Home
County Agencies
Elected Officials
School Systems
Statistical Info
Current Weather
|
Welcome to the Official Government Site
of
Guernsey County, Ohio.
A Very Brief History of Guernsey County, Ohio
by Attorney Russell Booth Jr.
The
earliest known inhabitants of Guernsey County were some Delaware
Indians, 20 warriors and about 30 women and children, living in a dozen
houses on the south side of Will's Creek in the vicinity of the viaduct
in Cambridge. The year was 1763. The Mingo Trail crossed the creek at
that point. Thirty-three years later the Indians were gone but a group
of white men from Wheeling, led by Ebenezer Zane, crossed Will's Creek
at the same ford where the Indian town had been located. They were
laying out a post road, later called Zane's Trace.
By 1798, a ferry and a tavern had been
established where the road crossed the creek, and in 1802, another road
was built from the Steubenville area, largely following the Mingo Trail,
to the ferry crossing of Will's Creek. In 1806, Zaccheus Beatty and
Jacob Gomber platted the town of Cambridge, just east of the crossing.
It is at this point in our history that the
people who would give our county its name came on the scene. They were
several families from the island of Guernsey, just off the coast of
France. Arriving at about the same time as the lots in Cambridge were
being sold, they decided to stay here. The next year more people came
from the same place, in all amounting to 15 or 20 families. With so many
Guernseyites in the area, when the county was formed in 1810, it was
decided to give it the name of their island home and we became Guernsey
County. Since Cambridge was at the intersection of the two major roads
coming from the east, it became the county seat.
In 1828 the National Road was constructed
through Guernsey County. It was, by far, the finest road in the country,
and many thousands of people, and animals, used it every day. Several of
the stone bridges of the National Road are still in use.
Then, in 1854 the railroad came to Guernsey
County. It would later be called the Baltimore & Ohio line. In 1873
another railroad, eventually called the Pennsylvania line, was
established, thus giving the county excellent rail service in all
directions. This happened just as coal was being successfully mined in
the southern part of the county, and mining soon became our principle
industry (outside of farming, of course). Many hundreds of immigrants
from central Europe moved here to work in the coal mines.
Our most exciting days would have been in July
of 1863, when the Civil War came to Guernsey County. About 600
Confederate cavalrymen under the command of General John H. Morgan
entered the county at Cumberland, and were here for the next 30 hours,
passing through Pleasant City, Buffalo, Senecaville, Lore City, Old
Washington, Winterset, Antrim, Londonderry, and Smyrna. At Old
Washington, there was a skirmish with pursuing Union cavalrymen, and
three Confederates were killed. There is an appropriate monument at
their gravesite in the Old Washington cemetery.
In the early and middle 1900s, pottery and
glass-making flourished in the county. Later the plastics and
electronics industries came to the area, but with the construction of
two interstate highways through the county, transportation still plays
an important part in our story, just as it did over 200 years ago in the
days of the Mingo Trail and Zane's Trace.
|
|
