Pickaway County, Ohio, sounds like an all-American kind of place. Just outside of a major American city, quiet, rural, sparsely populated but good folks everywhere you look. Heck, the geography alone sounds positively bucolic:
The Scioto River flows southward through the center of Pickaway County. Big Darby Creek drains the upper western part of the county, discharging into the Scioto at Circleville, and Deer Creek drains the lower western part of the county, flowing southward into Ross County...
Beautiful. Oh yeah also if you show up be prepared to be slapped in the face multiple times with the screaming-loud name of the most genocidal monsters in human history:
Pickaway County is also known for its various places with the name "Hitler", including Hitler Road, Hitler-Ludwig Road, Hitler-Ludwig Cemetery, and Hitler Park.
I just...I mean, wha....?
I mean, yes, of course, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this:
[A]ccording to the Circleville Herald, the Hitlers who settled Pickaway Township in 1799 were actually "fine, upstanding citizens."
They were farmers with good reputations, who couldn't have known the burden their surname might put on their descendants...
His family, [George Hitler] argues, actually has more of a claim to the name than the genocidal leader who ruined it for everyone.
They were there first, you see. All of that checks out, though folks, I can't stress enough the cosmic absurdity of the names the Pickaway County Hitlers chose for their own:
The first Circleville Hitler was George Hitler. Born in 1763 — more than a century before Adolf — George married Susannah Gay in Pennsylvania, and together they had four children.
One of them was George Washington Hitler.
And — just as you thought it couldn't get better — George Washington Hitler had a son named Gay Hitler.
George Washington Hitler. Gay Hitler. You couldn't make those up.
Props to Pickaway County for not letting one of the world's most evil people control the narrative!
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