Pomeroy

• Ambrose Bierce1842-c. 1914Meigs County-born satirist, journalist and short-story writer, author of The Dev...

• James McHenry JonesPerson · 1859-1909
• Kid ElberfeldPerson · 1875-1944
• Valentine B. HortonPerson · 1802-1888
• Pomeroy coal and salt industriesInvention or first · 1819-1848

How Pomeroy began

Pomeroy was founded around 1804 when Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, a Boston merchant, bought land here from the Ohio Company; the settlement grew slowly under the name Nyesville until Pomeroy and his sons and sons-in-law organized a coal-mining company in the 1830s and built the town on it. Coal and, after 1848, brine-well salt made it a 19th-century river-trade hub, with a downtown squeezed onto a narrow shelf between the Ohio River and a steep hillside, giving Pomeroy its distinctive stepped, terraced streets and a courthouse with entrances on three different levels. It was incorporated in 1840 and became the Meigs County seat in 1841. Repeated floods (1884, 1913, 1937) and the postwar decline of coal and salt shrank the town from a mid-19th-century peak of roughly 6,000 people to 1,573 at the 2020 census.

Settled 1804-1806, incorporated 1840, by Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy and Samuel Ervin.

Where the name comes from

The village was first called Nyesville, after Nial Nye, who ran a tavern, mill and wharf-boat there from 1826. It was renamed for Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, the Boston merchant and land speculator whose family developed the surrounding coal lands in the 1830s.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail or burial site has been documented within Pomeroy's own village limits in the sources we checked. A National Register site called 'Mound Cemetery Mound' is sometimes tied to Pomeroy's ZIP code, but that Adena burial mound is actually located north of the separate community of Chester, in Chester Township, several miles from the village. The county as a whole held numerous Adena-era burial mounds, many destroyed by early settlers digging for relics, and the land was claimed by the United States from the Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee and other nations of the Northwest Territory confederation through the Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789) and, more fully, the Treaty of Greenville (1795); Pomeroy sits within the area the Ohio Company purchased from Congress in 1787, on the American side of the pre-1795 frontier along the Ohio River.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware), Adena culture.

Timeline

1. 1804 — Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, a Boston merchant, purchased land from the Ohio Company along the Ohio River at the site that would become Pomeroy.
2. 1819 — David Bradshaw opened the first coal bank in the Pomeroy area, beginning coal mining that would dominate the local economy for over a century.
3. 1827 — A post office opened under the name Nyesville, the settlement's original name.
4. 1835-1836 — The Pomeroy company built the steam towboat Condor, one of the first coal-fired (rather than wood-fired) boats on the Ohio River, able to tow loaded coal barges to Cincinnati and back on a weekly run.
5. 1840 — The village of Pomeroy was incorporated.
6. 1841 — Pomeroy became the seat of Meigs County.
7. 1848 — Salt production began after brine was struck in deep coal-company wells, adding a second extractive industry to the local economy.
8. 1884 — One of the village's most disastrous floods struck Pomeroy; a fire the same year was one of several that destroyed its old wooden buildings.
9. 1913 — A major Ohio River flood hit Pomeroy, one of the most disastrous in its history.
10. 1937 — The Ohio River flood of 1937, one of the most disastrous on record for the entire Ohio Valley, devastated Pomeroy along with other river towns.
11. 1945 — Coal and salt production in the Pomeroy area were not resumed after World War II, leading to sustained economic and population decline.
12. 1978 — The Pomeroy Historic District, covering the village's 19th-century downtown, was added to the National Register of Historic Places; a boundary increase was added later.

Stories

A courthouse built into a cliff

Pomeroy's downtown sits on a shelf so narrow between the Ohio River and the hillside behind it that the streets had to be terraced, one above another, up the slope. The Meigs County Courthouse, built in 1848 in the Greek Revival style and enlarged with wings along the hillside in 1877, was built directly into that hillside: because of the grade, the building has entrances on three different ground-level floors, a detail that got it featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not! The same terraced, stair-stepped layout still defines the whole historic district today.

The Condor and the coal boom

In 1833 Samuel Pomeroy organized a mining company with his two sons and two sons-in-law and began working the coal seams along the river in earnest; by the mid-1830s the operation employed about 200 men, many of them Welsh immigrants experienced in mining, and pulled roughly two million bushels of coal a year out of the hillsides. At Coalport, just below the town, miners drove horizontal shafts more than a hundred feet above the river and let gravity carry loaded coal cars down a series of graded tracks to the water. In 1835-36 the company built the steamboat Condor, one of the first towboats on the Ohio River to burn coal instead of wood, and used it to tow barges of Pomeroy coal down to Cincinnati and back every week, burning about 2,000 bushels a trip. The town grew from twelve families in 1834 to roughly 1,600 people by 1846 on the strength of that trade.

When the war ended, so did the work

Coal and the salt wells that were sunk into the coal-company's shafts after 1848 kept Pomeroy's economy running for more than a century, surviving the floods of 1884, 1913 and 1937 that repeatedly swamped the low riverside downtown. World War II gave the mines and salt works one last surge of demand. But when the war ended, coal and salt production in the Pomeroy area was not resumed, and the village's population, which had peaked near 6,500 in 1860, went into a decline that has continued for eighty years, leaving a 2020 population of 1,573 in a downtown built for a city several times that size.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · meigs.ohgenweb.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · data.epa.gov · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Meigs County on the full map

Groundwater wells (2 wells) The water here

• Pomeroy Village55% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Leading Creek Conservancy District41% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Middleport Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Syracuse Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public libraries (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Police stations (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 4 of 5 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 1.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

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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