Malvern

How Malvern began

Malvern began as Troy, platted in November 1834 by the Reverend William Hardesty, and was renamed Malvern in 1840 to avoid confusion with the many other Troys in Ohio; it incorporated as a village on May 31, 1869. A station on the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad, it grew into one of Ohio's earliest and largest paving-brick manufacturing centers in the 1880s and 1890s, work that still shows in brick streets and foundations around town. The village sits on the historic Great Trail, an Indigenous trade route that a Revolutionary War army camped on in 1778 on its way to build Fort Laurens, and it later gave the country AT&T's founding president, Theodore Vail. Today Malvern is a village of about 1,110 people near Lake Mohawk, a large private reservoir built in 1963 just south of town.

Platted 1834, incorporated 1869-05-31, by Rev. William Hardesty, who platted it as the village of Troy.

Where the name comes from

The settlement was originally platted as Troy in November 1834; it was renamed Malvern in 1840, most likely to end confusion with the several other Troys already registered in Ohio post offices.

Before the town

Malvern sits directly on the Great Trail (also called the Tuscarawas Path), an Algonquian and Iroquoian overland route linking the forks of the Ohio River to Lake Erie that was used for travel and trade by the Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, Shawnee and Mingo. In November 1778, during the American Revolution, a 1,200-man Continental Army expedition under Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh — marching with allied Delaware guides toward the Sandusky towns and, ultimately, to build Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River — camped for two nights at a site now inside Malvern's Village Park (the expedition's 'Camp No. 9'). A historical marker there commemorates the stop. No earlier mound-builder or specific village site inside present Malvern was located in the sources checked.

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

• The Great Trail / McIntosh Expedition Camp No. 9 (trail|camp) — Malvern Village Park, West Canal Street, pre-contact trade route; camped November 13-14, 1778 (yourohionews.com)

Timeline

1. 1778 — General Lachlan McIntosh's 1,200-man Continental Army expedition, guided in part by allied Delawares, camped two nights on the Great Trail at what is now Malvern Village Park before marching on to build Fort Laurens.
2. 1834 — Rev. William Hardesty platted the settlement of Troy.
3. 1840 — The village was renamed Malvern.
4. 1845 — Theodore Newton Vail, future general manager of Bell Telephone and founding president of AT&T, was born in Malvern.
5. 1869 — Malvern was incorporated as a village on May 31.
6. 1893 — The Malvern Clay Company and the Canton & Malvern Fire Clay Paving Brick Company together produced roughly 16.5 million paving bricks in a single year.
7. 1916 — The Odessa Theater was built on Main Street; it later became the Hollywood Milk Company, a milk and chocolate processing plant.
8. 1963 — American Realty Service Corporation dammed Middle Run, a Sandy Creek tributary, on 1,728 acres just south of Malvern to create Lake Mohawk, a private gated-community reservoir.
9. 2024 — Malvern's Methodist Episcopal Church at 121 West Wood Street was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

Two nights on the Great Trail, 1778

In the fall of 1778, with the Revolution still very much undecided in the west, Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh led some 1,200 Continental soldiers and militia out of Fort Pitt, aiming to strike British-allied towns on the Sandusky River. The column — soldiers, camp followers, Scotch-Irish and German speakers, African Americans, and livestock, guided in part by Delaware allies — followed the old Great Trail westward. On the nights of November 13 and 14, 1778, they made camp at a site that is now Malvern's Village Park; historians number it 'Camp No. 9' along the march. From there the expedition pushed on to the Tuscarawas River and built Fort Laurens, the only Continental Army fort raised in Ohio during the Revolution. Fort Laurens itself sits in Tuscarawas County, but the campaign passed directly through what is now Carroll County, and a marker in the park remembers the stop.

The village that paved Ohio's streets

Malvern's clay beds and its station on the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad made it a natural home for the paving-brick trade that took off across Ohio in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1893 alone, the Malvern Clay Company and the Canton & Malvern Fire Clay Paving Brick Company turned out about 16.5 million bricks between them — roughly 7.5 million from one plant and 9 million from the other — fired hard enough to survive decades of wagon and streetcar traffic. Those bricks still surface in Malvern's own streets, building foundations and sidewalks, a durable trace of an industry that once shipped Malvern's name across the state.

The telephone man from a railroad depot town

Theodore Newton Vail was born in Malvern on July 16, 1845, in a village then defined by its brickyards and its Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad depot. Vail went to work for the Railway Mail Service before Gardiner Hubbard recruited him to the young Bell Telephone Company, where he became general manager in 1878 and helped the company defend its patents and adopt copper wire. He went on to found American Telephone & Telegraph in 1885 and led it again from 1907 to 1919, pushing the then-radical idea that a telephone company should run as a regulated public utility rather than chase maximum private profit. When Vail died in 1920, AT&T stopped telephone service across the entire country for one minute during his funeral — roughly 12 million phones went silent at once, in tribute to a man born in a small Carroll County railroad town.

Photographs

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

Eight active wells and two treatment plants feeding one distribution system, plus water bought from Malvern; public records do not say which wells feed which plant. The water here

• Aqua Ohio - Mohawk53% of residentsGroundwater wells (8 wells)
• Malvern Village43% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Green Acres Mobile Estates4% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (2)

Public schools (3)

Public libraries (1)

Superfund sites (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-05-07

Statewide question: State Issue 3: Voter ID

Local questions for Malvern, Carroll County and its school district:

• Carroll County: Renews a 1.4-mill property tax levy to maintain & operate County Home of Carroll County for 5 years, beginning in 2027.

Races, candidates and every question for an address: your ballot. County offices and judges are on your county board's sample ballot.

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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