Jeffersonville

How Jeffersonville began

Jeffersonville stands on Sugar Creek at the center of Jefferson Township, on ground where William Robinson Sr. built one of the township's first cabins around 1804. Walter B. Wright and Chipman Robinson laid out the town in March 1831 and sold lots at five dollars each; it was named, like the township, for Thomas Jefferson, gained a post office in 1834 and was incorporated by the legislature in March 1838. The railroad the township paid for, finished in 1877, turned a village of 17 mostly log buildings in 1840 into a grain-shipping town of 628 people by 1881, with an elevator, a mill and a brick town hall and opera house added in 1898. Its best-known native, Grayson L. Kirk, born there in 1903, became president of Columbia University; the village today has about 1,250 residents.

Settled c. 1804, platted 1831, incorporated 1838, by Walter B. Wright and Chipman Robinson (plat, surveyed by Stephanus Hunt, March 1, 1831).

Where the name comes from

Named for Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States.

Before the town

No village site, mound or camp is recorded inside Jeffersonville itself. The township histories record Native presence close by: Rattlesnake Creek, which crosses the township west of the village, was said by the first settlers to be named for a chief called Rattlesnake whose camp stood on land later owned by Clement Shockley, and the first public road through the township, later the Jeffersonville and Bloomingburg pike, was an old Indian trace made into a state road. The 1872 pioneer record reports a mound about half a mile from Jeffersonville, on the farm of Mrs. Mary Jones, from which a number of skeletons had been dug; it gives no builders or date, and its location relative to the present village limits is not stated precisely. William Robinson, the first settler on the village site, is said to have found the local Indians friendly after the 1795 Treaty of Greenville; they attended cabin raisings and left for the Sandusky country about 1811.

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

• Mound on the Mary Jones farm (mound) — about one-half mile from Jeffersonville (direction not given), unknown; described in 1872 as having yielded human skeletons (archive.org)

Timeline

1. c. 1804 — William Robinson Sr., from North Carolina by way of Virginia and Greene County, builds a cabin on the present village site.
2. 1831 — Jeffersonville is laid out in the center of Jefferson Township.
3. 1831 — On March 1 Stephanus Hunt surveys town lots for owners Walter B. Wright and Chipman Robinson, who sell them at five dollars each; Robert Wiley builds the first house, on Main Street, lot No. 1.
4. 1834 — A post office is established at Jeffersonville.
5. 1834 — Jacob Creamer is appointed the first postmaster at Jeffersonville on June 21.
6. 1838 — The General Assembly incorporates the Town of Jeffersonville by an act dated March 17, with a mayor, recorder and five trustees.
7. 1838 — The town council's earliest recorded ordinance, dated April 26, fines anyone racing horses in the streets or alleys one to five dollars.
8. 1840 — Jacob Creamer builds a water-powered saw-mill, later with a corn-cracker, where the covered bridge over Sugar Creek afterward stood.
9. 1840 — When a Mr. Howard moves to the village in February it has seventeen buildings, most of them log.
10. 1848 — Stockholders of the Free Church Association buy part of a school lot and build a 54-by-38-foot frame church open to all denominations.
11. 1852 — Ordinances taking effect August 28 prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquor within the town limits.
12. 1860 — The First Universalist Church of Jeffersonville is organized August 5; its brick church is finished in 1874 at a cost of $4,000.
13. 1870 — Jeffersonville Lodge No. 454, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, is organized July 20.
14. 1877 — The railroad through the village, for which Jefferson Township raised a $35,000 quota, is completed in the fall; it later passes to the Springfield Southern Railroad Company.
15. 1880 — The corporation limits are enlarged on April 9 to take in land east of Sugar Creek and along the railroad.
16. 1881 — The village has 628 inhabitants, a steam grain elevator, a grist and saw-mill, three churches, a printing office and Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges.
17. 1898 — A two-story brick town hall and corporation building with an opera house is built for about $18,000.
18. c. 1900 — The village's population peaks in this era at about 790 residents.
19. 1903 — October 12: Grayson L. Kirk is born in Jeffersonville; he later becomes the 14th president of Columbia University (1953-1968) and helps shape the founding of the United Nations Security Council.
20. 1910 — The census counts 716 people in Jeffersonville.
21. 2020 — The census records 1,258 residents, a 4.6% increase from 2010's 1,203.

Stories

From a Jefferson Township farm to Columbia's presidency

Grayson L. Kirk was born in Jeffersonville on October 12, 1903, in a village of a few hundred people that had been platted just seventy years earlier. He built a career as a political scientist, joining Columbia University's faculty in 1940, and during the Second World War worked in the State Department's Political Studies Division, where he became involved in planning the postwar peace organization. He attended the Dumbarton Oaks conference and the San Francisco conference that produced the United Nations Charter, helping shape what became the UN Security Council. Kirk returned to Columbia and rose to full professor in 1943 and provost in 1949, then to the university presidency in 1953, a post he held until 1968, a tenure that quadrupled the university's endowment and added a dozen buildings before ending amid the student protests of that year.

Five-dollar lots on Sugar Creek

In 1831 Walter B. Wright and Chipman Robinson, who owned a hundred acres at the center of Jefferson Township, decided the farms around them needed a trading point. On March 1 they had Stephanus Hunt survey town lots, and they sold them for five dollars apiece. Robert Wiley put up the first house, on lot No. 1 on Main Street, and William Devault, Reuben Carr, Jacob Jenkins and M. B. Wright were among the first residents. Edward Popejoy opened the first store, Hiram Duff was the first blacksmith and Joseph Games the first tanner. Growth was slow: a newcomer in February 1840 counted seventeen buildings, most of them log. The legislature had already made the settlement a town corporate in March 1838, and its council spent its first years on horse racing in the streets, show licenses, nine-foot sidewalks and the regulation of hogs.

The railroad the township bought

For nearly half a century Jefferson Township voted on railroad schemes that came to nothing; one bond issue for the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy line was approved and then struck down as unconstitutional. In the winter of 1874-75 William Blessing and C. W. Gray revived the idea, called a public meeting and set out to raise the township's quota of $35,000. Willis Hays, Isaac Glaze, George Janes, M. B. Wright, Gray and Blessing filled it quickly, and work began the next spring. The road was finished in the fall of 1877; within a year it was in a receiver's hands and was sold to the Springfield Southern Railroad Company, but traffic held. By 1881 the county history reported that there was not a vacant house in Jeffersonville, and that grain handling at the elevator and mill brought 'lively times' every fall.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Jeffersonville Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (6 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public EV charging (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

Money issues on the ballot since 2021: 1 of 1 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 2024-10-08

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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