New Vienna

How New Vienna began

New Vienna lies in the southeastern part of Green Township near the Highland County line, on land the Hussey brothers, Joshua and Stephen, settled in 1806-07 and where Micajah Nordyke donated three acres in 1809 for a Friends meeting house. It was laid off on April 21, 1835 by the surveyor Nathan Linton for Thomas Hussey as Buzzard's Glory, a name the 1915 county history ties to buzzards drawn to hides at a debt-ridden tanyard about 1812-13; Harkens T. Van Winkle gave it the name New Vienna. The Friends once ran their principal American printing office here, the village ranked as the county's second town in 1880 with 797 people, and the Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern ran through it. It had about 900 people in 1915 and 1,108 in 2020.

Settled 1806, platted 1835-04-21, by Harkens T. Van Winkle (renaming); original settlement by Joshua and Stephen Hussey.

Where the name comes from

Platted in 1835 under the name Buzzard's Glory, tied by the 1915 county history to a tannery incident around 1812-13; Harkens T. Van Winkle changed the name to New Vienna, presumably evoking the European capital in the fashion common to small Ohio towns of the era, though no source gives his specific reason.

Before the town

No village, trail or mound specific to New Vienna's own ground was found in the sources checked. Shawnee and Miami people were present in this part of Clinton County before the 1795 Treaty of Greeneville. The nearby ghost town of Fallsville, for which the Fallsville Falls and Wildlife Area are named, was in Highland County rather than here, so no Native history tied to that name belongs specifically to New Vienna.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Miami.

Timeline

1. 1806-1807 — Joshua and Stephen Hussey emigrated from North Carolina and settled the ground where New Vienna was later platted.
2. c. 1809 — Micajah Nordyke gives three acres where the Quaker cemetery lies and a two-room log Friends meeting house is built, with a stone hearth in each room for charcoal and sliding shutters between them.
3. 1812-1813 — A tannery incident reportedly gave the future village its first nickname, Buzzard's Glory.
4. 1820 — The first house built expressly as a school, on what became Fred Johnson's lot, is put up and warmed by the first stove brought to the village.
5. 1826 — Thomas and Joshua Hussey start a gristmill, and in 1833 install an engine to run a steam grist and saw mill.
6. 1827 — Rafe Mortinier and Stephen Hussey sink a tanyard in the part of town called Canada.
7. 1829 — Stephen Hussey and William Reese open the first store, and Jonathan Haworth and Thomas Reese start a carding mill; Zion Rains opens an oil mill for linseed oil about 1834.
8. 1835 (April 21) — The village was formally platted; Harkens T. Van Winkle renamed it New Vienna.
9. 1840 — The liberal Baptists who split from the Hard-Shell Baptist church east of the village build their own church.
10. 1850 — The Methodist Episcopal church, organized about 1848, builds its first house of worship; the present building replaces it in 1876.
11. 1866 — The Church of Christ is organized and builds a church in 1866-67 after a missionary has worked there since 1859.
12. 1871 — The Friends build their present meeting house; at that time they had their principal printing office in the United States in New Vienna, sending out weekly papers, monthlies and books.
13. 1880 — New Vienna has 797 residents in the census and ranks second to Wilmington among the county's towns, commanding in some respects a larger trade than the county seat.
14. 1915 — New Vienna is a village of about 900, with a municipal water and light plant, a bank, a flour mill, a creamery, a tile and brick plant and a high school praised by the U.S. commissioner of education.
15. 2000 — The village's population peaked at 1,294 residents.
16. 2020 — The village's population was recorded as 1,108 at the census.

Stories

From Buzzard's Glory to New Vienna

Few Ohio villages carried as blunt an early name as New Vienna did. Settled by the Hussey brothers in 1806-07, the crossroads that would become the village picked up the nickname Buzzard's Glory around 1812-13, tied in the 1915 county history to an incident at a local tannery — precisely the kind of frontier joke-name that boosters later worked hard to bury. When the village was formally platted on April 21, 1835, Harkens T. Van Winkle gave it the name it carries today, New Vienna, trading the tannery's reputation for the borrowed prestige of a European capital, a common move for small Ohio towns staking a claim to respectability as they grew.

The Friends' two-room meeting house

Quakers from North Carolina and Tennessee, among them Micajah Nordyke and the Husseys, made the first public improvement in the New Vienna neighborhood about 1809, a meeting house. Nordyke gave three acres on what became Lawrence Wright's farm, and the Friends built a log house of two rooms, each with one door and one window and a stone hearth in the center where charcoal was burned, since no stoves could be had. The rooms were joined by sliding shutters in the partition, so that the two halves of the meeting could be opened to each other. The first school in the neighborhood was taught in a private house, then in this log meeting house by Robert Ellis; the Friends used it until 1871, when they built their present house. By then New Vienna was the site of the Friends' principal printing office in the United States, which sent out their papers, monthlies and books. This account is from the 1915 county history.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• New Vienna Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (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 2025-12-02

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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