Canton and its surrounding suburbs were once supported by a buzzing manufacturing economy. The vacuum cleaner was invented there in 1908, for example, with the Hoover Company’s factory employing much of North Canton for almost a century. But over time, Hoover’s operations moved to Mexico and China, and its Ohio plant shut down in 2007.



Above, a teenager and his younger brother play in the street, less than a block away from Union Metal, a lamppost factory founded in 1906 that once employed several hundred from the Canton area but shuttered late last year only to be reopened by a new owner and placed under new management with a fraction of the workforce it used to have.

Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine