Deersville

• Clendening LakeBuilt 1936 · 1800 acres
• Tappan LakeBuilt 1936 · 2350 acres

How Deersville began

Deersville was platted by John Cramblett on November 25, 1815 (plat filed December 19) in section 25 of Franklin Township, in the southeastern corner of the township and about midway between older settlements. Pioneer families included the Pittis family, who came from the Isle of Wight, and the Pittis name appears among justices of the peace, county commissioners and landowners through the nineteenth century. A Methodist society met here by 1814 and the post office opened in 1828. The village peaked at 382 people in 1880 and counted 69 in 2020; its Main Street, with Greek Revival and Gothic Revival houses, inns and a church, is the Deersville Historic District on the National Register since 2004. The author and explorer Mary Jobe Akeley, born at nearby Tappan in 1878, is buried in the village cemetery.

Settled by 1814 (a Methodist society met here), platted November 25, 1815, by John Cramblett.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted explains the name Deersville. Hanna's 1900 county history and Lewis's 1921 history record the plat but not the reason for the name; the common explanation that it refers to deer is a guess, not a documented fact.

Before the town

No Native village, mound, burial or battle site is recorded for Deersville in the sources consulted (Hanna's 1900 county history, Lewis's 1921 county history, the township and village chapters). What the record does show is regional. The 1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh, signed with the Wyandot, Delaware (Lenape), Ojibwe and Odawa, claimed most of eastern and southern Ohio for the United States, though many Native leaders rejected it, and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville confirmed the cession after Fallen Timbers. Hanna notes that the first routes into Harrison County were probably old Indian trails along streams and ridge tops, and cites Archer Butler Hulbert's 1900 study of Ohio's Indian thoroughfares, which traced a 'Mingo Trail' from the Mingo Bottoms (Steubenville) to Will's Town (Duncan Falls) crossing the county a short distance south of Cadiz. The first settlers to reach Short Creek in 1796 included former government Indian scouts paid in land, and Hanna describes the county's earliest white visitors as Indian fighters, scouts and hunters from the Ohio River frontier.

Nations recorded here: Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga), Delaware (Lenape), Shawnee.

Timeline

1. 1809 — Walter and William Craig, the latter from Washington County, Pennsylvania, are the earliest settlers named for Franklin Township, the township in which Deersville was later laid out.
2. 1814 — Hanna writes that Methodist societies were organized at Rankin, Deersville, Bethel, Cadiz and elsewhere in the county as early as 1814, so a Deersville class was meeting before the village was platted.
3. 1815-11-25 — John Cramblett plats Deersville on November 25 in section 25 of Franklin Township; the plat is filed on December 19, 1815.
4. 1828 — A post office called Deersville opens and is still in operation.
5. 1833-03-24 — Harrison County is divided into the civil townships that exist today, including Franklin Township, which holds Deersville.
6. 1846-10-19 — Thomas E. Crawford begins as pastor of the Nottingham Presbyterian church, giving two-thirds of his time to Nottingham and one-third to Deersville as stated supply for nine years.
7. 1850 — The census counts 289 people in Deersville; the village reaches its peak of 382 in 1880 and falls to 256 in 1900.
8. 1878-01-29 — Mary Lenore Jobe, later the explorer, author and conservationist Mary Jobe Akeley, is born at Tappan in Franklin Township; she is buried in Patterson Union Cemetery at Deersville.
9. 1894 — A county handbook of 1894 lists Dr. R. H. Simmons of Deersville among the leading physicians the county had known.
10. 1920 — The census counts 115 people in Deersville; Lewis's county history calls it a place noted as a community center but 'not of great importance' commercially, and says the township and village together have furnished more county officers than any other in proportion to size.
11. 1970 — The census counts 91 people, down from 149 in 1950; the village falls to 79 in 2010 and 69 in 2020.
12. 2004-10-27 — The Deersville Historic District, roughly 212 to 230 West Main Street (about 17 acres, with houses, inns, a church and a general store in Greek Revival and Gothic Revival styles), is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
13. 2019-04-27 — Deersville is dedicated as a Buckeye Trail Town.

Stories

The Isle of Wight families of Deersville

Hanna's county history records that Robert Pittis emigrated with his family from the Isle of Wight and settled at Deersville, and the name runs through the early county record. Robert Pittis served as a justice of the peace and married couples in the early 1830s; his will, dated September 25, 1847 and proved January 21, 1859, names him as of Deersville village and leaves the estate to his children Robert, George and Jane Scott. His daughter Jane married John W. Scott, born at Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire in 1811, whose father James Scott had settled in Cadiz in 1819. A second Pittis, John of Deersville, was the father of Ann Pittis, who married Hiram Worstell, a settler in Franklin Township, and died in 1873; a George Pittis lived at Scio. A John H. Pittis took a seat among the county commissioners in 1896. Small as it is, the village drew English emigrant families as well as the Pennsylvania and Virginia Scots-Irish who filled most of the county.

Mary Jobe Akeley, from Tappan to the Canadian Rockies

Mary Lenore Jobe was born on January 29, 1878, at Tappan, a hamlet in Franklin Township. She took a bachelor's degree at Scio College in 1897, taught school at Uhrichsville, and went on to study at Bryn Mawr and Columbia. In 1914 she led an expedition to a peak in the Canadian Rockies she called Mount Kitchi, later named Mount Sir Alexander, and in 1915 took a Canadian government commission to map the glaciers of the Fraser River and that mountain. She married the explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley in 1924 and finished his African expedition after his death in 1926. Tappan itself was later submerged beneath Tappan Lake; she died in Mystic, Connecticut, on January 19, 1966, and was buried in Patterson Union Cemetery at Deersville beside her parents.

Photographs

Local history sources: archive.org · us-data.org · postalhistory.com · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · npgallery.nps.gov · en.wikipedia.org · buckeyetrail.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Groundwater wells (2 wells) The water here

• Deersville Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-08-07

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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