Manchester

• Nathaniel MassiePerson · 1763-1813

How Manchester began

Manchester began in December 1790 as Nathaniel Massie's stockade at the Three Islands on the Ohio, the first settlement in the Virginia Military District, and took the name Manchester after Massie's English ancestral home about 1791. By 1797 it had fifteen to twenty cabins and a tavern kept by the Irishman John McGate; Andrew Boyd opened the first store in 1799 and Israel Donalson became postmaster of the county's first post office in 1801. The original plat had 108 lots, with additions from 1839 to 1858 bringing the total to 651, and the town incorporated in 1850 with 434 people and Abraham Perry as first mayor. The census counted 1,965 residents in 1890 and 1,839 in 2020.

Settled 1790, platted original plat of 108 lots, undated; West Manchester added 1839, incorporated 1850, by Nathaniel Massie.

Where the name comes from

Renamed in 1791 from Massie's Station to Manchester, for Manchester, England, the ancestral home of founder Nathaniel Massie.

Before the town

No native-specific sites or events tied to the village of Manchester itself are recorded.

Timeline

1. 1790 — Nathaniel Massie founded Massie's Station on the Ohio River, the fourth permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory and the first in the Virginia Military District.
2. 1791 — Residents had completely encircled the settlement with a defensive stockade, and it was renamed Manchester after Massie's ancestral English home.
3. 1797 — George Sample, riding in from Ohio Brush Creek, finds fifteen to twenty cabins at Manchester and a tavern that is at least a grogshop, kept by the Irishman John McGate and his wife Katy; the court records are full of fights at McGate's.
4. 1799 — Andrew Boyd opens the first store in Manchester.
5. 1801 — A post office, the first in Adams County, is established with Israel Donalson as postmaster; he serves twelve years and is succeeded by John Ellison Jr.
6. 1805 — The Presbyterian congregation of Manchester is formed from the Eagle Creek congregation near West Union; a log church goes up about 1807, the congregation is incorporated in January 1814, and a brick church replaces the log one in 1845.
7. 1839 — West Manchester is added with 48 lots, followed by Yate's Addition (16 lots) in 1843, Donalson's Addition (23 lots) in 1849 and the Improvement Company's Addition (452 lots) in 1855, for 651 lots in all by 1858.
8. 1850 — Manchester was incorporated as a village.
9. 1856 — The house later known as The Ridge, at 503 E. 8th Street, was built; it stayed in one family for four generations with its original furnishings intact.
10. 1856 — De Kalb Lodge No. 138 of the Odd Fellows, instituted at West Union in 1849, is moved to Manchester and re-instituted on July 31 with nineteen members.
11. 1859 — Manchester Lodge No. 317 of the Free and Accepted Masons begins work under a dispensation from the Grand Master dated May 7 and receives its charter in October; its first initiate is the merchant Andrew B. Ellison.
12. 1889 — Michael O'Neil has a frame Catholic church built in Manchester, the only one ever organized in Adams County.
13. 1890 — The census counts 1,965 residents in Manchester, up from 1,455 in 1880.
14. 2020 — Census recorded 1,839 residents, down 9.1 percent from 2,023 in 2010.

Stories

First in the Virginia Military District

When Nathaniel Massie led settlers to a bend of the Ohio River in 1790 to found Massie's Station, he was staking out the very first permanent town inside the Virginia Military District, the vast tract Virginia had reserved to pay its Revolutionary War veterans in land rather than cash. It was also only the fourth permanent settlement anywhere in the Northwest Territory. The danger of the frontier was immediate enough that within a year residents had built a stockade completely around the young town, and that same year, 1791, Massie renamed it Manchester after his family's home city in England. Massie went on to found Chillicothe and become the first president of the Ohio Senate, but Manchester's river-bend site, roughly halfway between Cincinnati and Huntington, West Virginia, remains one of the oldest continuously settled places in Ohio.

McGate's tavern

George Sample, who settled on Ohio Brush Creek at the mouth of Soldier's Run, wrote to the Western Pioneer in 1842 about his first visit to Manchester in 1797. He found fifteen to twenty cabins, one of them a tavern that was at least a grogshop, with a dozen visitors at it and a landlord who tippled along with them. They made Sample, a young newcomer, help the landlady mix a bowl of eggnog: he beat a dozen eggs in a large bowl with about a pound of sugar and a little milk, filled it up with whiskey and set it on the table, and the company sipped it with spoons, since tumblers had not yet come into fashion. The tavern belonged to John McGate, an Irishman, who with his wife Katy was one of Manchester's noted characters; the early court records are full of brawls at McGate's in which both took part. Grand juries repeatedly presented the schoolmaster James Dunbar and William Hannah for beating and abusing McGate and his wife, and Catherine McGate for a breach of the peace on Dunbar.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · sciotohistorical.org · archive.org

Every historic place in Adams County on the full map

Groundwater wells (2 wells) The water here

• Manchester Village87% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Adams County Regional Wd13% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (2)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 3 of 3 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 1.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• Fiscal emergency: declared 1983-08-19, released 1986-03-31. source
• Fiscal emergency: declared 1997-10-01, released 2018-10-16. source
• Financial Audit, 2021 to 2022, released 2025-08-19

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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