Sardinia

How Sardinia began

Sardinia was established as a post village around 1830 in Washington Township and laid out in 1833, taking its name either from the Mediterranean island or from a Methodist hymnal popular in the 1840s; accounts differ. It sits on the east fork of White Oak Creek about twelve miles northeast of Georgetown. In the 1830s it was home to Methodist minister John B. Mahan, who was arrested in 1838 on a Kentucky indictment for helping enslaved people escape and was acquitted at his trial in Mason County, Kentucky.

Settled 1828, platted 1833-03-30, by William B. Lilley and Josiah Moore.

Where the name comes from

Disputed: one tradition derives the name from the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea; another holds it comes from a Methodist hymnal popular in the 1840s.

Before the town

No Native American village, mound or trail specific to Sardinia is recorded. The site lies within the 1795 Treaty of Greenville cession and the Virginia Military District.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Miami.

Timeline

1. 1828 — Dr. Robert D. Lilley, who comes in February and stays until November 1832, sells goods at the site; a post office named Lilley, after him as first postmaster, opens in 1828 or 1829 and is renamed Sardinia after the town is laid out.
2. 1829-07 — Dr. Isaac M. Beck settles where the town now stands and practices medicine there for more than fifty years, apart from five years away.
3. 1830 — A post village is established at the site, in Washington Township.
4. 1830-08-01 — Beck delivers a temperance lecture in the neighborhood, repeating it in August 1880, fifty years later; the movement had been introduced there by Rev. Robert Dobbins in 1830.
5. 1833-03-30 — William B. Lilley and Josiah Moore lay out Sardinia with sixteen lots, surveyed by County Surveyor Jeptha Beasley; they add to it on August 12, 1836 and May 23, 1837.
6. 1835 — John B. Mahan opens the first tavern, and Josiah Moore begins a turning and cabinet shop that sells furniture, including a bed he patented, to Hillsboro and other towns.
7. 1836 — Franz Feike begins a tannery, which runs to about 1856; John L. Pangburn's carding machine and oil mill, begun soon after the town was laid out, ends with his death in 1837.
8. 1838 — November 13-19: Methodist minister John B. Mahan of Sardinia, who had been seized in Ohio and taken across the river into Kentucky, is tried in Mason County Circuit Court for helping enslaved people belonging to William Greathouse escape; he is found guilty and fined nearly $2,000, which fellow abolitionist William Dunlap of Ripley lends him to pay.
9. 1847 — A windmill factory starts in Sardinia with five or six workmen and as many traveling salesmen.
10. 1850 — Sardinia first appears in the census, with 198 people.
11. 1860 — The village's population is recorded at 200, within a Washington Township total of 1,300.
12. 1861 — Anderson, Huggins, Cross & Co. start making plows and farm wagons at Graham and Winchester streets; as Cross Bros. since 1870 it makes buggies from 1872 to 1880.
13. 1879-07-23 — Sardinia Lodge No. 683, I.O.O.F., is instituted in Moore's Hall with eight charter members.
14. 1882 — The village of about 300 people sits on the Cincinnati & Eastern and is the terminus of the Hillsboro & Sardinia Railroad, with the Georgetown & Sardinia then under construction; it has a brass band and a name for musical talent traced to the teacher John Moore.
15. 2020 — The census counts 1,083 people in Sardinia, up from 980 in 2010; the village lies mostly in Washington Township and partly in Clay Township, Highland County.

Stories

The arrest and trial of Reverend Mahan

John B. Mahan, a local preacher who kept a tavern on temperance principles in Sardinia, was indicted in Mason County, Kentucky, for helping two slaves of William Greathouse escape. Mahan said he had never seen one of them, that the other had stopped at his tavern but not been hidden by him, and that he had not been in Mason County or any adjoining county for nearly twenty years. The Governor of Kentucky sent a requisition, and on September 6, 1838 Ohio Governor Joseph Vance issued a warrant for Mahan's arrest and delivery to the sheriff of Mason County. Friends tried to free him by a writ of habeas corpus at Georgetown, but the writ was directed to the sheriff of Brown County and Mahan was already in Kentucky custody. His trial began on November 13 and lasted six days, and he was away from home nearly ten weeks. The jury acquitted him under Judge Walker Reid's charge that the court had no jurisdiction if Mahan was an Ohio citizen who had not been in Kentucky until brought there by legal process. A civil suit for damages followed, the trial report was published as a pamphlet, and many Ohioans censured Vance for surrendering him.

Local history sources: villageofsardinia.com · en.wikipedia.org · digital.library.cornell.edu · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Waynoka Regional Water and Sewer Dist52% of residentsLake Waynoka / Sycamore Run reservoirs
• Sardinia Village48% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Private schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

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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