Degraff

How Degraff began

DeGraff is a village in southern Logan County straddling Pleasant and Washington townships, grown up around a stop on the Mad River, or Dayton and Michigan, line through the county. It was named for a railroad official rather than a local settler, an unusual choice that reflects how much the village's early fortunes depended on the line. The population grew fastest in the 1870s, in step with the railroad, and has slowly declined since a mid-twentieth-century peak. The National Register-listed McColly Covered Bridge sits nearby on County Road 13, just across the township line in Washington Township.

Settled 1805, platted 1850, incorporated 1864, by John Boggs (site owner); Col. Andrew DeGraff (surveyor).

Where the name comes from

Named for a railroad man. The village history says Col. Andrew DeGraff, who surveyed routes for the Bee Line Railroad, surveyed the town site in 1850 and the town was named after him; Wikipedia says only that it was named for a railroad official and lists the spellings De Graff, De Graft, DeGraff, Degraff and Degraft.

Before the town

No Native American sites or events are recorded specifically for the DeGraff village site in the sources we checked. The village lies roughly 15 miles southwest of the Mac-a-cheek and Wapatomica Shawnee towns near West Liberty and Zanesfield, and within the wider area ceded by the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and later treaties.

Timeline

1. 1805 — John Boggs of Pickaway County buys the 503-acre site; George McCulloch and Jeremiah Stansbury settle nearby, and Stansbury builds the first flour mill between 1806 and 1810.
2. 1828 — Methodist families build Olive Chapel four miles south of the site; Daniel Strayer, who moved his family from Virginia in 1831, opens a blacksmith shop that year, and Joseph Shriver builds a flour mill in 1840.
3. 1850 — Col. Andrew DeGraff, who has been surveying routes for the Bee Line Railroad, surveys the town site; the railroad comes in 1852, and J. K. Askin opens the village's first store in 1851.
4. 1852 — The railroad reached DeGraff, and the naming of the town after a railroad official reflects the line's importance to the settlement's growth.
5. 1852 — The Presbyterian Church of DeGraff, the village's first church, is built; the first school meets in 1853 in a room over the old railroad hotel.
6. 1864 — DeGraff incorporates as a village, with A. J. Lippencott as first mayor; the Catholic church is built that year and also serves as a schoolhouse.
7. 1867 — A brick schoolhouse is built, used until a six-room school replaces it in 1877; a two-room addition follows in 1889.
8. 1870 — DeGraff's census population stood at 624; the decade that followed brought the fastest growth in the village's recorded history.
9. 1872 — A tornado kills two children and causes $22,000 in property damage; the village's population reaches 711 in 1873.
10. 1885 — The Citizen's Bank of DeGraff opens; the Creamery Company forms as a stock company in 1891 and the Inland Telephone Company arrives in 1898.
11. 1902 — A livery barn fire, the second of three, kills 16 horses and destroys $16,000 in machinery; the third livery fire follows in 1908.
12. 1914 — A fire causes over $100,000 in damage and destroys the southern part of the business district.
13. 1922 — A new schoolhouse is built and the old one closes; the DeGraff Chamber of Commerce forms in 1945.
14. 1950 — DeGraff marked its centennial, an event later recalled in local Logan County history writing.
15. 1980 — DeGraff's population reached its recorded peak of 1,358 before beginning a gradual decline.
16. 2020 — The census counts 1,250 people in DeGraff, down from 1,285 in 2010 and the 1980 peak of 1,358.

Stories

A village named for a railroad man

Most Logan County villages carry the name of a founder, a landowner, or a hoped-for virtue. DeGraff is different: it was named to honor an official of the railroad that built through the site, a choice that says plainly what mattered most to the people who platted it. The rail line, part of the Mad River corridor that also shaped Belle Center a few miles north, gave the settlement its reason to exist and its livelihood for a century. The 1870s, the decade right after the line's arrival, produced the village's single fastest burst of population growth on record. When the railroad's importance to small-town Ohio faded in the twentieth century, DeGraff's population faded with it, sliding from a 1980 peak of 1,358 down toward 1,250 by 2020.

Fires in a wooden railroad town

DeGraff grew along the railroad from 1852, and its wooden business blocks burned again and again. A livery barn fire in 1886 was followed by the Koogler and Sons flour mill fire in 1890, which caused $10,000 in damage, and Earsome's Restaurant in 1894, another $10,000. The Crockett Tannery burned in 1895. In 1902 a second livery barn fire killed 16 horses and destroyed $16,000 worth of machinery, and a third livery fire came in 1908. The worst was in 1914, when a fire caused over $100,000 in damage and destroyed the southern part of the business district. Earlier, an 1872 tornado had killed two children and done $22,000 in damage. Each time the village rebuilt, and by 1922 it had a new schoolhouse, a bank and a telephone system.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · degraffoh.com · peakofohio.com · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Degraff Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (2)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 2 of 3 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 0 of 1.

Ballot issues

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.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-12-05

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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