A brief history of Guernsey County
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.
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