Shawnee Hills

• O'Shaughnessy ReservoirBuilt 1925 · 950 acres

How Shawnee Hills began

Shawnee Hills was platted in the 1920s as a resort fishing community on the newly created O'Shaughnessy Reservoir of the Scioto River, in Concord Township. Developers laid out more than 3,600 small lots, typically only 35 by 70 feet, meant for weekend cottages rather than year-round homes. Because no public water or sewer service reached the lots for decades, growth stayed slow; only after an agreement with the City of Columbus brought sanitary sewers around the 2000s did Shawnee Hills begin building out toward its platted capacity. It remains today the nearest incorporated place to the O'Shaughnessy Dam, a small, still-growing village of well under a thousand people.

Platted 1920s, as the "Shawnee Hills Additions," over 3,600 lots.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted explains who chose the name Shawnee Hills or why.

Before the town

No Native village, camp, mound or trail is recorded on the ground platted as Shawnee Hills in the 1920s. Elsewhere in Concord Township, however, the county histories record one earthwork: a mound on Solomon Hill's farm beside a rocky stream, reported in 1879, that held human skeletons and a queen conch shell, mica and slate from the Atlantic coast and the east, all from far away. The 1880 history also says a cold spring on Mr. Stanbery's farm on the Scioto in the extreme southwest of neighboring Liberty Township, across the river from Concord, was 'in early times' a favorite camping place for Indians hunting in the vicinity. The broader Scioto valley holds real Native history: Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware) and Mingo hunted and lived along the Scioto and its tributaries in the 1700s, the Mingo chief Pluggy kept a town on the river at what is now the city of Delaware from 1772 to 1776, and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville opened this stretch of the valley to settlement.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga).

• Mound on Solomon Hill's farm (queen conch, mica and slate burial) (mound) — Concord Township, Delaware County, beside a rocky stream; exact location not given, prehistoric (culture unspecified); reported 1879 (archive.org)
• Cold spring on the Stanbery farm, a favorite Indian hunting camp (camp) — Extreme southwest corner of neighboring Liberty Township, on the Scioto River, 'early times' before settlement (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1795 — The Treaty of Greenville cedes the Scioto valley around the future village to the United States.
2. 1811 — George Hill, a Pennsylvanian, builds what is said to be the first cabin in the part of Delaware County that became Concord Township, north of the later Mansion House at the White Sulphur Springs; his brother-in-law Christopher Freshwater builds the second.
3. 1819 — Concord Township, which includes the future Shawnee Hills, is erected from Liberty Township.
4. 1838 — Col. Seburn Hinton, who built the first sawmill in Concord Township on Mill Creek and rafted logs down the Scioto to Columbus, enlarges his gristmill and installs new machinery.
5. 1879 — A newspaper account printed in 1879 and reprinted in the 1908 county history reports a mound on Solomon Hill's farm in Concord Township, beside a rocky stream, that held a queen conch shell, mica, slate pieces and two human skeletons, one about seven feet long.
6. 1908 — Columbus completes an earlier, smaller storage dam about ten miles downstream on the Scioto, the predecessor to the later O'Shaughnessy project.
7. 1920s — Developers plat the Shawnee Hills Additions, more than 3,600 small resort lots meant for fishing cottages on the new reservoir.
8. 1922-1925 — Columbus builds the O'Shaughnessy Dam on the Scioto River in Concord and Liberty townships, creating the reservoir the future village would be platted around; the dam is designed by architect Frank Packard and named for water-works superintendent Jerry O'Shaughnessy.
9. 1950 — The village is listed in the census with 338 residents; it numbers 394 in 1960, 428 in 1970 and 430 in 1980.
10. 1990 — The O'Shaughnessy Dam and bridge, immediately upstream of the village, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 5.
11. 2000-2010 — An agreement with the City of Columbus brings sanitary sewer service to the village for the first time, ending decades of septic-only development on the small platted lots.
12. 2001 — The village has about 419 residents, 200 homes and 30 businesses.
13. 2010 — Population is 681, up 63 percent over the decade; the village sits next to the city of Dublin.
14. 2010-2020 — The village's population rises from 419 (2000) to 681 (2010) to 835 (2020), a 62.5 percent jump in one decade followed by a further 22.6 percent.

Stories

A Resort That Took a Century to Fill In

Shawnee Hills was never meant to be a farming township's slow-grown village; it was a real-estate product from the start. In the 1920s, developers platted the Shawnee Hills Additions directly onto the shoreline of the brand-new O'Shaughnessy Reservoir, more than 3,600 lots at a time when Columbus's dam-building was turning a stretch of the Scioto into what contemporaries called the finest inland waterway in the United States. Most lots measured only 35 by 70 feet, sized for a small fishing cottage rather than a permanent house. But no one ran water or sewer lines out to the subdivision, and for most of the twentieth century that single fact kept Shawnee Hills small and thinly built. Only once Columbus agreed to extend sanitary sewer service, sometime around the 2000s, could the village begin filling in its ninety-year-old plat, and its population has climbed sharply ever since.

The Dam That Made the Village Possible

Shawnee Hills exists because of a piece of engineering built just upstream from it. Columbus began construction on the O'Shaughnessy Dam in 1922 and finished in 1925, moving its water-storage works ten miles north of an older 1908 dam and naming the new structure for Jerry O'Shaughnessy, the water-works superintendent whose recommendations led to it. Architect Frank Packard gave the dam a Classical Revival face, and the reservoir it backed up, 845 acres holding some 6.3 billion gallons, was described at the time as the finest inland waterway in the United States. Wikipedia's own article on the dam names Shawnee Hills as the nearest community to it today. The dam and its bridge were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, and the reservoir remains a working part of the Columbus water supply as well as the recreational lake the 1920s developers had been counting on all along.

The queen conch in the Concord Township mound

In 1879 a newspaper reported a find from the farm of Solomon Hill in Concord Township, in a mound beside a rocky stream: a queen conch shell, mica and several oddly shaped pieces of slate, with two human skeletons, one of them seven feet long and the other a child. The writer noted that the queen conch comes from the coast of Florida, the mica from New York and the slate from Vermont and Pennsylvania, all of them from far away. The 1908 county history reprinted the report and does not name a culture. The mound is not at Shawnee Hills; it lay in the same township, which was erected from Liberty Township in 1819.

Photographs

Local history sources: shawneehillsoh.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org · archive.org

Del-Co's own raw-water intake on O'Shaughnessy Reservoir (Scioto River) near Rathbone, Concord Township The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.84% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Columbus Public Water System16% of residentsScioto River (Griggs & O'Shaughnessy), Hoover Reservoir on Big Walnut Ck, plus wells

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Police stations (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 1 of 2 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 0 of 1.

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, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-09-25

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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