Ridgeway

• Ohio's Archaic periodOhio's Archaic period ran 7,000 years. People here built dugout canoes, grew squash, buried dogs beside their dead and traded Lake Superior copper.

How Ridgeway began

Ridgeway was established in 1851 in Hale Township, on the Hardin-Logan county line in southeastern Hardin County. It grew up alongside Mount Victory near a saw and grist mill district built between the 1850s and 1880s, and it sits immediately beside the Ridgeway Site, the glacial gravel kame where a railroad crew uncovered hundreds of ancient burials in 1856 -- now the type site for the Glacial Kame archaeological culture. Ridgeway remains a small village whose schools consolidated with Mount Victory's in the 1960s to form Ridgemont Local Schools.

Platted 1851-05-20, incorporated 1858-12-07 (as West Ridgeway), by William Boggs and Samuel McCulloch, proprietors; surveyed by county surveyor R. D. Millar.

Where the name comes from

Named for the Ridgeway family, the original owners of the town site (Wikipedia and the 1910 county history); the 1883 county history says it was named in honor of the Ridgeway Company, from whom Samuel McCulloch bought the land. It was incorporated as West Ridgeway.

Before the town

Ridgeway sits immediately next to the Ridgeway Site, a glacial kame between the villages of Ridgeway and Mount Victory that produced one of the most important Glacial Kame culture burial excavations in the Midwest. Railroad workers cutting gravel there in 1856 uncovered several hundred burials -- estimates run from about 308 to over 400 individuals, including more than fifty children under age eight -- along with cremations, a 90-foot string of shell beads wrapped around a group of bodies, copper beads and tools, worked stone, carved bird stones, rattlesnake rattles, and dogs buried with people. Careful excavation records by John Matson made the site the type site for the Glacial Kame culture, an Archaic-period tradition (about 8000-1000 BC) whose heartland archaeologists now place in Hardin and Logan counties. No source documents a later, historic-era (Wyandot or Shawnee) village at the Ridgeway site itself; that later history belongs several miles west, around Roundhead.

• Ridgeway Site (burial) — glacial kame between the villages of Ridgeway and Mount Victory, Glacial Kame culture, Archaic (about 8000-1000 BC) (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1851 — Ridgeway is established in Hale Township, the same year as neighboring Mount Victory.
2. 1851-spring — William Callahan builds a saw mill south of the railroad in the west part of the new town of Ridgeway, on four acres bought from Samuel McCulloch; it saws the lumber for the first houses, and Gorham Bunker builds the first frame house.
3. 1851 — Ridgeway's post office is established in 1851 or 1852 with Michael Printz as postmaster; W. P. Hews opens the first store, Robert Stevenson the first hotel and blacksmith shop in 1852, and Dr. D. C. Wooley is the first physician.
4. 1853 — A public school is organized in Ridgeway and a small frame house built for it; it is replaced by a brick union school in 1866-67.
5. 1856 — Railroad workers cutting gravel from a kame between Ridgeway and Mount Victory for the Bellefontaine and Indiana Railroad uncover hundreds of ancient burials.
6. 1858-12-07 — The village is incorporated as West Ridgeway on the petition of forty-eight resident voters.
7. 1859 — William Callahan buys a saw mill built by Van Deuser & Headly, adds two run of buhrs for a grist mill and takes William R. Watson as partner; about 1868 Campbell & Howe build a saw mill and stave factory on the same ground.
8. 1880 — A four-room brick school is built at West Ridgeway for about $5,000.
9. 1881 — West Mount Victory Cemetery, one of five burial grounds serving Hale Township including Ridgeway, is established.
10. 1883 — Ridgeway has two general stores, a hardware, drug store, bakery, harness shop, livery, four blacksmiths, four physicians and a hotel; its school enrolls 93 pupils.
11. 1893 — The Toledo, Kenton & Columbus railroad is built through Hale Township, touching the east edge of Ridgeway, which then advances more rapidly than ever.
12. 1910 — Ridgeway is an incorporated town with four churches (Disciples, Presbyterian, Methodist Protestant, Methodist Episcopal), a G.A.R. post, a Banking Company and a township and city hall, and about 600 inhabitants by the county history's count.
13. 1960s — Ridgeway's schools consolidate with Mount Victory's to form Ridgemont Local Schools, whose Golden Gophers mascot and colors blend both towns.
14. 2020 — The 2020 census counts 314 residents in Ridgeway, down from a peak of 456 in 1920.

Stories

A village next to the ice age

When the Bellefontaine and Indiana Railroad needed gravel ballast in 1856, its crews cut into a low, rounded hill of glacial debris right next to the young village of Ridgeway -- and instead of clean gravel, they found human remains by the hundreds. Local excavator John Matson spent years documenting the find: cremations, more than fifty children's burials, a 90-foot string of shell beads wound around one group of bodies, copper ornaments, carved stone bird figures, rattlesnake rattles, and dogs buried alongside the people. The careful records made the Ridgeway Site the archaeological type site for what is now called the Glacial Kame culture, an Archaic-era tradition dated to about 8000 to 1000 BC, and archaeologists still treat Hardin and neighboring Logan County as that culture's heartland -- a discovery made because a small Ohio village needed railroad ballast.

Victory! Victory! Why Mount Victory has its name

Samuel McCulloch had just laid out Ridgeway in May 1851 and did not want a competing town beside it. When the land of the late Cyrus Dille came up at an administrator's sale, McCulloch tried to buy the whole tract and turn it into a pasture. Ezra Dille bid it off instead and went home rejoicing. Thomas McCall met him and asked who had bought the land. 'We did,' Dille said, and McCall shouted, 'Victory! Victory! Its name shall be Mount Victory.' Dille laid out Mount Victory on August 23, 1851, three months after Ridgeway, and the two villages stood a short way apart on the same railroad.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · roadsidethoughts.com · ohiogenealogyexpress.com · mountvictory.com · archive.org · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org

No water-system data is linked to Ridgeway's ZIP codes yet.

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public libraries (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

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 2025-09-18

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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