Philo

How Philo began

Philo began as Taylorsville, a village James Taylor laid out on the Muskingum River in 1833 and built up with mills and a dam at nearby Duncan Falls. A new post office in 1851 renamed the town Philo, for early settler Philo Buckingham, and it grew as a river-commerce and coal town into the 20th century. The township around it -- organized in 1839 and named for General William Henry Harrison -- was first settled decades earlier by a family that reportedly lived in a hollowed sycamore tree near the mouth of Black run. In 1924 American Electric Power built a coal-fired generating plant on the riverbank, and in 1957 its Unit 6 became the first commercial supercritical steam-electric generating unit built anywhere in the world; the plant closed in 1975, and the village of about 720 people has worked through the same decline as many small industrial river towns since.

Settled 1798 (Harrison Township's first settlers), platted 1833, as Taylorsville, incorporated 1851 post office opens as Philo, by James Taylor.

Where the name comes from

Originally Taylorsville for founder James Taylor, the village was renamed Philo in 1851 when its first post office opened, honoring early settler Philo Buckingham. The surrounding township took a separate name: organized December 20, 1839 out of parts of Blue Rock, Brush Creek, and Salt Creek townships, it was named Harrison Township by petitioner John Hammond, in honor of General William Henry Harrison.

Before the town

No source consulted documents a named Native American village, mound, trail, or treaty boundary specifically at the site of Philo/Taylorsville. The village sits on the Muskingum River in Harrison Township, part of the Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Mingo homeland before the Treaty of Greenville (1795), and the Muskingum River corridor generally was a major Native travel route, but no site-specific record for the village itself was found.

Timeline

1. 1798 — The first recorded settlers in what became Harrison Township are a family named Bean, who lived in a large hollow sycamore tree near the mouth of Black run; the Larrisons, Farleys, and Cobbs arrive soon after.
2. 1804 — George Dutro settles on section seventeen; Jacob Baker arrives about the same time.
3. 1829-1830 — James Taylor builds a dam and sawmill across the Muskingum at Duncan's Falls in 1829, and a gristmill there the following year.
4. 1830 — James Taylor erects the first frame house in Taylorsville.
5. 1833 — James Taylor lays out the village of Taylorsville on the Muskingum River, naming it for himself; the same year Gearing Scarvell opens the township's first store.
6. 1834 — The first public school-house, a two-story frame building on the public square, opens in Taylorsville, with Robert Sheppard as teacher.
7. 1836 — Amos F. Whissen builds Taylorsville's first brick house.
8. 1839 — Harrison Township is organized December 20 out of parts of Blue Rock, Brush Creek, and Salt Creek townships, and named for General William Henry Harrison by petitioner John Hammond.
9. 1840 — The one-mile Taylorsville Canal, part of the state's Muskingum River navigation improvements, is completed, with locks thirty-six feet wide and two hundred feet long.
10. 1851 — Taylorsville's first post office opens under the name Philo, honoring early settler Philo Buckingham; the village takes the new name.
11. 1924 — A coal-fired electric generating plant is built at Philo on the Muskingum River.
12. 1957 — Unit 6 at the Philo Power Plant becomes the first commercial supercritical steam-electric generating unit in the world.
13. 1960 — Philo's population peaks at 913 residents.
14. 1975 — The Philo Power Plant closes.
15. 2020 — The census records 720 residents in Philo.

Stories

A world-first generator in a small river village

For a village that never held much more than a thousand people, Philo produced a genuine engineering first. American Electric Power's plant on the riverbank, built in 1924, grew over the following decades, and in 1957 its Unit 6 became the first commercial supercritical steam-electric generating unit built anywhere in the world, a technology that let the plant burn coal more efficiently by running its steam above the critical pressure point. The rotors from that generator later became public art outside the AEP Building in Columbus, a piece of Philo's industrial history relocated to the state capital. The plant closed in 1975 and a linked steel-alloy plant in 1980, and the jobs never came back in the same way, leaving the village to manage the same long decline as other small Ohio towns whose one major employer shut its gates.

Two names for one river village

James Taylor platted his namesake village, Taylorsville, on the Muskingum River in 1833, four years after building mills and a dam at nearby Duncan Falls. The name lasted less than two decades: when the village got its first post office in 1851, the office and then the village took the name Philo, after Philo Buckingham, one of the settlers on the ground rather than the founder who laid out the lots. It is a small but telling example of how many early Ohio river towns went through a name or two before the one that stuck.

A pioneer family's sycamore home

Before James Taylor ever platted a village on the Muskingum, the township's earliest recorded settlers had already arrived. In 1798, the 1882 county history reports, a family named Bean inhabited a large sycamore tree that stood near the mouth of Black run -- a detail preserved not because it was unusual for the time but because it was one of the few things anyone could still recall about the township's first arrivals when the county history was compiled eighty years later. The Larrisons, Farleys, and Cobbs followed soon after, then Nathaniel Ayers, Samuel McBride, James Hemmet, Henry Ballou, James Neff, and Thomas Winn; decades later James Taylor's mills and dam at Duncan's Falls, and his platted village of Taylorsville, grew out of that same stretch of river bottom.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Philo95% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Muskingum County Water - Se5% of residentsMuskingum River buried valley aquifer (wells near Duncan Falls)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Who holds office

Roster as of 2019: county board of elections.

Money issues on the ballot since 2018: 0 of 2 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 0 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

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-04-03

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.

Cite this page