Prospect

How Prospect began

Prospect is a village on the Scioto River in southern Prospect Township, Marion County, about ten miles south of the city of Marion. Christian Gast, a Lutheran from Bedford County, Pennsylvania, laid it out on September 17, 1835, as Middletown, for its place midway between Delaware and Marion, while the ground still belonged to Delaware County. It grew slowly as a Welsh and Pennsylvania German market town with mills, a foundry and five churches until 1875-1876, when its citizens paid to bring the Columbus & Toledo Railroad through the town; a new plat beside the tracks was named Prospect, and in January 1876 a court changed the whole village's name to match. The population rose from 355 in 1876 to 600 in 1880 and was 1,067 at the 2020 census.

Settled 1832 (Christian Gast buys the site), platted 1835-09-17, incorporated 1871-04-03 (as Middletown; the same chapter also refers to the village being incorporated in 1876, the year of the census of 355), by Christian Gast.

Where the name comes from

Christian Gast named the town Middletown because it lay about midway between Delaware and Marion. In January 1876 his son Christian Gast Jr. recorded a sixty-lot plat beside the new Columbus & Toledo Railroad and called it Prospect, the name the surrounding township had carried since 1848; the citizens of Middletown then petitioned the Court of Common Pleas to change their village's name, because several other Middletowns in Ohio caused trouble with the mail, and on January 31, 1876, the court renamed the entire village Prospect.

Before the town

The run that curves around the south side of the village is Battle Run, named for a clash in 1820 between a patrol of the Light Horse Guards from Big Island and a Wyandot party: a Wyandot man demanded a rider's necktie, the rider struck him with his own gun, hidden Wyandot men came out of the woods, and the next day the two sides made peace over a load of pumpkins and a saddle of venison (the full story is in the Prospect Township file). The village ground lies near the Greenville Treaty line of 1795, which crosses Prospect Township. No mound or village site within the village is recorded in the sources checked.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot.

• Battle Run (battle) — the run that passes in a crescent around the south side of the village, 1820 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1832-04 — Christian Gast arrives from Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and buys the land where the village now stands, with his brother William Gast settling nearby.
2. 1835-09-17 — Gast has Middletown surveyed and platted with eighty-one lots between Elm Street and the river, plus a lot for a schoolhouse, church and burial ground; the plat is recorded at Delaware on December 28, 1835.
3. 1836-09-28 — Mary Jeannette Knight is the first burial in what became the Prospect Cemetery on the west bank of the Scioto.
4. 1837 — A post office opens at Middletown on March 2 with Jonathan P. Brookins as postmaster; until then mail had come once a week from Radnor.
5. c. 1837 — The Methodists, who had met in a room over a store, build a 24-by-30-foot frame church; it is replaced in 1858 by a 36-by-54-foot church seating 450.
6. after 1842 — During the pastorate of Rev. B. Pope, called in 1842, the Lutheran congregation organized at Christian Gast's house in the 1830s builds a church on a lot Gast donated.
7. 1845-1853 — Robert Watkins Sr. and his brother Thomas run a foundry in Middletown until Thomas, the molder, dies in 1853.
8. 1846-04-13 — Zion's Reformed Church is organized with twenty-five members after a year of meetings in the Middletown schoolhouse.
9. 1852 — A company including Jacob Spade, Christian Gast and John Gast builds the first grist mill, a steam mill on the east bank of the river.
10. 1858-07-03 — Sparks from the mill engine start a fire that destroys the mill, the Lutheran church, a house and a doctor's office; none was insured, and William Gast rebuilds the mill.
11. 1871-04-03 — Middletown is incorporated, with C. L. Mohr, C. R. Thomas and Joseph Gast as trustees.
12. 1876-01-31 — The Court of Common Pleas changes the village's name from Middletown to Prospect, the name Christian Gast Jr. had given his new plat beside the railroad.
13. 1876 — Trains begin running on the Columbus & Toledo Railroad through the east side of the village; a census taken that year counts 355 people.
14. 1880 — The census counts 600 people in the village, up from 355 in 1876.
15. 1880 — The Prospect Bank, the village's first, is organized as a private bank; a second bank follows in 1883.
16. 1888 — Prospect has two newspapers, the Advance and the Monitor, two banks and five churches, and a school census of 262.
17. 1901 — The Sanborn Map Company publishes a fire insurance map of Prospect.
18. 2020 — The village's population is recorded at 1,067, within a Prospect Township total of 2,043.

Stories

A steamboat town on paper

George C. Knight came to Middletown from the East about 1840 and traded goods for land and town lots until he owned much of the village. Wanting to sell out after five or six years, he had an artist copy the town plat in bright colors, with the Scioto running full-width past the town and steamers drawn on it, some tied up at the landing and others pushing upstream loaded with the town's produce. Taking the map and a copy of the act of Congress that declared the Scioto navigable to the mouth of the Little Scioto, he went to Pennsylvania and sold his whole holding to a group of Quakers at a high price. When the buyers arrived they found a hamlet in the woods on a stream that did not look navigable at all, and they left for good; their property was later bought up for almost nothing.

Bringing the railroad to town

The Columbus & Toledo Railroad was first surveyed on a straight line from Marion to Columbus that ran about two miles east of Middletown. David Gast went to Columbus and argued for moving the line, the company's officers came to a meeting in the village, and at a final meeting in Columbus with David Gast, George Gast, C. L. Mohr, Watt Watkins, P. C. Sells, S. H. Gast and J. J. Wottring, the company agreed to come through if the village and township gave $10,000 and subscribed $25,000 in stock. Gast promised the money on the spot, and he and S. H. Gast collected the subscriptions and the right of way. Grading began in the summer of 1875 and trains ran in 1876. The 1883 county history judged that without this effort the town would have kept the name Middletown and stood two miles or more from any railroad.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com · co.marion.oh.us · 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 · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Aqua Ohio - Marion100% of residentsScioto River and Little Scioto River intakes, blended with local groundwater wells

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2015: 4 of 4 passed.

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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