Mcarthur

• Maude CollinsPerson · 1894-1972
• First woman elected sheriff in OhioInvention or first · 1926

How Mcarthur began

McArthur was laid out on November 25, 1815, as McArthurstown, by a company of Isaac Pierson, Levi Johnson, Moses Dawson and George Will and John Beach of Adelphi, who bought the southeast quarter of Section 21 in Elk Township, then part of Athens County, and named it for Gen. Duncan McArthur, with 112 in-lots and 25 out-lots on a plateau between the branches of Elk Fork. It grew around the trade in burr millstones quarried in the hills from 1806, got a post office about 1828 with Thomas Wren as postmaster, and became the seat of the new Vinton County in 1850; the legislature incorporated it as McArthur on February 7, 1851. The jail was built in 1852 and the courthouse finished in 1856. Fires swept its center, most of the north side of Main Street on January 16, 1883, with $55,000 in losses. It had 900 residents in 1880 and 1,783 in 2020.

Settled c. 1815 (two cabins of the Pierson brothers), platted November 25, 1815, incorporated February 7, 1851, by Isaac Pierson, Levi Johnson, Moses Dawson, George Will and John Beach.

Where the name comes from

The Hocking Valley history of 1883 says the new town, laid out November 25, 1815, was named McArthurstown in honor of Hon. Duncan McArthur, a prominent Ohio statesman at that time; the special act of February 7, 1851, changed the name to McArthur.

Before the town

No Native American village, camp, or named site specific to the McArthur town site is recorded. Elsewhere in Vinton County there is a wider record of Adena mounds.

Timeline

1. 1806 — A Mr. Musselman, a miller who discovered fine burr stone in Elk Township in 1805, opens the first quarry in the spring of 1806; Isaac Pierson works for him and then builds the first cabin and makes the first permanent settlement, and the millstone trade supports some fifty families by 1814.
2. 1815 — On November 25 a company of Isaac Pierson, Levi Johnson, Moses Dawson, George Will and John Beach buys the southeast quarter of Section 21 and lays out McArthurstown with 112 in-lots and 25 out-lots, Main Street 82 and a half feet wide, and lots 63 and 64 reserved for a court and market house and jail; Stanbaugh Stancliff builds the first house.
3. 1816 — Joel Sage builds the first tavern at Main and Market streets, later rented to Thomas Wren, and John Phillips and Dr. Windsor open the first store; Paffenbarger had started a tan-yard east of the graveyard the year before.
4. 1820 — The first church, a hewed-log Methodist building on the later cemetery lot, is built; the Methodist society, probably the oldest in Vinton County, had been organized in 1814 and met at Isaac Pierson's house.
5. 1828 — A post office is established at McArthurstown with Thomas Wren as postmaster, appointed by President John Quincy Adams; the mail comes by horseback between Athens and Chillicothe once a week.
6. 1838 — Presbyterian preaching begins in McArthur, with ministers from the university at Athens; the Rev. Chauncey P. Taylor becomes the regular pastor about 1849 and the church on High Street and Boundary Avenue is finished in 1851.
7. 1839 — The McArthur Hotel is built; it remains the village's oldest surviving structure into the 21st century.
8. 1850 — McArthur becomes the seat of the newly formed Vinton County.
9. 1851 — On February 7 the legislature incorporates the town as McArthur; the first election, April 5, chooses J. S. Hawk mayor. Delta Lodge No. 207 of the Free and Accepted Masons is organized under dispensation that July. The 1850 population is 421.
10. 1856 — The courthouse is finished, four years after the 1852 jail; a steam flour mill east of town and the arrival of the Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad about this year bring daily mail and ship flour to other points.
11. 1863 — The first Trinity Episcopal service is held, by Rev. Thomas J. Davis of Philadelphia; the congregation, which grew from three to eighteen members, begins its brick Gothic church in 1882 and holds its first service in it on June 24, 1883.
12. 1883 — On January 16, about 11 p.m., a fire sweeps the whole north side of Main Street between Market and Jackson streets, destroying about $55,000 of buildings, the Masonic hall and the Record printing office; the population is 900 in 1880.
13. 1976-03-16 — Trinity Episcopal Church in McArthur is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
14. 2021-12 — The Vinton County Convention and Visitors Bureau purchases the 1839 McArthur Hotel and begins a restoration project starting in 2022.
15. 2025-07-08 — A fire causes extensive damage to the McArthur Hotel, which insurers declare a total loss; renovation work resumes in 2026.

Stories

A hotel that survived 186 years and one bad night

The McArthur Hotel went up in 1839, not long after the town itself was platted, and stood as the oldest building in the Vinton County seat for nearly two centuries. It passed through private hands until December 2021, when the county's Convention and Visitors Bureau bought the property with plans to restore it as a landmark, work that began in earnest in 2022. On July 8, 2025, a fire tore through the building; insurance adjusters called it a total loss. Rather than demolish it, the owners started renovation again in 2026, this time with an eye toward documenting the rebuild for a television audience — a small county seat's oldest building getting a second, very public second life.

Mrs. Bothwell's thirty-two days to Elk Township

On July 5, 1874, Charlotte E. Bothwell of McArthur wrote down how, sixty years before to the day, she and her husband and two small children had set out for Ohio from Silveysport, Maryland. The Monongahela was too low for a flatboat, so her husband bought a pirogue and hired a pilot at two dollars a day; the children were sick from the first, and they went by Brownsville, Pittsburgh, Marietta and Gallipolis, then by wagon past the salt works at Jackson through a day of soaking rain, arriving on August 5 after thirty-two days; the youngest child died four days later. Her husband had already entered 160 acres and raised the walls of a cabin that had neither floor, door, window, chimney nor roof, and she hung a tablecloth in the window hole and a bed quilt for a door. Their cabin was the only one in the neighborhood with a glass window by January 1815. About fifty families around the settlement made burr millstones, she recalled, and made so much money that they would have been rich but for whisky: every pair of stones sold brought back a barrel of it. Her account appears in the 1883 History of Hocking Valley.

The night the north side of Main Street burned

McArthur, the Hocking Valley history says, was remarkable for devastating fires, three great ones within thirteen years sweeping away the principal part of the heart of the town. The worst came at about 11 o'clock on the night of January 16, 1883. It began in the Davis building at the east end of the square on the north side of Main Street, which held a grocery, an oyster saloon, a cigar shop, a jewelry store, a shoe shop and the armory of the Fenton Guards, and moved west so fast that the hook and ladder company could not stop it: the buildings, with one or two exceptions, were old wooden shells that burned like tinder boxes. The fire took the dry goods stores, a saddle shop, saloons, meat stores, the Masonic Hall and its owner's home, a drug store, the Record printing office, a law office and several residences, the whole square between Market and Jackson streets. The loss was put at upward of $55,000, about $20,000 of it insured, and the historian thought the burned part was, in proportion to the size of the town, larger than the Chicago and Boston fires of 1871 and 1872.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Vinton County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Mcarthur, Village Of100% of residentsGroundwater wells (7 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc0% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 8 of 8 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 5 of 5.

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.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-08-25
• Financial Audit, 2021 to 2022, released 2025-11-06

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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