Rendville

How Rendville began

Rendville was founded in 1879 by Chicago coal operator William P. Rend, who broke with the near-universal practice of Ohio mine owners by hiring Black miners alongside white and immigrant labor, making the new Sunday Creek Valley coal town one of Ohio's first racially integrated communities. Within a decade Black residents made up roughly a third of a boomtown population that reached nearly 1,800 (sources give differing figures for both), and the village elected Dr. Isaiah Tuppins mayor in 1888 (one source says 1886), one of the first Black mayors in the United States. It was home in the 1880s and 1890s to Richard L. Davis, a Black miner who became a national officer of the newly formed United Mine Workers of America and a leading voice for interracial labor solidarity, and briefly to a young miner named Adam Clayton Powell Sr., converted at a Rendville revival before he went on to lead Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. As the coal ran out the village shrank for a century; the 2020 census counted 28 residents, making Rendville the smallest incorporated village in Ohio, and a local preservation society now works to keep its history from being lost with it.

Settled 1879, platted 1879, incorporated 1879 (post office opened; village incorporated soon after), by William P. Rend.

Where the name comes from

Named for its founder, William P. Rend, a Chicago-based coal operator who opened mines in the Sunday Creek Valley and built the town to house his workforce.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or treaty ground specific to the Rendville site is documented; the settlement did not exist until coal mining began there in 1879, a century after the historic nations had been pushed from the Ohio country. The 1883 Perry County history, written within a few years of Rendville's founding, describes the Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware) and Wyandot as the principal occupants of the county in the eighteenth century, camping temporarily along Sunday Creek — the same stream Rendville sits on — and Monday Creek, and near the Great Swamp, rather than maintaining permanent towns in this part of the county. The region's record also includes Hopewell earthworks.

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

Timeline

1. 1879 — William P. Rend, a Chicago coal operator, founds Rendville as a company mining town in the Sunday Creek Valley and opens a post office.
2. 1882 — Richard L. Davis, a 20-year-old Black miner born in Roanoke, Virginia, settles in Rendville after working mines in West Virginia's Kanawha and New River fields.
3. 1884 — Adam Clayton Powell (later Powell Sr.), a 19-year-old miner, arrives in Rendville and is converted at a revival at the local Baptist church, a turning point that leads him away from mining and toward the ministry.
4. 1888 — Dr. Isaiah Tuppins, the first Black person to earn a medical degree in Ohio (Columbus Medical College, now Ohio State's medical school), is elected mayor of Rendville, among the first Black mayors elected in the United States.
5. 1890 — Richard L. Davis serves as a delegate to the founding convention of the United Mine Workers of America in Columbus and is elected to the executive board of UMWA District 6 (Ohio), a post he holds until 1896.
6. 1890 — Population peaks near 859 (a 146 percent jump from 1880), with a Black population the 1883-era county history and later accounts put at roughly 300 of about 1,800 mine workers and families in the wider Rendville-Corning district at the height of the boom.
7. 1897 — Davis wins the highest vote total among fourteen candidates for the UMWA's international executive board, becoming the highest-ranking Black officer in the union to that date; letters he had been writing to the National Labor Tribune and United Mine Workers' Journal since the mid-1890s argue steadily for interracial labor solidarity.
8. 1900 — Davis, blacklisted by mine operators and no longer paid by the union for organizing work, dies in Rendville on January 24 of 'lung fever' at age 35.
9. 1963 — Roberta Preston is appointed postmaster of Rendville, the first African American woman in Ohio to hold that position.
10. 1969 — Sophia Mitchell is elected mayor of Rendville, becoming Ohio's first Black woman mayor.
11. 2020 — Census records 28 residents, the smallest population of any incorporated place in Ohio.

Stories

Richard L. Davis and the color line in the mines

Richard L. Davis came to Rendville in 1882 already a veteran of the pits, having worked in a Roanoke tobacco factory from age eight and then in West Virginia coal before he was twenty. In Rendville's mixed workforce he found an argument he would spend the rest of his short life making: that Black and white miners had to organize together or operators would keep using Black strikebreakers to break every white-led strike, and white unions would keep losing. He joined the Knights of Labor, then helped found the United Mine Workers of America in Columbus in January 1890, one of two Black delegates at the founding convention, and was elected the same year to the executive board of UMWA District 6. Over the 1890s he wrote roughly 168 letters to the National Labor Tribune and the United Mine Workers' Journal, plainspoken dispatches arguing for wages, safety and racial equality in the mines in the same breath, and in 1897 he polled highest among fourteen candidates for a seat on the union's national executive board, the most senior position any Black officer had held in the UMWA. It did not last. By 1898 mine operators had blacklisted him and the union stopped paying him for organizing work; broke and out of the mines that had defined his life, he died in Rendville in January 1900, a month past his thirty-fifth birthday, and is remembered locally as 'the Sage of Rendville.'

A miner's revival and Harlem's largest pulpit

Adam Clayton Powell arrived in Rendville in August 1884, nineteen years old and by his own later account living hard, one more miner among the men Rend's mines had drawn from up and down the Appalachian coalfield. He was 'saved' at a revival at the village's First Baptist Church, a conversion he credited for the rest of his life with turning him away from the mines and toward the ministry. Powell worked his way through Wayland Seminary and was ordained in 1892; after pastorates in Philadelphia and New Haven, he was called in 1908 to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, which he built into one of the nation's largest Protestant congregations, and helped co-found the National Urban League. His son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., would become the first Black congressman elected from New York. The turning point both men's public lives trace back to sits, marked or not, somewhere in a coal camp of a few hundred people in the hills of Perry County.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · encyclopedia.com · rendvillehistory.org · discoverperrycounty.com · woub.org · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Corning, Village Of47% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-hemlock20% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-buckingham15% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-congo10% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Portersville East Branch Water Co.6% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Oakdale Water District3% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-11-07

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