Cedarville

• Hallie Quinn Brown1850-1949 · remembered hereWilberforce-trained elocutionist, teacher and clubwoman who lectured for…

• Whitelaw ReidPerson · 1837-1912

How Cedarville began

Cedarville grew up on Massie's Creek in what became Cedarville Township, first settled by Kentucky and South Carolina families (many of them Covenanter Presbyterians who left slave states on principle) starting around 1801. A mill owner named Jesse Newport platted the town in 1816 and first called it Milford, but the name clashed with another Ohio Milford and was changed to Cedarville, for the cedars lining the creek, when the village got its first post office in the 1830s-40s. Limestone quarrying and lime manufacture were the township's chief industries by 1880. Cedarville College, chartered in 1887 by the New Light Reformed Presbyterian Church, later merged with a Baptist institute in 1953 and is today Cedarville University, the village's dominant employer and identity.

Settled 1799 per Wikipedia; the 1881 county history dates the township's first permanent white settlement (the Townsley brothers on Massie's Creek, first corn crop) to 1801, platted 1816, by Jesse Newport, by Jesse Newport (proprietor who platted the village).

Where the name comes from

The village was first called Milford by Newport because he had a mill close by, but with another Milford already in Ohio the post office could not be established under that name. The 1881 county history says the village was renamed Cedarville in 1834, for the cedar trees lining the banks of Massie's Creek, at about the time it got its own post office (first postmaster John Paris). Wikipedia instead dates a post office called 'Massies Creek' to 1837 and says the name Cedarville was adopted in 1843 - the two sources disagree on the exact year.

Before the town

Cedarville Township sits at the headwaters reach of Massie's Creek, a Little Miami tributary, in territory that lay within the Shawnee and Wyandot hunting range before the 1795 Treaty of Greenville opened most of this part of Ohio to American settlement. The 1881 county history records that when Alexander McCoy settled just west of the future village site in 1802, his six hundred acres were 'full of bears, wolves, deer, and nearly all kinds of small game, together with a tribe of Indians who had a camp upon the place,' adding that this group was peaceable and 'the first settlers never received at their hands anything but the kindest, and most humane treatment' - the tribe is not named. The same source repeats a local tradition that General Nathaniel Massie, for whom the creek is named, drove Native people 'under the famous chief Tecumseh' across the cliffs below Cedarville village years before white settlement; this claim is unverified, undated, and hard to reconcile with Tecumseh's own biography (he was a child in the 1770s-80s when Massie was surveying), so it should be treated as local legend rather than established fact. The one concrete, dated Native site in the area is Williamson Mound, a large Adena burial mound off U.S. Route 42 west of the village, now within Indian Mound Reserve; an 1881 description of an oval mound 'about forty feet high' in an open field a quarter mile below the Falls of Massie's Creek almost certainly refers to the same mound, though the source does not use the name Williamson. No other named villages, trails, or treaty lines specific to Cedarville were found.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Wyandot, Adena culture.

• Williamson Mound (Williamson Mound State Memorial / Indian Mound Reserve) (mound) — Off U.S. Route 42, west of Cedarville, Cedarville Township, Adena culture, roughly 500 BC - AD 100 (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1801 — The Townsley brothers, John and Thomas, emigrate from Kentucky and settle on Massie's Creek, harvesting the township's first crop of corn raised by a white settler.
2. 1802 — Alexander McCoy settles just west of the future village site; his land includes a peaceable Native encampment, unnamed in the record.
3. 1816 — Jesse Newport plats the village, initially naming it Milford after his nearby mill.
4. 1834 — The village is renamed Cedarville and gets its first post office, with John Paris as postmaster, per the 1881 county history (Wikipedia instead gives 1837 for a post office called Massies Creek and 1843 for the Cedarville name).
5. 1850 — Cedarville Township is organized from portions of Xenia, Miami, and Ross townships.
6. 1887 — Cedarville College is chartered by the New Light Reformed Presbyterian Church.
7. 1888 — The Cedarville Opera House is built on Main Street, later housing the mayor, council, jail, fire and police departments, and waterworks offices on its ground floor.
8. 1915 — The Harper Mausoleum and its Egyptian Revival memorial entrance are built in North Cemetery for George W. Harper, a wealthy Cedarville banker and landowner.
9. 1953 — The Baptist Bible Institute of Cleveland relocates to Cedarville's campus, merging with the Presbyterian college and shifting it to Baptist affiliation.
10. 1971 — Williamson Mound is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Williamson Mound State Memorial.
11. 1973 — The Whitelaw Reid House, birthplace of the journalist and diplomat, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
12. 2002 — Cedarville College is elevated to university status, becoming Cedarville University.

Stories

The farm boy who edited the New York Tribune

Whitelaw Reid was born October 27, 1837, on his family's farm southwest of Cedarville, in a house built in 1823 that still stands at 2587 Conley Road. He attended Xenia Academy and graduated with honors from Miami University in 1856. Reid joined Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune in 1868 and became managing editor within a year; when Greeley died in 1872, Reid bought the paper and ran it until his own death. He served as U.S. Minister to France (1889-1892) and ran as Benjamin Harrison's vice-presidential candidate in 1892, then closed out his career as ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1905 until he died in London on December 15, 1912. His boyhood home, remodeled by Reid himself into a Queen Anne showpiece, was listed on the National Register in 1973 and later became the home of Ohio governor Mike DeWine.

A mound that outlasted its excavators

An 1881 description of the ground below the Falls of Massie's Creek, west of Cedarville, tells of an oval earthen mound about forty feet high, its slopes carrying trees a century old, from which a viewer could see for miles in every direction. The writer guessed it had been built by ancient people to watch for approaching enemies, and admitted plainly that 'to unravel the mystery of this earthen mound belongs to him who has made the study of pre-historic ages his life work.' Archaeologists later attributed such mounds in the region to the Adena culture, which built earthworks over burned mortuary structures as part of elaborate burial rites between roughly 500 BC and AD 100. The mound matching this description and location, now called Williamson Mound, sits in Indian Mound Reserve off U.S. 42 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

From cattle drover to Egyptian Revival mausoleum

George W. Harper's family came to Greene County from Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1812, when he was still an infant. At eighteen he went into the cattle business in Illinois and built a fortune, then returned to Cedarville, married in 1860, and became one of the township's largest landowners, with roughly 1,100 acres by 1881. He ran the George W. Harper Banking Company until it was bought out in 1896, and around 1900 he and his wife gave $5,000 to endow an economics chair at Cedarville College. When Harper died, his family commissioned an Egyptian Revival mausoleum and matching cemetery gate from the George Dodd & Sons Granite Co., completed in 1915, with sphinxes, palm-leaf column capitals, a vulture-and-sun-disk cornice, and bronze doors cast with lotus flowers. Both structures were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

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• Cedarville University100% of residentsGroundwater wells (8 wells)

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Money issues on the ballot since 2017: 3 of 3 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked. The county's results on file run through 2025-05-06; later elections are not loaded yet.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-11-06

Statewide question: State Issue 3: Voter ID

Local questions for Cedarville, Greene County and its school district:

• Cedarville Village: Renews a 2.6-mill property tax levy for the current expenses of Cedarville Village for 5 years, beginning in 2026.
• Greene County: Renews a 0.25-mill property tax levy for the bridges of Greene County for 5 years, beginning in 2026.

Races, candidates and every question for an address: your ballot. County offices and judges are on your county board's sample ballot.

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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