La Rue, OH

La Rue is a Marion County village founded by Major William LaRue on June 3, 1851. The railroad reached the area in the early 1850s, and a post office has operated here since 1853. The village's best-known chapter came through Walter Lingo, who ran the Oorang Airedale kennel and later owned the Oorang Indians, an all-Native American professional football team that traveled in the 1920s. Those dogs and that team put a small Ohio village on a national sports map.

Elgin Local School District serves La Rue, whose streets sit in the farm country north of Marion. The village also holds the Oorang Bang, a June festival honoring the Oorang Indians, Jim Thorpe, and the Airedales connected with Lingo's enterprise. The railroad-era street plan, the old post office, and the Oorang name give La Rue a distinctive local mix of agriculture, sports, and canine history. It remains a small village, but its story reaches far beyond the county line through the people and animals that made it famous.