Neville

How Neville began

Neville sits on the Ohio River survey that the 1880 county history calls the first located anywhere in Clermont County, if not in the state of Ohio -- the ground where John Gregg's party made the first, ultimately abandoned, attempt at settlement in Washington Township in the summer of 1795. The village itself was formally laid out in 1808 and named for Gen. Presley Neville, who owned the original town site; a post office followed in 1816. Neville has been hit hard by 20th- and 21st-century Ohio River flooding, most severely in March 1997, when a federal buyout of flood-prone properties cost the village more than half its population.

Settled 1795, platted 1808, incorporated 1854 (village government dates from 1854; earlier special charter), by Gen. Presley Neville, original owner of the town site, through his agent Jonathan Taylor.

Where the name comes from

The village is named for Gen. Presley Neville, who owned the original town site; the underlying "Neville survey" was already known by that name in 1795, when John Gregg's party mistakenly settled on it instead of the neighboring Anderson survey Gregg actually held title to.

Before the town

No mound, earthwork or documented historic-era Native village, encounter or battle is recorded for the Neville site itself. The Edgington Mound and Snead Mound, prehistoric sites recorded in the 1880 county history and listed on the National Register, lie in Washington Township near Neville and may fall within or close to the village's own vicinity, though the record places them no more precisely than 'east of Neville' and 'near Neville.' Neither is tied to a named historic nation. For the 1795 attempt at settlement on the Neville survey, see the story below.

• Edgington Mound (mound) — Washington Township, east of Neville, prehistoric, unspecified (en.wikipedia.org)
• Snead Mound (mound) — Washington Township, near Neville, prehistoric, unspecified (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1787-11-13 — John O'Bannon's surveying party lands on the north bank of the Ohio and surveys 1,400 acres for Colonel Presley Neville of the Virginia line, the survey on which the village of Neville now stands and the first located in Clermont County.
2. 1795 — Summer: John Gregg's party settles on the Neville survey by mistake, clearing land and planting a crop before discovering the error; they abandon the site soon after (an earlier passage in the same county history puts a first log cabin there by Buchanan and Gregg in 1793 or 1794).
3. 1808 — Neville is formally laid out and named for Gen. Presley Neville, owner of the original town site.
4. 1812 — General Neville adds 20 in-lots and 56 out-lots and moves to the village from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, living in a large double hewed-log house; the revived town draws immigrants, and Arthur Stewart is said to have opened its first store about this year.
5. 1816 — A post office is established at Neville.
6. 1819 — Elijah Larkin takes charge of the Neville post office and serves until 1845.
7. 1830 — Hunt & Pratt, who acquire the village's ox-mill about 1830, build the brick buildings at its east end; the mill is later steam-powered and becomes a distillery that by 1848 can distill 1,000 bushels of grain a day, burning down soon after 1870.
8. 1854 — The present Neville village government dates from 1854, when Elijah Larkin is mayor, although a special charter had given the town corporate privileges many years earlier.
9. 1880 — Neville has about 500 inhabitants (445 by census) and a decayed appearance, its river trade having gone to Fostoria, Kentucky, and to Moscow, though it still has several churches and substantial residences.
10. 1974 — July 15: the Edgington Mound, east of Neville, is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
11. 1974 — July 30: the Snead Mound, near Neville, is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
12. 1997 — March: a major Ohio River flood devastates Neville; a subsequent federal buyout of flood-prone properties buys out about 40 percent of the village's flood-prone lots, and the village loses more than half its population.
13. 2016 — Residents vote down an initiative to dissolve the village into Washington Township; it faces possible insolvency after cuts to the state Local Government Fund.
14. 2020 — The 2020 census counts 87 residents in Neville, down from 445 in 1880.

Stories

The wrong survey

Neville's earliest settlement story is one of good intentions undone by a surveyor's line. In the summer of 1795, John Gregg brought a small party -- William Buchanan, Buchanan's wife Jane, and an unnamed former river scout -- down from Kentucky to improve a tract he believed he owned, meaning to raise a crop of corn and potatoes for other Pennsylvania families waiting to follow him if the land proved good. They built a rough half-faced cabin with a bark roof and moss chinking, cooked over an open fire beside a large stump, cleared a few acres, and put in their crop -- only to discover, once the work was largely done, that they had settled on the Neville survey rather than the Anderson survey that actually held Gregg's title. An examination of his own land convinced Gregg it was too poor to bother improving, and he abandoned the Neville-survey clearing entirely, eventually moving on to the Mad River country, where he died shortly after arriving. The name of the survey he had mistakenly settled outlasted his brief stay on it: when the site was formally platted as a town thirteen years later, in 1808, it kept the name Neville, for Gen. Presley Neville, the survey's actual owner.

The distillery that kept Neville busy

The old ox-mill at the east end of Neville was bought about 1830 by Hunt & Pratt, who put up the brick buildings and meant the larger one for a hotel that was never used as such. The mill was enlarged and fitted with steam power, and Carlos Gould and Turpin Daughters, the next owners, added a bigger engine and began distilling grain. William Davis & Co. doubled the capacity and added a saw mill; when that firm failed in 1848, David Gibson & Co. took over and raised the output to a thousand bushels of grain a day. Orr & Lewis ran it next, then John P. Levis, until the distillery burned soon after 1870. While it lasted, the 1880 county history says, it gave work to many men and kept much activity in a river village that had otherwise begun to decay.

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

Eleven vertical wells and one collector well in the Ohio River valley aquifer at Clermontville and Moscow The water here

• Tate-monroe Water Association100% of residentsOhio River valley aquifer (collector/vertical wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

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, 2022 to 2023, released 2026-03-03
• Financial Audit, 2020 to 2021, released 2024-11-07

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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