Quaker City

• Salt Fork LakeBuilt 1967 · 2,952 acres

How Quaker City began

Quaker City was platted as Millwood by Jonah Smith on February 18, 1835, in Millwood Township, which was settled from about 1805 onward by families from North Carolina and Pennsylvania who belonged to the Society of Friends. Growth was slow until a store opened at the site in 1870, after which the village grew to a peak of 878 residents by 1900 and took the name Quaker City for its Quaker founders. It is now known chiefly for the Ohio Hills Folk Festival, whose roots reach back to an 1871 fall fair and which has run under its current form since 1904, making it the longest continuously running festival in Ohio.

Settled 1805 (John Hall and other Quaker families), platted February 18, 1835, as Millwood, by Jonah Smith, by Jonah Smith.

Where the name comes from

The village was platted as Millwood in Millwood Township, whose population was heavily Quaker from its earliest settlement; it later took the name Quaker City in reference to that Society of Friends community, and Millwood survives as the township's name and an old alternate name for the village.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail, or mound site specific to Quaker City or Millwood Township was found in the sources checked. Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, and Mingo people are recorded in the county's Wills Creek watershed.

Timeline

1. 1805 — John Hall came from North Carolina and purchased a tract of land near the site of the future village of Quaker City, part of an early wave of Quaker settlement in what became Millwood Township.
2. 1830 — John Hall opened a general store a mile and a half east of Quaker City, an early commercial venture in the township.
3. 1835 — Jonah Smith platted the village as Millwood, on section 20 of Millwood Township, on February 18.
4. 1839 — Isaac W. Hall entered the mercantile business at Quaker City and later became the founding president of the village's national bank.
5. 1850 — The first settlement recorded specifically at the Quaker City site was made about this year, though growth remained slow.
6. 1870 — A store opened at Quaker City, after which the village's growth picked up from its earlier static state.
7. 1871 — A fall fair was held that later local tradition traces as the origin of what became the Ohio Hills Folk Festival.
8. 1900 — Quaker City's population peaked at 878.
9. 1904 — The fair tradition was reestablished at Quaker City in the form that grew into today's Ohio Hills Folk Festival, now billed as the longest-running festival in Ohio.

Stories

A Quaker village takes its name

Millwood Township filled up after 1805 with families of the Society of Friends, John Hall's among the first, who came from North Carolina and Pennsylvania looking for land outside the slaveholding South. By the 1880s the township's biographical record reads like a roll of a Friends meeting: family after family in the county history is noted simply as belonging to the Society of Friends. The village Jonah Smith platted there in 1835, first called Millwood, grew slowly until a store opened in 1870 finally gave it commercial life, and it came to be called Quaker City for the community that had shaped it from the start, with Millwood left behind as the township's name.

Ohio's longest-running festival

Quaker City traces its annual festival back to a fall fair held in 1871, in the young village's Quaker-founded community. That fair lapsed, but was revived in 1904, and the event held every year since on Fair and South Streets has grown into the Ohio Hills Folk Festival, which by 2025 was marking its 121st year and is promoted as the longest continuously running festival anywhere in Ohio. It draws crowds back to a village whose census population has fallen to under 400, for a weekend of music, crafts, and homecoming built on a tradition older than the automobile.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Quaker City100% of residentsBarnesville Reservoirs #1, #2 & Slope Creek Reservoir

Community health centers (1)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 4 of 4 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.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-12-05

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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