Bainbridge

• Paint Creek LakeBuilt 1974 · 1,190 acres

• The Hopewell CultureOhio's Hopewell people built moon-aligned earthworks around AD 90-430, moved Yellowstone obsidian 1,500 miles, and left a 2023 UNESCO World Heritage Site.

How Bainbridge began

Bainbridge is a village on Paint Creek in Paxton Township, established in 1805 by General Nathaniel Massie and named for Commodore William Bainbridge; it incorporated in 1807. It is best known as the home of the first dedicated dental school in the United States, opened by Dr. John M. Harris in the 1820s, and it sits three miles from the Seip Earthworks, one of Ohio's major Hopewell ceremonial complexes. Pike Lake State Park lies nearby.

Settled 1805, platted 1805, incorporated 1807, by Nathaniel Massie.

Where the name comes from

The village is named for Commodore William Bainbridge, a U.S. Navy officer known for his War of 1812 service.

Before the town

Bainbridge stands at the center of Paxton Township, home to two documented Hopewell culture (c. 100 BC - AD 500) earthwork sites: the Seip Earthworks, about three miles east on U.S. Route 50, and the T.C. Campbell Mound, about a mile southwest. See the Paxton Township file for the detailed record of both. No specific eighteenth-century Shawnee town or trail record for the village site itself was found in the sources checked.

Nations recorded here: Hopewell culture.

• Seip Earthworks (earthwork) — about 3 miles east of Bainbridge, Paxton Township, Hopewell culture, c. 100 BC - AD 500 (ohiohistory.org)

Timeline

1. 1805 — Nathaniel Massie establishes Bainbridge on Paint Creek.
2. 1807 — The village is incorporated by act of the General Assembly.
3. 1815 — The building that later houses the Harris Dental Museum is constructed as a private residence.
4. 1938 — The Ohio Dental Association purchases the former Harris property.
5. 1968 — The property opens to the public as the Dr. John Harris Dental Museum.
6. 1973 — The Harris Dental Museum building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, on July 23.

Stories

The dentist who trained a founder of the profession

Dr. John Harris settled first in Madison, Ohio, in 1819 before moving to Bainbridge, where he began training doctors with an unusual specialty for the era: he paid close, systematic attention to dentistry at a time when most physicians treated it as a minor sideline. He is remembered as a pioneer of American dental education for that emphasis. His most consequential student was his own younger brother, Chapin A. Harris, who took what he learned in Bainbridge and went on to found the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery in 1840 - the first dental college in the world. The little stone building where John Harris taught still stands in Bainbridge, restored and open as the Harris Dental Museum, tying a single Ross County village to the founding of dentistry as a formal profession.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohiohistory.org

Every historic place in Ross County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Bainbridge Village56% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc44% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public libraries (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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