Leesville

• Atwood LakeBuilt 1936 · 1540 acres
• Leesville LakeBuilt 1936 · 1,000 acres

How Leesville began

Leesville was laid out by Thomas Price and Peter Saunders on August 1, 1812, as Leesburg, in what was then One-leg Township, Tuscarawas County - a full two decades before Carroll County itself existed. Its post office was renamed Leesville in 1880 to avoid confusion with a Leesburg in Highland County. Before the Civil War, according to the 1921 county history, it was an Underground Railroad stop that hosted some of the era's most prominent abolitionist speakers; afterward it settled into farming and coal mining, peaking at 408 residents in 1880. Today it is a village of 120 to 127 people (2020 census figures differ slightly by source) on Conotton Creek, a short distance from the Leesville Lake dam that carries its name.

Platted August 1, 1812 (as Leesburg), by Thomas Price and Peter Saunders.

Where the name comes from

Platted in 1812 as Leesburg, the village's post office was renamed Leesville by 1880 to avoid confusion with the existing Leesburg post office in Highland County, Ohio.

Before the town

No mound, earthwork, or named Native village has been documented specifically at Leesville, and no Carroll County-level history file exists yet to check further. The village sits on Conotton Creek, which early settlers of the surrounding township (then One-leg Township) knew as 'One Leg' creek, after a one-legged Native man said to have lived along its banks - the closest site-specific Native reference found in this area. As with the rest of Carroll County, the land passed to the United States under the Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785); the historic Lenape (Delaware) and Wyandot both traveled and hunted the Conotton valley before removal, and Leesville's 1812 platting came only seventeen years after the Treaty of Greenville (1795) had pushed the effective frontier of settlement this far west. The 1921 county history adds that Conotton Creek was formerly spelled Kanotton and is of Indian origin as a name.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot.

• 'One Leg' (Conotton Creek) (other) — Conotton Creek, at Leesville, pre-settlement, undated (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. before Civil War — By the 1921 county history's account, Leesville's public hall serves as a station on the Underground Railroad and hosts visiting abolitionist speakers including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Parker Pillsbury; local conductors Joseph S. Burr and Joseph Millesack move fugitives through the village en route from Port Washington to Salem.
2. 1807 — Benjamin Knight and Samuel Dunlap settle on Conotton Creek near the site of Leesville, among the first pioneers of One-leg Township.
3. August 1, 1812 — Thomas Price and Peter Saunders plat the village of Leesburg on Conotton Creek in what was then One-leg Township, Tuscarawas County.
4. 1820 — Census counts 131 residents in the young village.
5. 1868 — Orange Lodge No. 406, F. & A.M., is organized at Leesville on October 21 with John B. Penn as worshipful master and William Adair as senior warden.
6. 1880 — Population peaks at 408, mostly employed in farming and coal mining; the post office is renamed Leesville to avoid confusion with Leesburg, Highland County.
7. 1884 — William Adair, a Leesville lawyer and member of the Ohio Constitutional Convention, is known as the author of the celebrated liquor law, and Mary E. Kail, the village poet, lives there.
8. 1900 — The population falls to 269 from 408 in 1880, as coal mining and farming wane.
9. 1909 — Orange Chapter No. 302, Order of the Eastern Star, is organized at Leesville on January 19 and has 117 members by 1920.
10. 1918 — Leesville subscribes $2,800 to the Fourth Liberty Loan; in 1920 the village has a general store, grocery, hardware store, harness shop, barber, an incubator factory and a Methodist church.
11. October 1936 — The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District completes the Leesville Lake dam on McGuire Fork of Conotton Creek, just north of the village, creating a 1,000-acre reservoir named for it.
12. 1950 — The population rises to 297 from 212 in 1940.
13. 2020 — The census counts 127 residents; the village is in the Conotton Valley Union Local School District.

Stories

Frederick Douglass came to a coal-country village

Before the Civil War, Leesville was small even by the standards of Carroll County, but by the account of the 1921 county history it stood on an Underground Railroad route running from the river town of Port Washington north to Salem, and its public hall was important enough on that circuit to draw William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Parker Pillsbury - four of the most prominent abolitionist orators in the country - to speak there. Local conductors Joseph S. Burr and Joseph Millesack are named in the county history as the men who actually moved escaped people through the village and on toward Baxter's Ridge. It is an outsized piece of national history for a village that never held much more than a few hundred residents, before or since.

A clockmaker, a poet and a lawyer

The 1921 county history says much of Carroll County's history centres on Leesville, 'long known as an intellectual and reforming center'. It names three residents. Charles Dunster, a self-taught man working in an ordinary blacksmith shop with his own rough tools, built an ingenious astronomical clock that kept the time for several of the larger cities of the country, and the history calls him a celebrated genius and clock-builder, though it gives no date. Mary E. Kail, born in Washington but raised in Carroll County, had once been a clerk in a department at the national capital until a change of administration let her go, and wrote the poems 'Crown Our Heroes' and 'Ohio'. William Adair practised law at Leesville and in 1884 was known as the author of the celebrated liquor law and a member of the Constitutional Convention of Ohio. The village hall that had once hosted Garrison, Douglass and Phillips housed, by 1920, a Masonic lodge, a Grange, an Eastern Star chapter and a chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution.

Photographs

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

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

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-08-27
• Basic Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-08-29

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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