New Straitsville

• An Ohio coal fire set in 1884

How New Straitsville began

New Straitsville was founded in 1870 as a coal-mining town in the Monday Creek valley in southwestern Perry County, and boomed fast, reaching 2,782 residents at the 1880 census before the industry that built it turned against it. In 1884, during a bitter strike against the Columbus & Hocking Coal and Iron Company, unknown men pushed burning mine cars into six mines around the village in protest against replacement workers; the underground coal seam caught fire and has burned, at reduced intensity, in the hills around the village ever since. New Straitsville was also a headquarters town for the labor organizing that led to the founding of the United Mine Workers of America in 1890, and during Prohibition the same smoke-hazed hollows that hid the mine fire also hid moonshine stills, earning the village its lasting reputation as Ohio's moonshine capital.

Settled 1870, platted 1870, by New Straitsville Mining Company.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted gives a documented origin for the name 'New Straitsville' beyond the village's founding by the New Straitsville Mining Company in 1870; the 'New' suggests an intended or actual namesake connection to an earlier place called Straitsville, which was not independently confirmed in the sources checked.

Before the town

No village, camp, or named site of a historic Native nation is recorded directly at New Straitsville. The village sits within Monday Creek Township, where the 1902 county history records mounds, a village site, and Native corn-planting at nearby Whiskey Hollow and a camping place at Salt Run; none of the sources checked ties a specific site to the platted village itself.

Timeline

1. 1870 — New Straitsville founded as a coal-mining town by the New Straitsville Mining Company.
2. 1875 — Labor organizer Chris Evans arrived in New Straitsville and established a Knights of Labor chapter, beginning the village's role as an organizing center for Ohio coal miners.
3. 1880 — Village population reached 2,782 at the 1880 census, a figure repeated in 1890, its census peak.
4. 1884 — During the Hocking Valley coal strike, unknown men pushed burning mine cars into six mines surrounding New Straitsville in protest against replacement workers, igniting the underground coal seam; the fire has burned in the hills ever since.
5. 1884 — Pinkerton guards were brought into the district during the strike, and the dispute grew violent; miners later held secret strategy meetings in Robinson's Cave on a nearby hillside during the four-year contest between competing national labor organizations that followed.
6. 1890 — The competing national mine-labor organizations centered in the New Straitsville area were absorbed into the founding, in Columbus, of the United Mine Workers of America.
7. 2020 — Village population recorded at 652, down about 77% from its 1880 peak.

Stories

The mine fire of 1884

In the fall of 1884, New Straitsville's coal miners were locked in a bitter strike with the Columbus & Hocking Coal and Iron Company and other operators. On October 11, in protest against the replacement workers, unknown men pushed burning mine cars into six mines in the hills around town. The fire caught in the coal seam itself, and it has never gone fully out: for generations residents could draw water hot enough from certain wells to brew coffee, and the smoldering hillsides became a local landmark and, later, a tourist curiosity where visitors could fry an egg over a warm vent in the ground. The same fire and its drifting smoke later gave cover to the corn-whiskey stills that made New Straitsville famous during Prohibition, since the haze and sulfur smell made it hard for revenue agents to tell a still from the mine itself.

A mining town becomes the moonshine capital

By the time national Prohibition took hold in 1920, New Straitsville's coal boom had already faded, but its steep, smoke-wreathed hollows and abandoned mine works proved ideal ground for another trade: moonshining. Corn liquor distilled in and around the old mines was, by local and regional accounts, produced there on a scale that made the village synonymous with illegal whiskey nationwide, and it came to be called the moonshine capital of the world. The village still marks that history each Memorial Day weekend with its Moonshine Festival.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · theclio.com · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · discoverperrycounty.com

Every historic place in Perry County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• New Straitsville, Village Of90% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Old Straitsville Water Association10% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public libraries (1)

Auditor of State record

• Fiscal emergency: declared 1985-10-28, released 1990-05-29. source
• Financial Audit, 2021 to 2022, released 2025-05-08

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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