South Vienna

How South Vienna began

South Vienna sits in Harmony Township in eastern Clark County, on the old National Road about ten miles east of Springfield and roughly midway between Dayton and Columbus. John H. Dynes founded and laid out the village in 1833, just before the National Road reached it in 1837; a post office opened in 1838 as Vienna Cross Roads, and the settlement was called Vienna, then Vienna Cross Roads, before finally taking the name South Vienna in 1909. It grew as a National Road trade village with hotels, a tannery, churches, and an Odd Fellows lodge, survived an 1850 cholera outbreak and repeated fires, and today is a small farm-country village of 402 residents (2020) that still holds an annual Corn Festival.

Platted 1833, by John H. Dynes, who founded and laid out the village in 1833 on the National Road, nearly half a mile west of the Ludlow survey line.

Where the name comes from

The village was first called simply Vienna. No source found records who chose that name or why; there is no local Vienna family or founder surname it derives from in the 1881 county history, which only credits John H. Dynes with laying out the plat. A post office named Vienna Cross Roads was established in 1838, and the place went by Vienna / Vienna Cross Roads for roughly seventy years until the post office and village were renamed South Vienna in 1909, apparently to distinguish it from other Ohio places named Vienna (there is a Vienna in Trumbull County) — but no source found states that reasoning explicitly, so it is left open rather than asserted as fact.

Before the town

Nothing specific to South Vienna village or Harmony Township itself is recorded in the sources checked: no named village, mound, trail, or treaty cession tied to this exact spot. At the county level, Clark County lies on and near the Mad River, home to the historic Shawnee town the Shawnee called Piqua (also written Pickaway or Picawey), located roughly seven miles west of present Springfield in what is now Bethel Township. Piqua was the Shawnee capital and the birthplace claimed by Tecumseh; on August 8, 1780, some 970 Kentucky militia under Gen. George Rogers Clark, retaliating for raids on Kentucky settlements, defeated Shawnee warriors led by Black Hoof (with Lenape, Wyandot, and Mingo allies) at Piqua, burned the town, and destroyed roughly 500 acres of standing corn; the Shawnee then resettled on the Great Miami River at a new town also called Piqua (Peckuwe), giving today's city of Piqua its name. Harmony Township, in the eastern part of Clark County, is roughly 20 miles east of that battle site — on the opposite side of the county from the heart of Mad River Shawnee settlement — and no source found places a specific Native village, camp, or trail inside Harmony Township's boundaries.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee.

• Piqua (Shawnee town, also Pickaway/Picawey) (village) — Mad River, about 7 miles west of Springfield, now Bethel Township, Clark County, destroyed August 8, 1780 (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1818 — Clark County's commissioners organize Harmony Township in the eastern part of the new county.
2. 1833 — John H. Dynes founds and lays out the village of Vienna on the surveyed but not-yet-built National Road, ten miles from Springfield.
3. 1834 — Caleb Barrett opens as the village's first merchant, a business he continues for about twenty-three years.
4. 1835 — Vienna's first schoolhouse, a frame building, is erected near the residence of F. V. Hartman; it is replaced by a brick schoolhouse north of the village in 1845.
5. 1837 — Construction of the National Road through the village is completed, several years after it was surveyed at the time of Vienna's founding.
6. 1838 — The Vienna Cross Roads post office is established with Caleb Barrett as first postmaster, a post he holds until 1858.
7. 1850-08 — Cholera strikes the village of Vienna; among those who die are Mary Ann Barret, John Pemberton, Dr. Cyrus Dulan, John Coverdell, William Barnes, two children of James Kelley, Charles Warren, John Chilson, Mary A. Tottan, a child of David Stansbury, and a son of Jacob Williams.
8. 1859 — Vienna Lodge No. 345, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, is chartered May 10 and instituted June 15, with charter members James Sprague, George Johnson, William Simpson, Nathan T. Brooks, James Wallingford, A. H. Spencer, and Joseph Wallingford.
9. 1873-11-24 — Fire destroys a cluster of village buildings including a store built by Emanuel Wayne and the dwellings of W. T. Harris, James McCafferty, and James E. Johnson.
10. 1909 — The village and post office are renamed from Vienna Cross Roads to South Vienna.
11. 2020 — The U.S. Census records 402 residents.

Stories

Cholera on the National Road

In August 1850, cholera swept through Vienna, then a young trade village of a few hundred people strung along the National Road. The 1881 county history lists the dead by name: Mary Ann Barret, John Pemberton, the village's own Dr. Cyrus Dulan, John Coverdell, William Barnes, two children of James Kelley, Charles Warren, John Chilson, Mary A. Tottan, a child of David Stansbury, and a son of Jacob Williams. The road that had brought the village its trade and travelers also carried the disease to it; cholera moved along the National Road corridor that summer the way it moved along rivers and canals elsewhere in Ohio. The losses of a doctor and several children in one small settlement give a sense of how hard the epidemic hit a place this size.

A campaign canoe cut from a cottonwood tree

Ahead of the February 22, 1840 Whig convention that nominated Tom Corwin for governor, Harmony Township's Whigs built a thirty-four-foot canoe at Vienna, carved from a single huge cottonwood tree that had grown on the edge of the village. Ephraim Davidson spent two weeks shaping the log into a craft wide enough to seat two people to a bench. A crew of local men — Caleb Barnett, Emanuel Mayne, Thomas C. Busbey, Dr. J. B. Lingle, William Osborn, Col. William Foreman, Daniel Waddle, and others — then loaded the canoe onto a wagon behind the best team in the county, with John McClintock driving, and hauled it off to the convention as a piece of political theater. The 1840 log-cabin-and-hard-cider campaign produced this kind of frontier showmanship all over Ohio, and Harmony Township's contribution survived as a named anecdote in the county history four decades later.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• South Vienna Village67% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Brookside Village MHP33% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Public schools (2)

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.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2025-02-11

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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