Stark County
Where Is Stark County, Ohio? A Local's Honest Guide to Living Here
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Stark County is located in the northeast Ohio region along the Cleveland–Akron–Canton corridor. Its county seat and largest city is Canton, home to about 69,000 people, with the county as a whole holding steady at just over 374,000 residents.
If you’ve heard of Stark County at all, it’s probably because of one thing: football. Canton is the birthplace of the NFL, the permanent home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the location of the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival. You cannot talk honestly about Stark County without talking about the sport at every level.
FAQs about Stark County
Where is Stark County in Ohio?
Stark County sits in the northeast, part of the Cleveland–Akron–Canton corridor—about an hour south of Cleveland, an hour west of Youngstown, and roughly two hours northeast of Columbus.
What is Stark County's size?
581 square miles of land and water.
What is Stark County's population?
374,091—essentially flat over the past five years, more on that below.
What is the county seat of Stark County, Ohio?
Canton is the county seat and also Stark County’s largest city.
What cities are in Stark County, Ohio?
The major cities are Canton, North Canton, Massillon, and Alliance. Stark County is also home to smaller towns like East Canton, Louisville, Minerva, Navarre, and Bolivar, plus 17 townships that make up a significant share of where people actually live.
What are Stark County's notable townships?
Plain, Jackson, Perry, and Lake are the townships people ask about most, though there are 17 in total—see the full breakdown below.
What are Stark County's ZIP codes?
44646
44720
44601
44685
44708
44641
44647
44709
44705
44706
44721
44718
44614
44662
44632
44714
44657
44710
44707
44703
44730
44612
44798
44704
44626
44688
44666
44712
44643
44608
44634
44669
44760
44702
44613
44689
44652
44640
44670
44630
44650
44648
44701
44711
44750
44735
44767
44799
What is Stark County, Ohio known for nationally?
The Pro Football Hall of Fame, which is permanently based in Canton.
What is Stark County's official website?
Between the Lines
We editors have lived in Stark County for decades. Jen raised two kids here, and most of that time was spent in township-style living, and Annalisa spent a few years in North Canton as well as Downtown Canton. Both of us have also lived in Canton proper. So, we can speak honestly to both the suburban-sprawl side of the county and the urban core.
What is life and culture in Stark County, Ohio, really like? Here’s the good and the complicated.
Stark County’s story mirrors a lot of northeast Ohio’s story: waves of immigrants who came for farming, industrial jobs, a manufacturing boom and bust, and then the long, uneven process of figuring out what a place becomes after.
What sets Stark County apart from other northeast Ohio counties, in my experience, is scale. The urban core is not and never was as dense as Cleveland or Columbus, which means outside of predictable rush-hour windows, you can get from one side of the county to the other quickly—as long as you have a car. Public transportation in Stark County is limited to buses. If you’re used to a city with real transit infrastructure, this will be an adjustment. Life here assumes you drive, which, combined with the county’s lower density, is part of why it’s genuinely easy to get around once you do have a car.
You get a lot of the amenities people associate with bigger cities (museums, the Stark Parks system, a symphony, a genuinely good restaurant scene if you know where to look, the retail hub at Belden Village, easy highway access, etc.) without the density or the hassle. It has a small-town feel layered on top of a solid infrastructure, and for a lot of people, that combination is the whole appeal.
Stark County cities, townships, and small towns
That mix of small-town feel and real infrastructure looks different depending on where in the county you land. Stark County is a patchwork of very different kinds of places, and understanding the difference matters if you’re trying to figure out where you’d actually want to live or spend your time.
The cities include Canton, North Canton, Massillon, and Alliance.
Canton, the county seat, and Massillon could be described as a mid-size or second-tier cities. Both feature authentic downtowns dominated by Italianate and Classical Revival streetscapes, Midwestern industrial bones (ex., The Timken Company, The Belden Brick Company, and Republic Steel), and identities that are somewhat connected (the Canton-Massillon football rivalry is a big deal around here).
North Canton, originally called New Berlin, was originally a small crossroads town until the Hoover Company headquarters—now being slowly redeveloped after closure in 2007—provided the city its original global production recognition; it remains home to Diebold Nixdorf. Alliance, on the other hand, grew up around the intersection of Ohio & Pennsylvania and Cleveland & Wellsville railroads, developing a self-contained rail and manufacturing hub surrounded by farmland.
The townships, all 17 of them, are arguably the bigger and more confusing story for people who aren’t familiar with Stark County, Ohio.
The original first form of local government in Ohio, these Stark County townships today represent decades of urban sprawl and have become their own well-defined enclaves. A significant share of the county’s wealth is concentrated in them, especially in Jackson Township, which has become something like Stark County’s version of an affluent suburb.
Plain Township is one of the largest and most socioeconomically diverse, and many of the townships are politically conservative and value traditional or faith-centered community life. We’ve also appreciated something different in the urban core: a stronger feeling of community and interconnectedness with neighbors.
List of Stark County Ohio townships
Townships with an urban/suburban experience and a majority of Stark County’s residents:
- Butler Township—contains most of the city of Alliance, not including a small portion that extends into Washington Township and Mahoning County.
- Canton Township—contains the communities of Meyers Lake, North Industry, and Waco, along with the subdivision of Canton South.
- Jackson Township—contains a small portion of the cities of North Canton and Massillon, the village of Hills and Dales, the subdivisions of McDonaldsville and Marchand, and the neighborhood of Highland Park.
- McKinley Township—occupied entirely by the city of Canton.
- Plain Township—contains most of the city of North Canton, part of the city of Canton, and part of the village of Meyers Lake.
- Perry Township—contains most of the city of Massillon, a small portion of the village of Navarre, and the communities of Perry Heights, Reedurban, and Richville.
Townships with a hybrid small-town and rural experience:
- Bethlehem Township—contains most of the village of Navarre and very small portion of the city of Massillon.
- Lake Township—contains the villages of Hartville, Greentown, Uniontown, and the now vanished village of Aultman. Cairo straddles Lake and Plain Townships and is often more closely associated with North Canton despite historic links to Lake.
- Lawrence Township—contains the city of Canal Fulton and has growing residential subdivisions, such as North Lawrence.
- Nimishillen Township—contains the city of Louisville and the community of Limaville.
- Osnaburg Township—contains the village of East Canton.
- Paris Township—contains the city of New Franklin, part of Minerva, and the community of Robertsville.
Sandy Township—contains the villages of Magnolia and Waynesburg. - Sugarcreek Township—contains the villages of Beach City, Brewster, and Wilmot
Townships with a strong rural experience:
- Lexington Township
- Marlboro Township
- Massillon Township
- Pike Township
- Tuscarawas Township
- Washington Township—contains a small part of the city of Alliance.
The economy is shifting from factories to healthcare
Stark County’s economy used to be defined by its major manufacturers. That is still part of the picture, but similar to other areas of Ohio, healthcare has caught up to it. As of the most recent data from the Stark County Development Board, manufacturing employed about 30,000 people in Stark County, and health care and social assistance was right behind at roughly 29,400.
Aultman Hospital is the anchor of that shift. It’s Stark County’s largest healthcare provider with more than 7,000 employees across Aultman Hospital, Aultman Orrville, and Aultman Alliance Community Hospital—the latter having become an Aultman affiliate in 2018 after decades as an independent community hospital. Cleveland Clinic Mercy Hospital, formerly Mercy Medical Center, and other providers round out the healthcare employment base. On the manufacturing and corporate side, Diebold Nixdorf still has its global headquarters in North Canton, and The Timken Company and Metallus remain major regional employers.
Stark County’s average weekly wage was $1,152 in Q4 2025, which is near the bottom of Ohio’s 15 largest counties (ranging from $1,088 in Mahoning to $1,553 in Hamilton), so a 6.5% year-over-year gain is a large percentage jump off a comparatively low wage base, not a sign Stark County has closed the gap with higher-wage counties.
Housing in Stark County, Ohio, is still a relative bargain, but that’s changing quickly
This is one area where Stark County has gotten real national attention. The Canton-Massillon metro area has repeatedly ranked among the hottest housing markets in the country in Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com rankings: as high as #2 nationally in spring 2024 and again in summer 2025 and #4 in summer 2026.
What that means on the ground: you still get more house for your money here than in most of the country, but you get noticeably less than you did five or ten years ago. We can say this confidently as individuals who have purchased homes in Stark County in 1997, 2000, 2019, and 2022. It’s still affordable relative to national prices. How long that holds is an open question.
In Stark County growing?
Not right now. The county’s population has been essentially flat for years: 374,853 at the 2020 census versus a 2024 estimate of 374,091, which is a slight dip. If you’re moving here expecting a boomtown, that’s not the story. What you’re getting instead is a stable, slowly-shifting place—which, depending on what you’re looking for, might be perfect. We rather like it.
Stark County schools are a proxy for the area’s inequalities
The townships, particularly Jackson and Perry, are heavily white and carry a disproportionate share of the county’s wealth: Jackson’s median household income sits around $91,000 and its population is nearly 90% white; Perry is over 92% white with a median household income around $68,000, still well above the urban core. North Canton, which runs its own city schools separate from Plain Local, lands in between the two on wealth—richer than Perry, poorer than Jackson—while matching them closely on race, at roughly 92% white.
Canton City Schools, by contrast, serves a population that’s roughly evenly split between white and black students, with the district ranking among Ohio’s most diverse. The disparity here isn’t a lack of funding on paper—Canton City actually spends more per student than the state median—but academic outcomes still lag far behind state averages, a gap that speaks to concentrated poverty and decades of disinvestment rather than a simple funding shortfall. Plain Township stands out as a partial exception: its schools are more mixed than Jackson’s or Perry’s with real cross-class and cross-race presence you don’t see elsewhere in the townships—though it’s worth noting Canton City itself is actually the more racially integrated district by the numbers.
This isn’t a new pattern. Canton was one of fourteen Ohio cities formally redlined by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1936 and 1940, a practice that graded neighborhoods for mortgage lending risk largely along racial lines. You can view Canton’s actual 1937 HOLC map through the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project. The consequences of those maps are still visible in how the county’s wealth and school outcomes are distributed today.
Ohio’s expanding school voucher program adds another layer to a state school funding fight that’s been unresolved for decades. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state’s school funding system unconstitutional in DeRolph v. State—the first of four rulings that found the same thing, largely because heavy reliance on local property taxes created wide gaps between rich and poor districts. The state didn’t adopt a genuine attempt at a fix until 2021’s Fair School Funding Plan, and even that has never been fully funded, and the state’s share of the cost has slipped since, not risen.
Layer vouchers onto a system that was already found unconstitutional four times and never fully repaired, and money now moves out of public districts through a second channel on top of that. In a county where the highest-need districts are already stretched by concentrated poverty and rigid state and federal compliance mandates, that’s one more pressure point.
Stark County weather is classic northeast Ohio
Expect real cold in the winter, though after 30-plus years here, my sense is that winters have gotten milder than they used to be. We say that as individuals who genuinely like cold weather, for what it’s worth. Summers get hot and humid, which we like a lot less. There’s something for most seasonal preferences here; it’s just not going to be mild and even, the way some regions are.
One strange weather phenomenon here: the Canton Slot. According to long-time local journalist Jim Hillibish, “Canton often is the dividing area for high and low pressure in Ohio. This creates a ‘dry slot’ where we have storms north and south of us and dry, calm weather overhead.”