Somerset

• Philip Sheridan1831-1888Union cavalry general raised in Somerset, Perry County, whose ride to rally his ...

How Somerset began

Somerset was laid out in 1810 by Jacob Miller and John Finck, Pennsylvania-German settlers who had each bought a quarter-township section, on a site along Zane's Trace midway between Lancaster and Zanesville; it took its name from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, home of most of the first settlers. When Perry County was created in 1818 from parts of Fairfield, Muskingum and Washington counties, Somerset became the temporary and then, from 1819, the permanent county seat, building a courthouse in 1829 that still stands. A three-way legislative and legal fight in the 1850s stripped the seat away to New Lexington by 1857, and Somerset settled into life as a market village, remembered today chiefly as the boyhood home of Civil War general Philip Sheridan and, by several accounts, the site of the oldest Catholic parish in Ohio.

Settled 1807-1810, platted 1810, by Jacob Miller and John Finck.

Where the name comes from

Named for Somerset County, Pennsylvania, the origin of most of the village's first settlers, including founders Jacob Miller and John Finck, Pennsylvanians of German descent.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or treaty ground is documented at the Somerset town site itself. The 1883 Perry County history describes the Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware) and Wyandot as the principal occupants of the surrounding county in the eighteenth century, ranging the land between the Muskingum and Scioto rivers and camping temporarily along Sunday and Monday creeks and near the Great Swamp; it states the Wyandot presence recorded in the county came after white settlement began, in peaceable circumstances, rather than reflecting an earlier fixed town. Somerset's own siting on Zane's Trace, the 1796-97 road Ebenezer Zane cut on a federal contract from Wheeling to Maysville, put it directly on a route that itself followed older Native trails through the Ohio country.

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

Timeline

1. 1810 — Jacob Miller and John Finck begin selling lots in the newly laid-out village of Somerset, on Zane's Trace between Lancaster and Zanesville.
2. 1818 — Perry County is organized from parts of Fairfield, Muskingum and Washington counties; a Somerset resident's house serves as the first temporary courthouse.
3. 1819 — Somerset builds a purpose-built courthouse, functioning mainly as a jail with courtroom space, as the county's permanent seat.
4. 1829 — A new brick Federal-style courthouse, 45 by 42 feet, is built on the public square for $6,600; it survives today as the Old Perry County Courthouse.
5. 1831 — Philip Sheridan's family, having emigrated from Ireland (Philip was born around 1831; where is disputed -- Albany, New York, at sea, and Ireland are all claimed), settles in Somerset, where he spends his boyhood.
6. 1851-1859 — The Ohio legislature passes three separate laws relocating the county seat amid a bitter contest between Somerset, Rehoboth and New Lexington, with a Supreme Court of Ohio ruling along the way; New Lexington wins the seat permanently by 1857-59.
7. 1975 — The Somerset Historic District, encompassing more than 100 early-to-mid-1800s structures including the old courthouse and the Sheridan House, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

The county seat that lost by a legislature

For nearly forty years after Perry County's creation in 1818, Somerset was unquestionably its seat of government: it held the courthouse, the jail, the county offices. But New Lexington, platted downstream in 1817 by James Comly, grew faster as roads and rail favored its site, and its residents pressed the legislature for the seat. Between 1851 and 1859 lawmakers passed three different relocation acts, Somerset and Rehoboth partisans fought back in the courts, and the fight eventually reached the Supreme Court of Ohio. When the dust settled New Lexington had the county seat for good, and Somerset's 1829 courthouse, built as a monument to the village's importance, was leased back to Somerset for use as a town hall — a demotion still visible in the building's plain, functional second life.

Sheridan's boyhood on Columbus Street

Philip Henry Sheridan's birthplace is disputed — most accounts place it in Albany, New York, shortly after his Irish immigrant parents landed, though a persistent local tradition and his own uncertain paperwork left room for a County Cavan, Ireland claim — but there is no dispute that he grew up in Somerset. The family settled here when Philip was a small child, and the frame house on South Columbus Street where he lived, built by the Sheridans, stands today as a museum property and National Register listing. Sheridan clerked in a Somerset store before securing an appointment to West Point in 1848, and went on to command Union cavalry and then armies in the Civil War, becoming one of Ulysses S. Grant's most trusted generals. A monument to him stands near the old courthouse, and Perry County has claimed him as its own son ever since, even as historians continue to debate exactly where he was born.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · hmdb.org · achp.gov · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Perry County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Somerset Village Of100% of residentsSomerset Reservoir + Lake St. Joseph

Nursing homes (1)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Private schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2025-03-04

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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