Dexter City

How Dexter City began

Dexter City is a small village in Jefferson Township, Noble County, laid off on August 5, 1870, by R. W. St. John for the proprietor Hiram Flanders and named for Dexter W. Sullivan, who built the first house. It grew on the Cleveland & Marietta Railroad, which reached the site about when the lots were sold, and on the oil field around it, where the Diamond Well of McKee & Duff had been drilled in 1860. The Johnny Appleseed memorial stands just south of the village, near the cemetery where his half-brother Parley Chapman is buried. The village peaked at 278 people in 1900 and counted 81 in 2020.

Platted August 5, 1870, by R. W. St. John surveyed for the proprietor Hiram Flanders.

Where the name comes from

The 1904 county history says the town was named for Dexter W. Sullivan, who erected the first building in the place after the original plat was surveyed; the 1887 history calls him one of the first settlers and says he was a Civil War soldier of the 116th Ohio who was captured at Winchester.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail, mound, or treaty line specific to Dexter City is recorded in the sources consulted. The site lies in southern Noble County, within the area ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, in territory used by Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware), and Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga) people; no site-specific record for this particular village was found. See the county-level history file for what is recorded at that broader scale.

Timeline

1. 1860 — McKee & Duff complete the Diamond Well in the fall, in Jefferson Township below the site of Dexter City; it is abandoned because water floods it.
2. 1870 — Dexter City is laid off on August 5 by R. W. St. John, with Hiram Flanders as proprietor of the site; the town is named for Dexter W. Sullivan, who builds the first building, and David McKee opens the first store.
3. 1870 — The Cleveland & Marietta Railroad reaches Dexter City about the time the lots are laid off, and the village enjoys a boom from the railroad and the nearby oil field.
4. 1873 — A. A. Clymer moves from Caldwell to Dexter City and opens a general store with David McKee; his sons carry it on after his death.
5. 1880 — The census counts 255 residents.
6. 1887 — The 1887 county history calls Dexter City a neat and enterprising town with business houses, societies and churches.
7. 1900 — The census counts 278 residents, the highest on record.
8. 1903 — Dexter City is one of fifteen post offices in the county authorized to issue and redeem money orders.
9. 2010 — Census records 129 residents in 51 households, with a median age of 38.5.
10. 2020 — Census records 81 residents, a 37.2 percent drop from 2010.

Stories

Johnny Appleseed's family ground

John Chapman, the nurseryman remembered as Johnny Appleseed, never lived at Dexter City, but his family did: the Chapman homestead stood about a quarter mile south of the village, and Chapman is known to have visited often. His half-brother Parley Chapman and Parley's family are buried in a small family cemetery on the hill above the site. Sometime after, a monument grew up there in Chapman's memory built not of quarried stone but of rocks mailed and carried in by people from along the routes he is said to have traveled, a pile that keeps growing as visitors add their own stone. It sits just off State Route 821, a short walk from the village that is otherwise unremarkable on the map.

The Diamond Well and the oil boom

Oil came to the Duck Creek valley before the Civil War. In the fall of 1860 David McKee and Duff completed the Diamond Well in Jefferson Township, a short distance below the place where Dexter City would stand, but water flooded the hole and the well had to be given up. The war stopped all development by the fall of 1861. After the war speculators from New York, New England and Pennsylvania came to lease land, and companies capitalized in the millions sold stock. A company of Eastern capitalists brought in four paying wells on the J. C. Tilton farm near the site, two of them still pumped in 1887, and the first well in the vicinity had been put down on the old Robinson Sanford farm. The Cleveland & Marietta Railroad reached the spot about the time R. W. St. John laid out the lots in August 1870, and the village that took Dexter Sullivan's name enjoyed a boom before settling down to steady growth.

Photographs

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

No water-system data is linked to Dexter City's ZIP codes yet.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-02-19

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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