A series of ill-suited circumstances leads to one of Ohios ghost towns
By Amber Kanuckel
February 8, 2017
3745
In our corner of Ohio ghost towns arent common at all. Most of the earliest villages in the area still exist to some degree, whether theyve turned into small groups of a few homes or bustling small towns. Thats not so with the town of Newville, which once existed near the western tip of Pleasant Hill Lake in Richland County, not far from Perrysville.
This town was first arranged in 1823 by John Frederick Herring, who named it after his hometown of Newville, Pennsylvania, which still exists today. Situated in a fertile valley where Slaters Run meets the Clear Fork River, it wasnt long before settlers flocked to this new town. In those days, without flood control dams, the Clear Fork of the Mohican was a much larger body of water than it is today, perfect for gristmills and the sorts of industry that those early settlers relied on for their survival.
In fact, a few years prior to the founding of Newville, Herring built his second gristmill (the first having been built near to present-day Bellville) in the Newville area. Shortly after the towns founding other businesses sprang up. Daniel Stoner was Newvilles first blacksmith while Michael Hogan was the first Newville merchant. The first tavern in the town was operated by Abraham Nye. George Armentrout, Daniel Carpenter and Luther Richard were among the towns first settlers.
In those early days Newville was filled with hope. New counties were being developed throughout Ohio at the time, and Newvilles people had aspirations of turning the town into a county seat.
The first problem came with the railroads, however. In order to become a prominent town in the mid-1800s, it was necessary to become a stop on a major rail line. The B&O Railroad came to the town of Butler, four miles southwest of Newville, while the Pennsylvania Railroad ran a line through Perrysville, four miles east of Newville. Newville was caught squarely in the middle, and without a rail line of their own the town began to dwindle.
The railroads bypassed Newville, and that pretty much sealed their fate as a town, said Boyd Addlesperger, historian at the Richland County Librarys Sherman Room.
Despite their lack of a railroad Newville had no shortage of notable people throughout the 19th century. One of the towns first school teachers, Samuel J. Kirkwood, went on to become the Richland County prosecutor and then later moved to Iowa, becoming Iowas governor. From there he went on to become a United States senator and then a cabinet member to President James Garfield.
Illinois also had a governor that spent at least part of his childhood in Newville. This was Gov. John Peter Altgeld, who was the son of German settlers that established a farm near Newville.
Newville also attracted a great many religious leaders including acclaimed speaker Sidney Rigdon of the Disciples Church, who would later become an elder of the Mormon Church prior to a falling out with the Mormon leader Brigham Young.
The railroads or lack of them werent responsible for the towns final demise, however. The town continued to hang on with a population of 300 in the 1880s and a population of 100 in the 1930s. Likely Newville would still exist today as a small, out-of-the-way village if not for the construction of Pleasant Hill Lake.
In the late 1930s, however, the newly formed Muskingum Conservancy District, today the MWCD or Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District, decided to build a flood control dam on the Clear Fork of the Mohican. This dam, completed in 1936, created a new lake: Pleasant Hill Lake. Engineers knew that the town would be in danger of flooding whenever flood waters backed up at Pleasant Hill Lake.
During the construction of Pleasant Hill Lake, Newville sat upon 20 acres of land and included not only homes, but also two churches and a school. The Muskingum Conservancy District bought it all, forcing the villagers to move to higher ground.
In an article from 1936 they interviewed people, and nobody seemed to have any problem with this at all, Addlesperger said.
And indeed, among the several people interviewed for Richland Countys newspaper, not one seemed all that distraught at the prospect of losing their homes.
It seems odd that the residents of Newville were so willing to give up their homes. Such an event today would likely result in hard-fought court battles. However, in 1936 the United States was still in the throes of the Great Depression. Perhaps, to these villagers, this was just a minor setback in an already harsh reality.
One resident, John Alley, told the newspaper that he was receiving $1,700 for his home, which he had purchased several years prior for $1,900. He calmly explained to the articles author that he isnt out much, noting that most of the rest of the villagers probably wouldnt receive as much money from the MCD, but then again they hadnt invested as much in land either.
The abandoned town of Newville did not go under water permanently, but today the spot where the town once sat is within Pleasant Hill Lakes flood plain. The lakes waters did cover farms, roads and other features that once lay to the east of Newville, just not the town itself. The original buildings were razed, although a couple of foundations can still be found in the woods near where Pleasant Hill Road meets state Route 95. The towns cemetery also remains, not far from the original town site on Township Road 320.
