Flushing

• Piedmont LakeBuilt 1937 · 2,310 acres

How Flushing began

Flushing was platted in 1813 and incorporated in 1849 in a township originally settled chiefly by Quakers. The village produced two nationally notable figures within a generation of each other: Rachel Lloyd, born there in 1839 to Quaker parents and educated at the local Friends School, who became the first American woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry in 1886 and helped found Nebraska's commercial sugar-beet industry; and Reverdy C. Ransom, born in Flushing in 1861 to an African American mother and Native American father, who became the 48th bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, co-founded the 1906 Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois, and was the first African American to speak at Boston's Faneuil Hall. The village's population peaked at 1,266 in 1980 and has declined by more than a third since. Downtown, the Underground Railroad Museum - Ohio Valley, founded in 1993, documents the region's role in the Underground Railroad.

Platted 1813, incorporated 1849.

Where the name comes from

No documented explanation of the village's name was found in the sources consulted.

Before the town

No Native village, camp, or trail specific to Flushing is documented in the sources consulted.

Timeline

1. 1813 — The town site of Flushing is platted.
2. 1839 — Rachel Abbie Holloway (later Rachel Lloyd) is born in Flushing on January 26 to Quaker parents Robert Smith Holloway and Abigail Taber.
3. 1849 — Flushing is incorporated as a village.
4. 1852 — Rachel Holloway, age 13, attends the Friends School in Flushing.
5. 1861 — Reverdy Cassius Ransom is born in Flushing on January 4 to an African American mother, Harriet Johnson, and a Native American father.
6. 1886 — Rachel Lloyd earns a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Zurich, becoming the first American woman to hold a chemistry PhD.
7. 1906 — Reverdy Ransom co-founds the Niagara Movement's second meeting and speaks on 'The Spirit of John Brown,' part of the civil rights organizing that led to the NAACP.
8. 1980 — The village's population peaks at 1,266.
9. 1993 — Dr. John Mattox and his wife Rosalind found the Underground Railroad Museum - Ohio Valley in downtown Flushing.

Stories

A Quaker girl who became America's first woman chemistry PhD

Rachel Holloway grew up in Flushing's Quaker community, attending the local Friends School at age thirteen before family circumstances and further education took her elsewhere. She kept pursuing chemistry long after most doors to advanced study were closed to American women, and in 1886 she earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Zurich, becoming the first American woman ever to hold one. As Rachel Lloyd, she joined the University of Nebraska in 1887, rose to full professor within a year and department head by 1892, and turned her analytical skills toward a practical problem: measuring sucrose concentration in sugar beets accurately enough to prove the crop could support a real industry. Her research helped Nebraska's sugar-beet production grow more than tenfold in five years, and in 1891 she became the first woman regularly admitted to membership in the American Chemical Society. Illness forced her to stop teaching in 1894, and she died in 1900, but the industry her research helped launch, and the door she opened for American women in chemistry, both outlasted her.

From Flushing to Faneuil Hall

Reverdy Cassius Ransom was born in Flushing in 1861 to an African American mother and a Native American father; his mother, by his own account, sacrificed a great deal to see him educated. He went on to become a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the 48th in its history, pastoring congregations in Boston and Chicago and founding the Institutional Church and Social Settlement, an early social-services organization offering education, job training, counseling, and childcare to Chicago's Black residents. In 1905 he became the first African American to address an audience at Boston's Faneuil Hall, a building already steeped in Revolutionary and abolitionist symbolism, and the following year he helped organize the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, the civil rights organization that brought together W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black leaders in the years before the NAACP's founding, where Ransom delivered an address on the legacy of John Brown. He later ran for Congress as an independent in 1918, though he was removed from the ballot over petition irregularities. A library at Wilberforce University's Payne Theological Seminary bears his name today.

Photographs

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

A well in the Ohio River valley (alluvial) aquifer serving the St. Clairsville-area system The water here

• Flushing Village95% of residentsOhio River valley aquifer (wells)
• Holloway Public Water System5% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2015: 3 of 4 passed.

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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-10-01

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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