Pleasant City

• Wills Creek LakeBuilt 1936 · 900 acres

How Pleasant City began

Pleasant City began as Point Pleasant, a village platted in 1829 by Benjamin Wilson at the junction of the Beaver and Seneca forks of Wills Creek in Valley Township, on land held by Squire Joseph Dyson, its first storekeeper and postmaster. Its pioneers, who arrived around 1820, were mostly related families from Virginia, and for sixty years it was a farm village with a water mill, a woolen mill and a tan yard. The Cleveland and Marietta railroad of about 1880 and the opening of the Cisco coal mine in 1892 turned it into a mining town; the post office, long called Dyson, took the name Pleasant City in 1887, and the village incorporated in 1896. It reached its peak of 1,006 residents in 1900 and had about 400 in 2020.

Settled about 1820 (Jackson and James Albin families), platted 1829, as Point Pleasant, by Benjamin Wilson, incorporated 1896, by Benjamin Wilson (plat); Joseph Dyson owned the land and named the village.

Where the name comes from

Squire Joseph Dyson, the first storekeeper, postmaster and justice of the peace, named the village Point Pleasant, according to a 1904 account, presumably for the way his hill (later Jackson's hill) pushed its shoulder into the valley. The post office was first called Dyson; it was changed in 1887, when J. P. Stranathan became postmaster, and the incorporated village took the name Pleasant City.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail or mound site specific to Pleasant City or Valley Township is recorded in the 1882 or 1911 county histories or the 1895 county record; the 1911 history begins the village's story with settlers around 1820. Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Wyandot and Mingo people are recorded in the county's Wills Creek watershed.

Timeline

1. 1810 — Peter D. Robins's father, John Robins, a native of the isle of Guernsey who had come to America in 1807, settled in Valley Township.
2. 1815 — The county commissioners organized Valley Township on March 25, 1815, from land formerly in other townships.
3. 1820 — By about 1820 the Jackson family south of the future town and the James Albin family north of it had been joined by the Robins, Fishel, Clark, Frye, Cale, Trenner, Secrest, Spaid and Dyson families, most of them related before they left Virginia.
4. 1829 — Benjamin Wilson platted Point Pleasant on July 24, on the northeast quarter of section 13, at the junction of the Beaver and Seneca forks of Wills Creek.
5. 1830 — The first lots, four rods wide by ten deep, were surveyed along Main Street, which was a county road straightened and widened.
6. 1840 — Squire Joseph Dyson, the first merchant, whose goods came overland from Baltimore, died about 1840; his son Thomas carried on the store.
7. 1864 — St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran church was organized on April 1 in the village school house under Rev. Reuben Smith; its members had shared the Methodist Episcopal building until they built their own church in 1869 and 1870.
8. 1866 — Point Pleasant Lodge No. 360, Free and Accepted Masons, was chartered on October 17.
9. 1880 — The Cleveland and Marietta railroad, later the Marietta division of the Pennsylvania, was built through the village about this time, giving farmers and merchants rail shipping.
10. 1882 — Dr. J. A. Kackley, a graduate of Columbus Medical College, opened a practice in Point Pleasant; his father, Jonathan R. Kackley, had once owned the Point Pleasant mill and rafted flour down to Ohio River points at high water.
11. 1886 — A roller-process flouring mill with a daily capacity of forty barrels was built.
12. 1887 — The post office, known until then as Dyson, was changed when J. P. Stranathan became postmaster; he served until July 1909.
13. 1891 — A new school building replaced the two-story frame school that Harrison Secrest had built at his own extra cost.
14. 1892 — Work began on the Cisco mine, the first effort to work the coal fields at Pleasant City.
15. 1895 — The People's Bank of Pleasant City was established, with George J. Markley as proprietor and W. F. Bierly as cashier.
16. 1896 — Pleasant City was incorporated as a village.
17. 1900 — The village's population peaked at 1,006, its high point in the census record.
18. 1902 — About this year a Cincinnati firm opened a glass works in the village that made telephone and telegraph insulators; it later closed, and by 1910 Pittsburgh steel makers were leasing the buildings for experiments.
19. 1905 — A Sanborn Fire Insurance Map was drawn of Pleasant City's commercial buildings, part of a series (1905, 1913, 1922, 1946) that recorded the village's downtown over four decades.
20. 1907 — C. L. Stranathan founded the Recorder in February, after the Record, the News, the Citizen and the Leader had each failed.
21. 1920 — Population had fallen to 781 from its 1900 peak.
22. 2020 — The census recorded 400 residents in Pleasant City.

Stories

Point Pleasant's Virginia families

In December 1904 Abe T. Secrest wrote a history of the village as a Christmas souvenir, and the 1911 county history reprinted it. He found that almost every early family in the township had come from Virginia, and that many were related before they left: Henry Secrest's wife was a Spaid, and the wives of Fishel, Trenner and William Spaid were Secrest women. The Robins family came from the isle of Guernsey and the Jackson and Thompson families from Pennsylvania. Until the Civil War, families still traveled back to visit relatives in the Shenandoah Valley. Secrest wrote that the settlement wanted the Union preserved but was reluctant to fight its Virginia cousins, so few men from Valley Township volunteered; one who did, N. H. Larrick, fought against a cousin at the battle of Winchester.

Mill, tan yard and the Cisco mine

The first industry at Point Pleasant was probably a water-powered grist mill, later given a steam engine so it could run when the creek was low; a woolen mill was built beside it, and people brought wool from miles around to be spun into yarn or woven into cloth and blankets. A tan yard used bark from the nearby oak forests. For about half a century after that the village changed little; lots were cheap and there were no public works to draw people. In 1892 work began on the Cisco mine, which Secrest called the close of the village's middle ages. Newcomers came with the mines, and Secrest wrote in 1904 that the original settlers had become a small minority.

The first school and the two-story schoolhouse

According to Secrest's 1904 account, the first cabin school near Pleasant City stood near the Hopewell cemetery, about a mile north of town; a later cabin school stood at the forks of the road. When the village built its first frame schoolhouse, on the site later used by the Masonic hall, the building committee chose a one-room plan. Harrison Secrest, a builder who had also burned a brick kiln and put up the village's only brick building, built two stories instead and paid the extra cost himself. The two rooms served, though often crowded, until a new school was built in the autumn of 1891. Wash Glass taught three generations of the village to sing by shape notes.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Pleasant City, Village Of100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 6 of 6 passed.

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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-08-19

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