Kingston

How Kingston began

Kingston is a village in northern Green Township in eastern Ross County, at the edge of the Pickaway Plains. It was known as 'Ingston' until the name was fixed as Kingston in 1816 and platted that year. It grew as a farm-trade town on the county's fertile eastern flat and today is the larger of the two settlements (with Adelphi) serving that corner of the county. A short-lived railroad once linked it to Adelphi, and Green Township holds one of the county's most remarkable stories of early contact with Native Americans, that of Catherine Goodman, held captive as a girl and later a pioneer settler of the township. The historic Bellevue farmhouse often associated with Kingston's ZIP code actually stands just across the county line in Pickaway County.

Platted 1816.

Where the name comes from

A 1902 county history says Thomas Ing came into possession of a forty-acre tract on which the village of 'Ingstown' stood, and that in 1816 the town was regularly laid out and christened Kingston; Ing kept its first tavern.

Before the town

No mound, village or trail specific to Kingston itself was found in the sources checked. The village sits near the western edge of the Pickaway Plains, a prairie-and-woodland mosaic that was Shawnee hunting and farming ground in the eighteenth century (the main Shawnee towns on the Plains were farther north and east, in Pickaway County proper). Green Township, in which Kingston lies, does carry a documented and specific native-contact story, though it concerns Pennsylvania rather than Ohio: Catherine (Gouger) Goodman was captured by Native Americans as a twelve-year-old girl in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, around 1744, and held five years before being ransomed by French traders in Canada and returned home. Decades later, as a widow, she came west with her son John Goodman and settled on a tract in Green Township that she recognized, by her own account, as ground she had once camped on with her captors as a girl. She died there in 1801 and was buried on her son's farm at that same spot, which a 1915 newspaper called the only known burial place tied to a captivity story of this kind in the county; her descendants placed a monument there in 1916.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee.

• Catherine Goodman grave / former Native encampment site (camp|burial) — on the John Goodman farm, fractional section 4, Green Township, Ross County, captivity recalled from the 1740s-50s; grave 1801; monument 1916 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1803 — Green Township, in which Kingston sits, is organized on May 10.
2. c. 1797-1798 — John Goodman, prospecting from Pennsylvania, buys a squatter's claim to government land in what is now Green Township and the next spring brings his family, including his mother Catherine (Gouger) Goodman, down the Scioto by flatboat to settle there; his later house served for years as a wayside inn stopping President James Monroe and General William Hull.
3. 1801 — Catherine (Gouger) Goodman dies in Green Township and is buried on her son's farm at the spot she recognized as an old Native encampment from her captivity as a girl.
4. 1816 — The settlement's name is fixed as Kingston, having previously been recorded as 'Ingston'; it is platted the same year.
5. 1890 — Kingston's population peaks in the nineteenth century at 751 residents before settling into a long plateau.
6. 1916 — Catherine Goodman's great-grandchildren erect a monument at her grave in Green Township.
7. 1980 — The IRS grants the Ross County Water Company, which serves Kingston, tax-exempt status as a member-owned mutual utility, effective that September.

Stories

The captive who came home

Catherine Gouger was twelve years old in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, around 1744 when she and a younger brother were seized by Native raiders; her brother, too young for the hard travel, was killed by his captors, and her father was later slain as well. Catherine was held five years before French traders bought her and carried her to Canada, from where she was eventually released and sent back to Pennsylvania. She married in 1756, raised a family, and was widowed. Well into old age she made the journey west to Ohio with her son John Goodman and his family, and when they reached a tract he had claimed in what is now Green Township, she recognized the ground: it was, she said, a place she had once camped with the people who held her captive as a girl. She lived out her last years there and died in 1801, asking to be buried on that same spot. Her grave was still known to the family in 1916, when her great-grandchildren raised a monument over it, and a 1915 Chillicothe newspaper called her the first white woman known to have set foot within the present limits of Ross County.

A railroad that ruined its builder

In the later nineteenth century, John Karshner of neighboring Adelphi, by then an elderly and wealthy landholder, supplied most of the money and effort behind a short line built to connect Kingston with Adelphi. It ran for about fourteen years before it was abandoned, and the venture, undertaken too late in Karshner's life to be recouped, swept away the fine estate he had spent a lifetime building. Since the line's abandonment, a county history from 1917 notes, Adelphi had remained comparatively isolated from the rail network that reached Kingston and other Ross County towns.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · sites.rootsweb.com · en.wikipedia.org · irs.gov · archive.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com

Eight wells in the buried Teays River Aquifer, in the Scioto valley north of Chillicothe The water here

• Ross County Water Co. Inc56% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Kingston Village44% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public libraries (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

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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