ohio and the Western Reserve. It dates to April 20, 1798, when surveyor Nathaniel Church arrived from Connecticut to lay out the town. Church and his team erected a log cabin and laid out roads and lots using a New England Green Plan centered on communal ground that would later be surrounded by civil buildings. During the War of 1812, the Canfield Green served as a drill ground for the Northern Ohio and Western Reserve militia led by General Elijah Wadsworth, and on August 23, 1812, Wadsworth and the Canfield Dragoons departed from the Green for Cleveland to defend the United States and the Western Reserve from attacks by the British and their Native American allies. The Mahoning County Agricultural Society organized in 1847 and held its first fair on October 5, 1847, on the Canfield Green, a one-day event with livestock tethered along Broad Street and produce displays and meetings in the Congregational Church and other civic buildings. In 1851 the fair moved to SR 46, and in the 1870s the southern half of the Canfield Green became a park with a gazebo. Even then, children played there while residents could still send livestock to graze in the traditional manner of a New England commons, and in the early twentieth century the north end was completed to provide a more traditional civic center for Canfield.