Gambier

• Edwin Stanton1814-1869Steubenville lawyer who became Lincoln's Secretary of War from 1862 to 1868 and ...
• Jonathan Winters1925-2013Dayton-born improvisational comedian of Maude Frickert and Elwood P. Suggins, wh...
• Paul Newman1925-2008Shaker Heights-raised, Kenyon-educated film star of The Hustler, Hud and Butch C...
• Rutherford B. Hayes1822-1893Nineteenth president, three-time governor of Ohio, and the president whose Fremo...

• James WrightPerson · 1927-1980

How Gambier began

Gambier was platted in 1824-1825 as the new home of Kenyon College, an Episcopal institution founded by Bishop Philander Chase, who had moved the young college from Worthington after raising funds in England. Both the village and the college are named for British benefactors who funded that fundraising trip: the village for James Gambier, 1st Baron Gambier, a naval hero, and the college for George Kenyon, 2nd Baron Kenyon. Chase bought roughly 8,000 acres on a wooded hill above the Kokosing River, reportedly declaring 'This will do' when he saw the site, and the college opened its first building, Old Kenyon, in 1829. The village incorporated in 1870 and has grown up almost entirely around the college; today it is a small, walkable community of 2,213 residents at the 2020 census whose economy, streets and stone buildings are inseparable from Kenyon.

Settled 1825 (Chase's purchase and first building on Gambier Hill), platted 1824, incorporated 1870, by Bishop Philander Chase, founder of Kenyon College.

Where the name comes from

Gambier is named for James Gambier, 1st Baron Gambier, a British admiral and one of the major English donors Bishop Philander Chase solicited on an 1823-1824 fundraising trip to England for his new college; the college itself took the name of a second donor on that trip, George Kenyon, 2nd Baron Kenyon. Chase named the specific hilltop site he purchased 'Gambier Hill' when he reached it on July 24, 1825.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail, mound or documented encounter located within present-day Gambier itself was found in the sources we checked. The village sits directly on the Kokosing River, whose English name is a 20th-century revival of a Native word; the river and the creek it was long called, Owl Creek, were Delaware (Lenape) fishing and hunting grounds before Ohio statehood, and Delaware people camped along Owl Creek's banks into the early 1800s. The Greenville Treaty Line (1795), the boundary the Treaty of Greenville drew between land ceded by the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, and other nations and land reserved to them, crosses Knox County near Fredericktown and forms part of the county's border with Richland County. No source found documents a specific Native settlement or trail on the ground that is now the Kenyon College campus or Gambier village.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, Shawnee.

Timeline

1. 1818 — Philander Chase becomes the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio.
2. 1824 — Chase founds Kenyon College at Worthington, Ohio, incorporated in December; the same year he sails to England to raise money, securing gifts from Lord Kenyon, Lord Gambier and philanthropist Hannah More.
3. 1825 — Chase purchases about 8,000 acres of wooded hill land in Knox County and, on reaching the site on July 24, names it Gambier Hill.
4. 1828 — Kenyon College relocates from Worthington to the new campus at Gambier.
5. 1829 — Old Kenyon, the college's first permanent building, opens; the college holds its first commencement, graduating six students including Alfred Blake.
6. 1833 — Bexley Hall, the college's Episcopal theological seminary, is organized at Gambier.
7. 1863 — Christ Church at the Quarry, a stone chapel begun as a Kenyon student mission and Sunday school, is built east of Gambier from locally quarried stone, likely designed by architect William Tinsley.
8. 1864 — Architect William Tinsley builds Kokosing House on Kokosing Drive as an office and residence for Gregory Thurston Bedell, third Episcopal Bishop of Ohio; it becomes the grandest home in the village and the center of Gambier social life.
9. 1870 — Gambier incorporates as a village.
10. 1873 — A railroad connects Gambier to regional cities; its route later becomes the Kokosing Gap Trail.
11. 1877 — President Rutherford B. Hayes, a member of Kenyon's class of 1842, visits the campus.
12. 1891 — Bishop Bedell donates Kokosing House and its contents, along with 25 acres and an upkeep fund, to Kenyon College.
13. 1924 — Kenyon College celebrates its centennial.
14. 1949 — A fire destroys Old Kenyon and kills nine students; the building is rebuilt by 1950.
15. 1969 — Kenyon enrolls its first fully coeducational class.
16. 2020 — Gambier passes LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination legislation, becoming the 29th Ohio municipality to do so.
17. 2024 — Kenyon College marks its bicentennial, with Founders' Day on October 24 commemorating 200 years since incorporation.

Stories

This will do

Philander Chase became Ohio's first Episcopal bishop in 1818 and quickly concluded that the frontier state's shortage of trained clergy could only be solved by training them there, not back east. He founded Kenyon College at Worthington in 1824, then sailed to England to raise the money a permanent campus would need, calling on aristocratic patrons including George Kenyon, Lord Gambier, and the writer Hannah More. With their gifts in hand, Chase went looking for land far from the temptations of an existing town, and in the summer of 1825 he rode out to a heavily wooded hill in Knox County above the Kokosing River. According to the story the college still tells, he looked at the site and said simply, 'This will do.' He bought roughly 8,000 surrounding acres, named the hill Gambier after his English donor, and by 1828 had moved the college there from Worthington. Everything in the village today, from its street grid to its stone buildings, grew outward from that one hilltop decision.

A chapel raised from its own quarry

In the 1850s, students at Kenyon College started a mission and Sunday school for the people living around Gambier, work that grew into a campaign to build the mission its own church. The result, finished in 1863, was Christ Church at the Quarry, a small stone chapel east of the village mixing Gothic and Celtic details, likely designed by architect William Tinsley, who also worked on Kenyon's Ascension Hall. Its walls were cut from a quarry right next to the building site, so the chapel is literally made of the ground it stands on. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and still stands near the junction of Quarry Chapel and Monroe Mills roads, a rare case of a church whose name records its own construction story.

The bishop's house becomes the college's

When Gregory Thurston Bedell became the third Episcopal bishop of Ohio, William Tinsley built him an office and residence on Kokosing Drive in 1864, a grand stone house that quickly became the social center of the small village. For nearly three decades Kokosing House was where Gambier's public life happened. In July 1891, Bishop Bedell made an unusually complete gift: he handed the house, its entire contents, the surrounding 25 acres, and money to cover its taxes and upkeep over to Kenyon College outright. The college has held it ever since, and it remains individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the clearest surviving links between Gambier's Episcopal founding and its present-day life as a college town.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · knoxpages.com · kenyon.edu · knoxhistory.org · en.wikipedia.org · historicknoxohio.org · en.wikipedia.org · knoxpages.com · www2.kenyon.edu · statenews.org

Wells drawing groundwater from the buried-valley aquifer along the Kokosing River near Mount Vernon The water here

• Gambier Village100% of residentsBuried Valley Aquifer (Kokosing River valley wells)
• Martinsburg Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Colleges (1)

Public schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Public EV charging (2)

Stations and terminals (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.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-05-12

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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