ZIP code 43027: Burlington Township and Homer

Drinking-water compliance

Most homes here are on private wells, which EPA does not regulate or test; a well owner tests on their own.

Source: EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System (Envirofacts, pulled September 2026), violations and lead and copper sampling for the system that serves most of this ZIP · EPA SDWIS (Envirofacts) · EPA ECHO

Byproducts and contaminants

Most homes here are on private wells, which nobody samples for compliance; a well owner tests on their own.

Source: EPA Six-Year Review 4 compliance monitoring data, 2012 to 2019 (TTHM, HAA5 and coliform from distribution-system samples of the system that serves most of this ZIP; nitrate, arsenic, radionuclides, solvents, herbicides and metals from the entry points of the same system); non-detects counted as zero

PFAS

Most homes here are on private wells, which nobody tests for PFAS unless the owner pays for it.

Source: EPA UCMR 5 occurrence data (final release, August 2026) and Ohio EPA statewide PFAS sampling 2019 to 2021 and its current status map, for the system that serves most of this ZIP; results in nanograms per litre (parts per trillion) · Ohio EPA PFAS

Lead at the tap

Most homes here are on private wells; lead there comes from the house plumbing, and only a lab test of the tap will find it.

Children: this ZIP is not on the Ohio Department of Health's high-risk list for childhood lead testing; children on Medicaid or in pre-1978 housing with peeling paint should still be tested.

Housing age: 100% of the homes here were built before 1960 and 100% before 1940, when lead service lines, lead solder and lead paint were common; 100% predate 1980 (Census ACS 2020 to 2024).

Source: EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System lead and copper 90th-percentile results (Envirofacts) and EPA's service line inventory dashboard (2026 Q2), for the system that serves most of this ZIP · ODH childhood lead testing · ODH high-risk ZIP list (CCBH PDF) · Ohio EPA lead and copper · H2Ohio

Fluoride and treatment

Most homes here are on private wells: no fluoride is added, and any treatment is the household softener or filter.

The health department counts 96.3% of Licking County residents on community water as receiving fluoridated water.

Source: CDC My Water's Fluoride, fluoridation status of each system as reported by the Ohio Department of Health; EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System treatment table for the system serving most of this ZIP; EPA Six-Year Review 4 compliance monitoring, 2012 to 2019; Ohio Department of Health fluoridation report (DataOhio) for the county share · EPA SDWIS search

Algal toxins

Most homes here are on private wells, which algal blooms do not reach.

Source: Ohio EPA public water system harmful algal bloom monitoring (HAB data and map, DrinkingWater/HAB service, fetched 2026-09-09), total microcystins by ELISA in raw and treated water, for the system that serves most of this ZIP · Ohio EPA HAB information for public water systems

Groundwater

Under the surface

sand and gravel with fine layers, part of the N Fork Licking Buried Valley Aquifer (buried valley setting); wells there yield > 500 gallons a minute, deposits > 100 ft thick

Bedrock

Cuyahoga Group, yielding 5 - 25 gpm to a well

Setting

Sand and Gravel; water table 5-15 ft down, 7-10 in/yr recharge, sandy loam soil (hydrogeologic setting 7D); pesticide index 201

Well logs

22 drilled wells on file (379.3 per 1,000 residents), median 56 ft deep, 15 gallons a minute median test yield, water 20 ft down

Aquifers

0% of wells in bedrock, 100% in sand, gravel and other unconsolidated material; typical well drilled 1983, 6 since 2000; uses: Domestic 21

Geology

100% of the ZIP is a sensitive geologic setting, where thin or sandy cover leaves the aquifer open to what soaks in from the surface; nearest verified sinkhole 15.3 mi away (Ohio EPA and ODNR Geological Survey)

Water table

LI-4 OH monitoring well (ODNR), 9.1 mi away: water 21.5 ft below ground on 2026-04-27; averaged 21.9 ft in 2015 to 2019 and 21.9 ft over the latest year, about the same; range 16.9 to 24.6 ft over 3,757 readings since 2015

Nitrate risk

EPA researchers put the chance that a public water system in the Vance Creek-North Fork Licking River subwatershed exceeds the nitrate limit at 21% if it draws on groundwater and 45% if it draws on rivers or lakes, judged from land use, geology and past results (EnviroAtlas nitrate violation index; the typical Ohio subwatershed scores 23% for groundwater and 39% for surface water)

Quality monitoring

Ohio EPA's nearest ambient groundwater monitoring well is Utica Wellfield (Licking County), 3.8 mi away: 144 ft deep in sand and gravel (North Frk Licking Rv aquifer); wells there yield over 500 gallons a minute; sampled every three years. 11 active wells within 15 mi

Vulnerability rates how easily a spill at the surface reaches the aquifer, not whether anything has. Well logs include abandoned and replaced wells, so counts overstate wells in use; a private well owner is the only one who tests it.

Source: ODNR Division of Geological Survey, Groundwater Vulnerability (DRASTIC) map (polygon at the ZIP's population-weighted center), karst feature inventory, and the Ohio water well log database (logs inside the ZIP boundary) · ODNR Geological Survey · Ohio EPA GIS services · USGS water data

Aquifer exposure

Karst

no karst-prone bedrock under the population center; no mapped sinkhole inside the ZIP; nearest verified sinkhole 15.3 mi from the center

Wellhead protection

less than half a percent of this ZIP lies inside any public water system's five-year wellhead protection area

Vulnerability index

DRASTIC 177 (ODNR; higher means a spill at the surface reaches the aquifer more easily)

Sensitive settings are outwash plains, buried valleys, karst and shallow bedrock, mapped statewide by Ohio EPA for siting decisions. Exposure is not contamination: it says how quickly a spill, a failing tank or heavy manure would reach the water table, not whether one has.

Source: Ohio EPA Sensitive Geologic Settings and karst geology layers (geology/Geology), ODNR Geological Survey karst and spring points, Ohio EPA source water protection areas (DrinkingWater/SWAP); shares by ZIP boundary overlay, karst by a point query at the population-weighted center · Ohio EPA geology layers · Ohio EPA source water protection (SWAP) · ODNR Geological Survey

Sewage treatment

Size

0.423 million gallons a day design flow

Compliance

6 of the last 12 quarters with a violation; currently in violation (not significant); 8 effluent limit exceedances in 3 years

Sludge source: nearest Utica WWTP, 4.4 mi away; 2 within 10 miles (Ohio EPA).

State water loans: no Ohio EPA revolving-fund project inside this ZIP; the nearest is WWTP Upgrade - Phase 1 (Utica, 2025, $5.1 million), 4.4 mi away.

Sewer planning: 100% of it is assigned to Licking County as the designated sewage management agency under Ohio's Clean Water Act section 208 plan (generic prescriptions). The 208 plan decides who may build and extend sewers.

Stormwater: this ZIP lies outside Ohio EPA's regulated MS4 areas, so its storm drains and ditches carry runoff without a municipal stormwater permit.

Where a home's sewage actually goes depends on the sewer district, and rural homes are on septic systems the county health department permits; the nearest plant is a proxy. Violations range from paperwork to raw discharges.

Source: EPA Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO), Clean Water Act NPDES facilities with a POTW component in Ohio; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center. Compliance data lag about a quarter.; other Clean Water Act permit holders inside the ZIP from the same service · EPA ECHO · EPA CSO inventory · Ohio EPA GIS services · EPA Facility Finder

Stream health

Uses failing

aquatic life 100% of the land, recreation (bacteria) 100%, fish consumption not assessed here

Causes listed

nutrients (100%), bacteria (pathogens) (100%), low oxygen (100%)

Cleanup plans

0% of the land is under a TMDL pollution budget

Watersheds here: Vance Creek-North Fork Licking River (not supporting).

Nearest stream assessment (Ohio EPA): N. Fk. Licking R. Dst. Homer @ Twp. Rd. 70 on the North Fork Licking River, 0.7 mi away, draining 64 square miles: full attainment of its warmwater use; fish IBI 55 of 60 (2008); bugs rated exceptional; habitat QHEI 82 of 100. 6 within 3 miles, 36 within 10. Scores above about 40 (IBI), 36 (ICI) and 60 (QHEI) mean a healthy warmwater stream.

Stream designations (Ohio EPA water quality standards): 0.3 miles of designated streams cross this ZIP: 0.3 mi warmwater habitat. Nearest specially protected stream: the Rocky fork, 7 mi away, an Outstanding State Water. Exceptional and coldwater streams are the state's healthiest; modified and limited-resource waters are channelized or ditched.

Proposed for 2026: the nearest reach Ohio EPA proposes to add to the antidegradation tiers is the Kokosing River (Armstrong run (RM 28.04) to the mouth), 8.8 mi away, as Outstanding State Water for recreation.

PFAS in the river (Ohio EPA large river survey): at Licking R. Near Newark @ St. Rt. 16 (Stadden Bridge), 16.5 mi away, the water carried 77.63 ng/L of total PFAS (PFOA 1.9, PFOS 1 ng/L); fish fillets held 33.72 ng/g in bluegill and 18.91 ng/g in catfish (PFOS 13 in bluegill). Drinking water limits are 4 ng/L for PFOA and PFOS; river water is not drinking water, but treatment plants that draw from it start from these numbers.

Farm chemicals (USGS estimate, 2018): farms in Licking County used about 178 metric tons of pesticide active ingredient, 258 kg per square mile, 41st of Ohio's 88 counties. Largest: glyphosate 63 t, atrazine 26 t, metolachlor 20 t, acetochlor 10 t, 2,4-D 6 t. Atrazine, the corn herbicide, is the pesticide that most often shows up in Ohio tap water after spring rains; this county used 26 t of it.

Farms (2022 Census of Agriculture): 1,532 farms work 207,389 acres of Licking County, with 32.7% of its land in cropland, 135 acres to a farm. 19,018 cattle, 53,591 hogs, 765 broilers, 89 turkeys; 46,096 acres of corn and 58,737 of soybeans. Sales $389 million, 72% from animals and animal products. Manure and fertilizer from farms like these carry the phosphorus and nitrogen behind Ohio's algae and nitrate problems; withheld figures protect individual farms.

A watershed unit fails when any sampled stream in it fails; ditches in flat farm country fail on habitat and nutrients, city creeks on bacteria and sediment. Ohio's own report is at epa.ohio.gov; the EPA link on each unit's report page has the sampling detail.

Source: EPA ATTAINS (Ohio EPA 2024 Integrated Report), watershed assessment units overlaid on the ZIP boundary in an equal-area projection; shares are of the ZIP's land area · EPA ATTAINS · Ohio integrated report · Ohio sport fish advisory · Ohio EPA advisory map

Watershed

• Licking100% of residentsDrains to the Ohio River

H2Ohio: nearest project Perfect Creek Treatment Wetlands, inland flow-through wetland, funded 2022, completed, 15.6 mi away: The Perfect Creek Treatment Wetlands project created a wetland treatment train to receive, treat, and temporarily retain water from Perfect Creek and Dry Run du...; 0 within 5 miles, 0 within 15. H2Ohio pays for wetlands, farm practices and lead line work to cut the nutrients behind Lake Erie's algae.

Source water: 100% of this ZIP drains to the river intake of Newark City PWS and sits inside its Ohio EPA source water protection area.

Watershed grants: nearest "CA&C Rail Depot Stormwater Management Demonstration" by City of Mount Vernon (stormwater management, SWIF), 9.5 mi away; 1 within 10 miles (Ohio EPA project lists: Section 319 and GLRI through fiscal 2023, SWIF through 2017).

Road salt: nearest went to City of Mount Vernon (equipment, 2026-2027), 9.9 mi away; 4 in Licking County. H2Ohio pays for brine makers, calibrated spreaders and covered salt barns so less chloride reaches streams and wells.

The population center sits in the Vance Creek-North Fork Licking River subwatershed; its water runs on through Dog Hollow Run-North Fork Licking River, then Log Pond Run-North Fork Licking River, then Bowling Green Run-Licking River.

In 2015 Licking County drew about 21 million gallons a day of fresh water (USGS): 12.6 million for public supply (42% from wells, 100,000 people served at 63 gallons a person a day at home), 0.2 million for industry, 0.3 million for irrigation, 0.8 million for mining; 70,600 residents drew their own well water.

EnviroAtlas, Vance Creek-North Fork Licking River: under 50 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program; 7,178 acres of grain crops; 57 miles of streams (3.0 per square mile); water use of 57 thousand gallons a day for homes and 82 thousand for farms; 40.2 inches of rain and snow a year; 10 kg of nitrogen per hectare falling from the air each year; farm nitrogen of 9.9 kg per hectare a year as manure and 28.3 kg as synthetic fertilizer; 16% of the farmland sits on drained hydric soils; potentially restorable wetlands on farmland cover 26% of the subwatershed; 0.7% of the land is paved or roofed; 39% of the stream banks keep natural cover (EPA EnviroAtlas national metrics, 2010s vintages).

Stream permits: 86% of this ZIP drains to streams Ohio EPA rates high quality, where a project that fills, pipes or crosses a stream needs an individual Ohio EPA 401 water quality review; 14% drains toward high-quality waters farther down and might qualify for the Army Corps' blanket nationwide permits after a field screening (Ohio EPA 401 nationwide permit eligibility map).

Source: USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset (HUC-8 subbasins by resident share, HUC-12 subwatershed at the population center) · 2020 census blocks · USGS watershed boundaries · EPA EnviroAtlas · Ohio EPA 401 map · USGS county water use 2015 · ODNR H2Ohio projects · ODNR Lake Erie Coastal Management Area · Ohio EPA source water protection (SWAP) · Ohio EPA nine-element plans · Ohio EPA 319, GLRI and SWIF project lists · Ohio EPA chloride reduction grants · NOAA Lake Erie water levels

Homes and income

The Census publishes no housing estimates for this ZIP.

Source: Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates by ZIP Code Tabulation Area; Eviction Lab (Princeton) tract estimates 2016 to 2018, weighted to the ZIP; HUD fiscal 2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents; IRS Statistics of Income ZIP data, tax year 2022; Mapping Inequality (University of Richmond), HOLC maps 1935 to 1940; HUD eGIS open data for subsidized housing; FDIC BankFind branch locations; NCUA credit union branch list, March 2026 · Census ACS · Eviction Lab · HUD data · IRS ZIP statistics · Mapping Inequality · HUD eGIS open data · FDIC BankFind · NCUA call report data

Houses and neighborhoods

Homes

48 one-family houses, 1 manufactured home, 1 farmhouse; also 7 other residential parcels

Age

82% built before 1950, 90% before 1978 (1978: the year lead paint was banned for housing)

Size

median living area 1,570 sq ft; median lot 0.21 acres (condominiums left out)

Value

median appraised value $103,400 (tax year 2025): the county auditor's market value for property tax, not a sale price

Sales

2 sales in the 12 months to Sep 14, 2026 (median $75,500); 6 sales in 5 years (median $147,500, $120 a sq ft). Counted: sales the auditor marked valid or has not yet reviewed (sales marked not valid, and unreviewed ones under $10,000, are left out), single-parcel sales of homes, one per house (its newest)

Owners

66% owner-occupied (homes receiving the owner-occupancy tax credit); 6% company-owned

Neighborhoods

0 neighborhoods and 2 subdivisions (details load below)

Show neighborhoods and houses

The houses load when you search, pick a filter or press the button (the pack for this part of the state, a few megabytes). Zoomed in on the map, each house of this ZIP draws as a dot that follows the search and filters.

Source: county auditors' appraisal records: Licking County Auditor (as of Sep 14, 2026); residential parcels placed in ZIPs by the atlas; owner names are not carried · Allen County Auditor · Ashland County Auditor · Auglaize County Auditor · Butler County Auditor · Champaign County Auditor · Clark County Auditor · Clinton County Auditor · Coshocton County Auditor · Crawford County Auditor · Fairfield County Auditor · Fayette County Auditor · Franklin County Auditor · Greene County Auditor · Guernsey County Auditor · Hardin County Auditor · Highland County Auditor · Hocking County Auditor · Holmes County Auditor · Jackson County Auditor · Knox County Auditor · Licking County Auditor · Logan County Auditor · Lorain County Auditor · Madison County Auditor · Marion County Auditor · Miami County Auditor · Montgomery County Auditor · Morrow County Auditor · Muskingum County Auditor · Perry County Auditor · Pickaway County Auditor · Richland County Auditor · Ross County Auditor · Stark County Auditor · Tuscarawas County Auditor · Union County Auditor · Wyandot County Auditor · OGRIP Ohio Statewide Parcels · Athens County subdivisions, town plats and additions (Athens County Auditor GIS) · Cincinnati Community Council Boundaries · Cincinnati Statistical Neighborhood Approximations (SNA), 2020 · Clark County recorded subdivision plats · Clermont County recorded subdivision plats · Cleveland Heights neighborhoods · Cleveland Statistical Planning Areas (SPAs) / neighborhoods · Columbus Communities · Columbus Community Planning Areas · Coshocton County subdivisions (recorded plats and town additions) · Dayton neighborhoods · Dublin Civic Associations · Franklin County recorded subdivision and condominium plats · Hamilton (Ohio) 17Strong neighborhoods · Lima neighborhood associations · Logan County subdivision and condominium plats · Madison County subdivisions (recorded plats) · Morgan County subdivision, addition and town plats · Muskingum County subdivision plats · Perry County subdivisions and town additions (recorded plat names on the county engineer's parcels) · Richland County subdivisions and condominiums (recorded plats, county GIS) · Sandusky neighborhoods · Stark County recorded allotment (subdivision) and condominium plats · Toledo neighborhood associations · Union County subdivision plats

Building permits

Mix

2,389 single-family houses, 0 units in buildings of five or more, 26 in duplexes and small buildings

Value

$750.2 million of construction at the value declared on the permits

By year

2016: 287, 2017: 263, 2018: 260, 2019: 259, 2020: 286, 2021: 359, 2022: 247, 2023: 164, 2024: 141, 2025: 149, 2026 through July: 106

Caveat

2 of the ten years had fewer than 12 months reported by the permit office; the Census Bureau estimates the missing months, so those counts are partly or wholly imputed

Survey counts are permits issued, not houses finished, and cover new residential construction only: additions, remodels, garages and commercial buildings are not in the survey. Values are the applicants' estimates. Where a city runs the building department for its township neighbours, the city's figure covers them too.

Source: Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, annual place files 2016 to 2025 (new privately owned residential units authorized), for the permit-issuing jurisdiction where most of this ZIP's residents live · Census building permits

Home prices

FHFA publishes no price index for this ZIP: too few repeat sales or refinance appraisals on conforming mortgages to measure.

Source: Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index, annual five-digit ZIP all-transactions series (repeat sales and refinance appraisals of conforming-mortgage homes, developmental, not seasonally adjusted), latest release; Zillow Home Value Index (mid-tier, smoothed, seasonally adjusted) and Zillow Observed Rent Index by ZIP, Zillow Research · FHFA house price index · Zillow research data · Realtor.com data

Local taxes

Northridge Local

26.4 effective mills (39.0 gross); $1,848 a year on a $200,000 home. Operating 15.9, bonds 2.3, emergency 4.1, inside millage 4.1.

Municipal income tax

None: this is unincorporated township territory (Burlington Township).

School district income tax

Northridge Local 0.5%. Voted by the district and collected with the state income tax.

Sales tax

7.25% combined rate in Licking County: Ohio's 5.75% plus county and transit levies.

A mill is $1 per $1,000 of taxable value, and taxable value is 35% of market value. Effective rates fall as values rise because Ohio holds most voted levies to the dollars first approved. County, municipal or township, library, park and vocational-school levies are added on the same bill and are not counted here.

Source: Ohio Department of Taxation, Aggregate Property Tax Rates by School District, tax year 2025 (composite DTE 515); weighted by the share of this ZIP's residents in each district; The Finder rate tables for municipal, school district and sales taxes, September 2026 · Ohio tax data series · The Finder

Who delivers the electricity

• AEP Ohio investor-owned100% of residentsAmerican Electric Power (AEP)

AEP Ohio outages, 2024: the average customer lost power for 272 minutes (158 minutes leaving out major storm days), about 1.1 interruptions a year.

AEP Ohio standard service offer price, 2024: 19.33 cents per kWh, about $174 a month for the average home, for the 550,768 residential customers who have not chosen a supplier; the other 788,464 pay AEP Ohio 10.75 cents per kWh for delivery plus their supplier's price (EIA-861).

AEP Ohio solar and meters, 2024: 11,606 customers run net-metered solar (158.9 MW, 11,036 of them homes); 79% of its 1,541,883 meters are two-way smart (AMI) meters, 21% drive-by automated reads (EIA-861).

Energy burden: households here spend an average 2.7% of income on electricity, gas and other fuels (about $3,645 a year against $134,162 of income); the 27% of households below 80% of the area median income spend 8.1%, and 24% of households fall in groups averaging 6% or more, the usual line for a high burden (DOE LEAD Tool, 2022 update, built from 2018 to 2022 survey data).

Source: PUCO certified territories via ODOT · HIFLD retail service territories (EIA Form 861) · 2020 census blocks · outage statistics from EIA-861 Reliability, 2024 with 2023 where a utility skipped a year (SAIDI and SAIFI, IEEE 1366) · residential prices from EIA-861 Sales to Ultimate Customers, net metering and advanced meters from the EIA-861 files of the same years · DOE LEAD Tool 2022 household energy burden by tract, apportioned into ZIPs by block population · PUCO electricity · ODOT territories service · EIA-861 · DOE LEAD Tool · HIFLD retail service territories

Natural gas here

100% of the 61 homes here heat with utility gas.

Utility gas 100%Electricity 0%Propane or LP 0%Oil, wood, other 0%

• Columbia Gas of Ohio regulated utility100% of residents, main companyNiSource Inc.

Territories overlap here: Ohio Cumberland Gas Company also maps service in this ZIP.

Pipes under the street: Columbia Gas of Ohio reported 20,620 miles of distribution main to PHMSA for 2025, 64% plastic and 6.6% cast iron or bare steel (the leak-prone materials); 3,271 hazardous leaks repaired in 2025.

PUCO lists 4 companies operating in Licking County: Columbia Gas of Ohio, Knox Energy Cooperative Association, Inc., National Gas and Oil Cooperative, Ohio Cumberland Gas Company.

Source: PUCO gas distribution companies by county, April 2026 · federal (EIA) territory polygons, 2016 · Census ACS 2020 to 2024 heating fuel · PUCO natural gas · HIFLD

Power plants

Nearest plant of any size: Denison Solar Array, 12.4 mi (solar, 2 MW).

0 plants within 10 miles totalling 0 MW.

Solar: Denison Solar Array, 2 MW AC (2017), 10 acres, 12.1 mi away; 1 utility-scale solar farm within 15 miles.

Capacity is net summer capacity in megawatts (EIA), not output; a solar farm's 200 MW runs a quarter of the hours a gas plant's would. Small peaking engines and landfill-gas units count as plants.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration Form 860 plant inventory via HIFLD (February 2025); USGS U.S. Wind Turbine Database and U.S. Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database; NRC emergency planning zones around Perry and Davis-Besse (residents inside the roughly 10-mile zone counted by 2020 census block); straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · EIA-860 · HIFLD · USGS wind turbines · USGS solar · NRC emergency planning zones

Gas transmission pipelines

0.4 miles of transmission pipe cross this ZIP: Columbia Gas Trans Co 0.4 mi.

Transmission lines run at hundreds of pounds of pressure and are inspected under federal rules; the distribution mains that actually feed homes are a separate, denser network not shown here. By mileage in this EIA layer Ohio's map is dominated by Columbia Gas Transmission and East Ohio Gas's intrastate lines; Texas Eastern and the Rover and Nexus lines built for Utica shale gas are among the other large interstate systems.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration Natural Gas Interstate and Intrastate Pipelines layer (data last updated July 2025, pulled September 2026), via the ArcGIS Online copy maintained by Esri's Federal User Community; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center; lengths clipped to the ZIP boundary in an equal-area projection · EIA U.S. Energy Atlas · ArcGIS Online item

Incumbent telephone company

• Brightspeed100% of residentsBrightspeed (formerly CenturyLink)

Source: PUCO incumbent local exchange carrier service areas · 2020 census blocks · PUCO telephone

Internet

Of 61 households, 100% subscribe to cable, fiber or DSL, 0% rely on a cellular plan only, and 0% have no internet at home.

Source: FCC Broadband Data Collection, June 2024 (availability) · Census ACS 2020 to 2024 (subscriptions) · Ookla Open Data, fixed-network speed tests by tile, 2025 Q2 (measured speeds) · FCC broadband map · Ookla open data · Census ACS

Cell signal

• AT&T4G 100% · 5G 0%
• T-Mobile4G 100% · 5G 100%
• Verizon4G 100% · 5G 0%

Registered towers: 0 antenna structures registered with the FCC inside this ZIP and 2 within 3 miles of its center; the nearest is a 415-foot guyed tower 2.2 mi away. Only structures over 200 feet or near airports must register, so most cell sites on short poles, water towers and rooftops are not counted.

Coverage as the carriers report it to the FCC for outdoor use at a stationary spot, by land area rather than by residents; indoor signal and rural hollows can be worse.

Source: FCC Mobile Broadband Data Collection via Esri Living Atlas (layer last updated November 2025, i.e. the June 30, 2025 filing round), carrier-reported outdoor coverage by hexagon, summed over the ZIP's land; FCC Antenna Structure Registration database, September 2026; Ookla open data mobile tiles, 2026 Q2 · FCC broadband map · FCC antenna registration · Ookla open data

EV charging

No public station inside this ZIP; the nearest of any kind is MV PKG GARAGE GARAGE STATION1, 10 mi. 0 stations within 5 miles of the ZIP's population center, 0 with DC fast charging.

Level 2 adds roughly 20 to 30 miles of range an hour; DC fast charging fills most cars in under an hour. Listings are operator-reported and lag new openings and closures.

Source: NREL Alternative Fuels Data Center via the U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics (public, open electric stations, the posts at one site merged, restricted-access sites excluded), and chargers in neighbouring states near the border; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center; station list as of May 29, 2026 · Alternative Fuels Data Center · BTS Alternative Fueling Stations (NTAD)

Public transit

0 stops inside this ZIP; the nearest stop is 7.9 mi from the population center.

Only fixed-route systems that publish a GTFS feed appear; dial-a-ride and demand-response services do not, and a handful of small fixed-route systems publish no feed at all. The nearest stop may be across the state line, and the out-of-state set may be incomplete. Half a mile is roughly a ten-minute walk.

Source: USDOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, National Transit Map stops (National Transportation Atlas Database, 2025 vintage, fetched September 2026), plus the Springfield, Lancaster-Fairfield, Knox County Transit, WayGo and BGSU Shuttle GTFS feeds; share of 2020 census block population within half a mile of a stop · BTS National Transit Map · BTS transportation atlas · Springfield City Area Transit GTFS feed · Lancaster-Fairfield Public Transit GTFS feed · Knox County Transit GTFS feed · WayGo GTFS feed · BGSU Shuttle GTFS feed

Walkability

Street grid

1 intersections per square mile, long blocks and country roads

Transit

no stop within three-quarters of a mile in the EPA's 2020 transit file

Mix of uses

employment mix 0.48 and mix of homes and job types 0.24 on the EPA's 0 to 1 scales, where 1 is the most varied

Car-free households

4.3% of households have no vehicle (the EPA's own figure, ACS 2014 to 2018)

The index scores every block group on intersection density, distance to transit and how mixed its jobs and homes are, then ranks them against the whole country. It measures the street pattern, not sidewalks, safety or hills.

Source: EPA National Walkability Index (Smart Location Database 3.0, 2021) by census block group, population-weighted to the ZIP through 2020 census blocks; car-free households from Census ACS 2020 to 2024 table B25044 (the Homes card), or, where that is missing, the Smart Location Database's own 2014 to 2018 share weighted by households · EPA walkability index · Smart Location Database · Census ACS

Rail crossings

Licking County has logged 11 rail accidents since 2010, 9 of them derailments (FRA Form 54). Yard mishaps at walking speed dominate; main-line derailments are the rare, dangerous ones.

Train counts and speeds are the railroad's last inventory update. Crossings with only crossbucks rely on the driver; Ohio has averaged about 77 crossing collisions a year from 2010 to 2025 (FRA Form 57), between 64 and 87 in a year.

Source: Federal Railroad Administration, Grade Crossing Inventory (Form 71, current records); crossings whose point falls inside the ZIP boundary, closed crossings excluded; nearest crossing measured from the population-weighted center. Collisions are FRA Form 57 crossing incidents since 2010, placed by crossing id through the inventory's coordinates; train accidents are FRA Form 54 rail equipment accidents since 2010, placed by their own reported coordinates, counted one per incident rather than one per report (county totals from the same file). All three pulled from data.transportation.gov, September 2026 · FRA crossing inventory (Form 71, current) · FRA crossing incidents (Form 57) · FRA rail equipment accidents (Form 54) · FRA safety data · DOT open data

Bridges

Age

typical bridge built 1977; oldest 1961, SR 661 over No Fork Lic River

Busiest

SR 661 over No Fork Lic River, 3,793 vehicles a day (2015 count)

Owners

state 1, county 1

Ratings come from the inspection every bridge gets at least every two years; poor means deterioration that needs repair, not imminent danger. FHWA's file is a yearly snapshot with inspections through early 2025, so a bridge replaced, re-rated or closed since then still shows its old rating here; ODOT's TIMS bridge inventory carries the current one. Traffic figures are the average daily counts the bridge owners filed with the inventory; most Ohio counts date from 2015 and some are older. County engineers own most of Ohio's small bridges and ODOT the big ones.

Source: Federal Highway Administration, National Bridge Inventory 2025 (Ohio file); structures whose point falls inside the ZIP boundary; condition from NBI items 58, 59, 60 and 62 (deck, superstructure, substructure, culvert) · FHWA bridge inventory · ODOT TIMS bridge inventory (live)

Traffic

Trucks

560 a day on SR 661, 12% of its traffic

Driving

about 313 vehicle-miles a day on the 1 counted segments inside the ZIP; the typical segment carries 4,487 vehicles

Annual average daily traffic is both directions combined, averaged over the year. County, township and city roads are labelled by their route number, which ODOT uses instead of the street name. Most city streets have no count, so the busiest local road is the busiest counted one. Interchange ramps are left out of the busiest-road pick; a ZIP with nothing but ramps shows one labelled ramp and its ODOT number.

Road deaths: 2 people died in 2 crashes inside this ZIP in 2020 to 2024; 0 involved a drinking driver and 0 happened in the dark; most on SR-661 NORTH ST (2). Too few people live here for a per-resident rate to mean much; deaths are counted where the crash happened, and many who die on through roads live elsewhere. (NHTSA FARS)

Source: ODOT traffic count segments, 2025 annual average daily traffic (ODOT TIMS); segments assigned to the ZIP holding their midpoint; NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System 2020 to 2024, crashes placed by their coordinates · ODOT TIMS traffic count segments · NHTSA FARS

Airports and trains

Nearest airfield

Knox County (4I3), Mount Vernon, 5.2 mi, public use

Amtrak

Elyria station, 80.3 mi

Ohio's Amtrak stops are on the Floridian (Amtrak has temporarily combined the Capitol Limited with the Silver Star), the Lake Shore Limited and the Cardinal, all overnight trains; Cincinnati's only calls three times a week. Amtrak's Thruway bus stops, Dayton-Trotwood among them, are not counted as stations here. Airline service at Toledo and Rickenbacker is limited to a few routes; Youngstown-Warren has had no airline flights since 2018.

Source: FAA airport facilities and Amtrak stations via USDOT BTS National Transportation Atlas; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · BTS transportation atlas

Radon in this ZIP

71% of tests at or above EPA's 4 pCi/L action level · median 5.3 · highest 21.3

A ZIP average says nothing about one house; readings next door can differ tenfold. Test yours, and fix it at 4 pCi/L or more.

Source: odh.ohio.gov radon levels by ZIP code, tests since 2010, before mitigation · ODH radon program

Flood zones

58% of the ZIP's land is in that floodplain. Zones mapped here: A.

Design storms (NOAA Atlas 14): a 100-year storm here drops 5.8 inches in 24 hours (2.8 in a single hour, 4.3 in six); a 2-year storm 2.6, 10-year 3.7, 25-year 4.5, 500-year 7.5 inches in 24 hours. Storm sewers, culverts and detention ponds are sized from these numbers, and a "100-year" storm has a 1% chance every year.

Nearest river gauge: North Fork Licking River at Utica OH, 3.9 mi away, draining 116 square miles. Record flow 10,200 cubic feet a second at a stage of 15.2 ft on 1979-09-14; the highest since 2016 was 6,410 on 2024-04-02 (USGS, 34 annual peaks, 1940 to 2025).

No federal flood insurance policy is in force in this ZIP.

Levees: nearest is a levee along Kokosing River, 9.2 mi away (de-accredited).

Community status: Licking County's unincorporated areas take part in the National Flood Insurance Program and earn a Community Rating System class 7 (15% off policies in the high-risk zone); flood map effective 07/31/24.

Lenders require flood insurance on mortgaged homes in the 1% zone (zones A and AE). Block centers understate narrow floodplains in rural areas, so check the FEMA map for a specific address.

Source: FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer (effective flood insurance rate maps, levee centerlines) · 2020 census block centers · ZIP land area by polygon overlay, open water excluded; NOAA Atlas 14 precipitation frequency at the ZIP center; USGS NWIS annual peak flows; OpenFEMA NFIP policies in force by reported ZIP as of September 2026, NFIP redacted claims and the Community Status Book · FEMA flood hazard layer · FEMA Map Service Center · OpenFEMA · NOAA Atlas 14 · USGS stream gauges

Natural hazard risk

• Hail94
• Ice storm88

FEMA's expected annual loss here from all hazards: $17,732 a year in buildings, crops and lives.

The index blends how often a hazard strikes, what it would cost, and how vulnerable and resilient the community is. Inland flooding (rivers and heavy rain) scores 74, tornado 52, winter weather 85.

Source: FEMA National Risk Index, census tracts, December 2025 release, weighted to this ZIP by 2020 block population · FEMA National Risk Index · NRI census tract layer (ArcGIS)

Climate

Temperature

50.0°F average; typical January low 17°, July high 83°

Hot and cold days

9 days a year reach 90°F; 128 nights fall below freezing, 7 below 0°F; 40 days never climb above freezing

Rain and snow

40.9 inches of precipitation on 82 days with a tenth of an inch or more; 26 inches of snow on 10 days with an inch or more, snow on the ground 39 days

Degree days

6,138 heating, 691 cooling (base 65°F): the higher the heating number, the bigger the winter gas bill

Drought (U.S. Drought Monitor): since 2020 Licking County has spent 21 weeks in moderate drought or worse, 10 of them severe or worse (most recently 10 weeks in 2024), and 62 weeks at least abnormally dry. The worst since 2000 was extreme drought in 2024/11; 3% of all weeks since 2000 were in drought. As of 2026-09-01: no drought.

Long run (NOAA, Licking County): the average year ran 51.7 °F over 1996 to 2025 against 50.1 °F over 1901 to 1930, 1.7 °F warmer (1.7 °F warmer than 1951 to 1980); the warmest year on record was 2024 at 54.7 °F, and 2025 came in at 51.6 °F. Precipitation averaged 42.6 inches a year lately against 40.8 a century ago, 4% more; the wettest year was 2018 with 55.9 inches, and 2025 brought 40.6. More rain in bigger bursts is what strains storm sewers and septic fields.

Stations: Centerburg 2 SE (7.5 mi, temperature); Utica 4 WSW (3.2 mi, precipitation and snowfall; 12 years of snowfall record). Normals are thirty-year averages, so a single winter can run far above or below them; NOAA marks this snowfall normal provisional because the station record is too short or too patchy for a standard normal, and the temperature and precipitation figures here skip stations with under 10 years.

Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Climate Normals 1991-2020 (annual/seasonal and monthly); nearest reporting station to the ZIP's population-weighted center for each element; U.S. Drought Monitor county statistics · NOAA climate normals · NOAA climate at a glance · U.S. Drought Monitor

Air quality

Worst days

98th-percentile day 21 µg/m³ (24-hour standard 35)

Ozone

64 ppb, 4th-highest daily 8-hour reading at Centerburg WWTP, 8.5 mi away (standard 70)

Licking County AQI, 2025

210 good days, 34 moderate, 1 unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse of the 245 days indexed; peak 119, median 40

Licking County AQI, 2026 so far

54 good days, 7 moderate and 0 unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse in the 61 days indexed through April 30; peak 71 (Ozone)

Air toxics

30 in a million lifetime cancer risk from outdoor air toxics across Licking County (EPA AirToxScreen 2020), mostly formaldehyde (17) and carbon tetrachloride (3)

Permitted sources

2 permitted air sources inside this ZIP under the Clean Air Act; none had a violation in the last 3 years. Nearest major source Owens Corning in Mount Vernon, 7.3 mi (EPA ECHO)

Air standards

Licking County is a maintenance area for ozone (2008) (Columbus, OH, redesignated 2016), ozone (2015) (Columbus, OH, redesignated 2019), fine particulate (1997) (Columbus, OH, redesignated 2013), meaning it once failed that standard and must keep a plan to stay clean (EPA Green Book)

Ohio has 38 PM2.5 monitors, mostly in cities and near industry, so a rural ZIP borrows a reading from far away. 2025 includes Canadian wildfire smoke days. Air-toxics risk is EPA's modelled lifetime estimate for the county as a whole; EPA's national average is about 30 in a million, and formaldehyde, with the globally mixed carbon tetrachloride background and acetaldehyde, makes up most of it.

Source: EPA Air Quality System, 2025 annual summary files (monitor annual concentrations, county AQI) and the 2026 daily county AQI file; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center to the nearest monitor · EPA air data files · EPA AirToxScreen · EPA Green Book · EPA ECHO

Toxic and Superfund sites

0 facilities have reported toxic chemical releases or transfers to EPA's inventory from inside this ZIP, and 0 sites appear in the Superfund program's list (most assessed and never listed).

2 EPA-registered facilities of all kinds in this ZIP: 0 brownfield sites in the cleanup program, 2 hazardous-waste handlers, 1 with air permits, 0 with water discharge permits.

Nearest landfill: Knox County Commissioners Sanitary Landfill, 6.6 mi from the center, municipal solid waste landfill (closed). Ohio EPA's list includes closed and historic dumps.

Voluntary cleanups: 0 properties inside this ZIP hold an Ohio EPA covenant not to sue after a Voluntary Action Program cleanup; 0 such properties within 3 miles of the population center, nearest Woodward Opera House, Mount Vernon, 9.8 mi. These are former industrial and commercial sites certified clean enough to reuse.

Solid waste: no licensed solid waste facility inside this ZIP; nearest Utica Composting Facility (compost site), 4.4 mi from the center; 1 within 5 miles of the center (Ohio EPA licences, 2026). Compost sites and transfer stations are where most of a county's trash and yard waste actually goes.

Hazardous waste (EPA ECHO): 1 active RCRA handler inside this ZIP; none had a violation in the last 3 years. Nearest treatment, storage or disposal facility: Clean Harbors Recycling Services of Ohio LLC in Hebron, 18.8 mi. Handlers include every business that generates hazardous waste, from body shops to chemical plants.

Drop-off sites: the nearest scrap tire drop-off is Goodyear Tire Center, Newark OH, 12.8 mi away (2 within 15 mi); the nearest household battery drop-off is Y-NOT Cycling - Mt Vernon, Mount Vernon, 9.7 mi away (4 within 15 mi) (Ohio EPA).

The inventory covers larger manufacturers and federal facilities that use listed chemicals; reporting means use or release, not a measured hazard to neighbours. Superfund status: on, proposed for, or deleted from the list after cleanup.

Source: EPA Facility Registry Service, Superfund (SEMS and NPL) sites and Toxics Release Inventory reporters, points inside the ZIP boundary; distance from the ZIP's population-weighted center · EPA Facility Registry · EPA Superfund sites · Ohio EPA cleanup sites · EPA UST Finder · EPA ECHO

Toxic releases

No facility inside this ZIP files a Toxics Release Inventory report. Only plants in listed industries with 10 or more workers that handle a listed chemical above its threshold must file, so small shops and most businesses never appear.

Source: EPA Toxics Release Inventory, basic data files for Ohio, reporting years 2020 to 2024 (2024 shown); facilities placed by their coordinates; dioxin rows reported in grams are left out of the pound totals · EPA TRI data files

Dams

Nearest high-hazard dam: Lake Damascus Dam, 9.9 mi, condition poor (recreation, 31 ft high, 240 acre-feet, built 2010, on Unnamed Tributary To Dry Creek, private owned).

No inventoried dam sits inside this ZIP.

"High hazard" describes what a failure would do downstream, not the dam's shape; Ohio rates more than a third of its inventoried dams in poor condition, mostly small private lake dams. Emergency action plans are required for high-hazard dams.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Inventory of Dams (August 2026 release); straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center. Condition assessments come from Ohio's dam safety program. · National Inventory of Dams

Disasters on record

Strongest nearby: F3 on 1985-05-31, 29 mi track (1 killed, 20 injured).

23 federal declarations for Licking County since Ohio's first in 1956 (18 major disasters): severe storm 10, flood 4, tornado 3. Latest: Tornadoes (2024).

0 earthquakes of magnitude 2 or more within 25 miles since 1970.

Warnings since 2015 (National Weather Service, Licking County): 23 tornado warnings (2015: 2, 2017: 1, 2018: 2, 2019: 3, 2020: 3, 2024: 8, 2025: 1, 2026: 3), 210 severe thunderstorm warnings, 24 flash flood warnings, 78 flood warnings and 137 flood advisories, 11 winter storm or blizzard warnings, 27 heat warnings or advisories, 6 extreme cold or wind chill warnings, 3 snow squall warnings; 1,072 products in all.

Mitigation grants (FEMA): 9 hazard mitigation projects in Licking County since 1997, worth $1.2 million ($855,826 federal), covering 18 properties; mostly property buyouts, safe rooms, fma or crs plan. Largest: safe rooms for Licking County Ohio, $324,969 (fiscal 2006).

226 severe weather reports for Licking County since 2016 in NOAA's Storm Events log: 130 damaging thunderstorm wind, 41 hail, 31 river and street flooding, 17 flash floods. Largest hail 2 in (Apr 2, 2025); strongest measured gust 64 mph (Mar 14, 2019); 1 death; about $2.7 million in reported damage, the costliest being flash floods on Mar 20, 2020 ($900K). Zone-wide advisories add 51 winter weather, 9 high wind, 8 winter storms.

Tornado tracks are straight lines from touchdown to lift-off; a near miss counts, a direct hit is not distinguished. Declarations include the 2020 COVID-19 emergency for every county; the latest, declared 2 May 2024 (DR-4777), covers the 14 March 2024 tornadoes in eleven counties, Indian Lake among them.

Source: NOAA Storm Prediction Center tornado database 1950-2025; OpenFEMA disaster declarations summaries; USGS earthquake catalog (M2+, 1970 to date); NOAA Storm Events database 2016 to 2026 by county. Distances from the ZIP's population-weighted center. · NOAA SPC tornado data · OpenFEMA · USGS earthquakes · NOAA storm events · IEM warning archive

Spills and releases

By year

2021: 0, 2022: 0, 2023: 0, 2024: 0, 2025: 0, 2026: 0

Anyone who spills more than a reportable quantity must call Ohio EPA within 30 minutes, so the log mixes a few gallons of diesel on a highway shoulder with real releases; the reported volume is the caller's first estimate. Every report in Ohio EPA's open-data layer carries coordinates; air-pollution complaints and calls where nothing was found are left out of this count.

Source: Ohio EPA Emergency Response spill reports (Spills2 open data), reports with coordinates inside the ZIP boundary, 2021 to date · Ohio EPA spills data · Ohio EPA Office of Emergency Response

Oil and gas wells

Status

0 producing, 2 plugged or abandoned, the rest drilled but idle, gas storage, orphan, expired permits or unknown

Ohio has drilled since 1860, so most wells here are old, shallow and plugged; unplugged orphans and injection wells are the ones that matter for groundwater. Well-head points can be a few hundred feet off for the oldest records.

Source: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, public well inventory (well-head points); counts inside the ZIP boundary and within 1 mile of the ZIP's population-weighted center · ODNR oil and gas · ODNR GIS services

Abandoned mines

Undermined land can subside and old workings can discharge acid mine water; ODNR's Abandoned Mine Land program funds repairs, and mine-subsidence insurance is included automatically in 26 eastern counties and offered as an option in 11 more. Maps drawn before 1977 are incomplete, so "none" means none mapped.

Quarries, pits and working mines: nearest St. Louisville Plant #5 (limestone, sand & gravel, Olen Corp., 385,727 tons sold), 7.2 mi away in Licking County; 0 within 3 miles, 3 within 10 (ODNR Industrial Minerals Locations, 2015, which includes surface and underground coal mines).

Source: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Mines of Ohio (abandoned underground mine maps, coal and industrial minerals, pre-1977), overlaid on the ZIP boundary in an equal-area projection · ODNR mines of Ohio · ODNR Geological Survey

Soils and septic

Soil

Fox gravelly loam, 18 to 25 percent slopes, eroded; Fox makes up 100% of the unit, 22% slope

Water

well drained; flooding none, ponding none

Septic

Very limited for a leach field under Ohio's rule

Basements

Very limited for dwellings with basements

Farmland

Not prime farmland

Elevation

1,007 feet above sea level at the ZIP's population center; Ohio runs from 455 feet where the Ohio River leaves the state to 1,549 feet at Campbell Hill

One point stands for the ZIP; soils change field by field, and a site evaluation is what the health department goes by. "Very limited" means the standard design will not work, not that nothing will.

Source: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, SSURGO soil survey via Soil Data Access; the map unit at the ZIP's population-weighted center and its dominant component's interpretations; Copernicus GLO-90 elevation model (via Open-Meteo) at that center · USDA Soil Data Access · Web Soil Survey · Open-Meteo elevation

Parks and public land

Nearest state park: Alum Creek State Park, 21.8 mi.

Trails: no built named trail crosses this ZIP; nearest is the Ohio to Erie Trail, 9.1 mi from the ZIP's center (ODNR statewide trails inventory).

Open access as reported by each owner; local inventories vary, so a golf course or school field can be listed and a new park missed.

State lands nearby (ODNR facility layers): nearest boat ramp: Buckeye Lake State Park - North Shore at Buckeye Lake State Park, 22.3 mi (0 within 5 miles); fishing access: Fishing Access at Alum Creek State Park, 22.8 mi (0 within 5 miles); swim area: Boater Swim Area at Alum Creek State Park, 22.6 mi (0 within 5 miles); campground: Campground/Campsite at Alum Creek State Park, 24.4 mi (0 within 5 miles).

Source: USGS Protected Areas Database of the United States 4.1 (open-access fee, designation and easement polygons), overlaid on the ZIP boundary; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center to the nearest ODNR state park · USGS PAD-US · ODNR GIS services

Wetlands

3 acres forested/shrub wetland. Largest single wetland: 2 acres of freshwater forested/shrub wetland.

High-quality wetlands: nearest is Chesterfield Swamp (Gleeson Family Nature Reserve) (Morrow County Park District), 44 acres, 17 mi away; 0 within 10 miles.

Mitigation sites: nearest North Fork Licking river, 6.5 mi away (a permittee-responsible site under an environmental covenant); 2 within 10 miles. These are wetlands and streams built or restored to replace ones filled under Clean Water Act permits.

Assessed wetland: nearest Blackjack Rd Front, a mixed shrub swamp of 0.5 acres, 7.2 mi away: ORAM 56 of 100 (category 2), plant community index 63 of 100 (surveyed 2000); 3 within 10 miles. Category 3 wetlands are the state's best and hardest to fill; category 1 are degraded.

Mapped from aerial photography, mostly 2004 to 2007 (the Lake Erie watersheds were re-mapped from 2021 imagery, a few areas date from 1976 to 2005 or 2014 to 2023), so small and seasonal wetlands are undercounted and ponds dug or filled since then are missing; a site delineation decides whether a lot is jurisdictional. Emergent means marsh, forested and shrub means swamp.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Wetlands Inventory (Ohio geodatabase), freshwater wetland and pond polygons clipped to the ZIP boundary; lakes and river channels excluded, imagery mostly 2004 to 2007 (Lake Erie basin 2021) · USFWS wetlands inventory · Ohio EPA GIS services

Land cover

Developed

24%: 1% high intensity (downtown blocks, big-box lots), 5% medium (apartments, small-lot houses), 13% low (houses on larger lots), 6.0% open space (lawns, parks, golf courses, road verges)

Farmland

38%: 24% row crops, 14% pasture and hay

Forest

37%

Water and wetland

0.3% open water, 1.3% wetland

Paved and roofed

8% of the ZIP's surface is impervious; rain that lands there runs straight to a storm drain or stream instead of soaking in

Tree canopy

28% of the ZIP sits under tree canopy

Area

0.1 square miles of land

Land cover is classified from Landsat imagery at 30 metre pixels, so a house on a wooded lot can read as forest and a farm lane as open space. Stream health starts to slip once about 10% of a watershed is impervious, and is usually poor above 25%.

Source: National Land Cover Database 2021 (USGS and the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium): land cover, percent impervious surface and tree canopy at 30 m, summarised over the ZIP boundary · NLCD · USDA Cropland Data Layer · ODNR pre-settlement vegetation

People

Ages

67% under 18, 0% 65 or older

Race and origin

100% white, 0% Black, 0% Hispanic or Latino, 0% Asian, 0% other or two or more races

Born abroad

0% of residents

Households

3.0 people per household on average; 0% of households are one person living alone, 0% married couples

Who lives here

100% of households include children, 0% someone 65 or over and 0.0% are a senior living alone

Poverty

0.0% of residents live below the poverty line, 0.0% of children. County-wide, the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate is 9.2% (11.1% of children) with a median household income of $86,157 (SAIPE)

Ancestry

most often reported: German 100%, Irish 67%

Movers

0.0% of residents lived somewhere else a year earlier

Moving

8,781 people moved into Licking County between the returns they filed in 2022 and 2023 and 8,096 moved out (net +685, 145,795 stayed put); most arrivals came from Franklin, OH (3,838), Fairfield, OH (798), Muskingum, OH (359); most leavers went to Franklin, OH (2,621), Fairfield, OH (801), Muskingum, OH (470) (IRS)

Metro or rural

USDA rural-urban continuum code 1 of 9 for Licking County: metro - counties in metro areas of 1 million population or more

County growth

Licking County went from 178,501 people in April 2020 to 185,564 in July 2025 (+4.0%): 9,316 births, 9,880 deaths and a net +7,253 from migration since 2020; in 2025 alone a net 1,001 moved in from elsewhere in the U.S. and 245 arrived from abroad (Census estimates)

Since 1900

First counted in 1810 with 3,852 people and 38,846 by 1850, Licking County counted 47,070 people in 1900, 70,645 in 1950, 107,799 in 1970, 145,699 in 2000 and 178,501 in 2020; it has never been larger than today (3.9 times its 1900 size, decennial censuses)

Commuting area: USDA classes this ZIP as a metropolitan suburb with heavy commuting to the core (rural-urban commuting area code 2 of 10, 2020 edition).

Race shares follow the Census categories, with Hispanic origin counted separately from race. Five-year averages centered on 2022. Moves count people on tax returns whose address changed county, so students and the very poor are undercounted.

Source: Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates by ZIP Code Tabulation Area (tables B15003, B03002, B05002, B21001, B01001, B25010, B11001, B17001, B19083, B04006, B07003, C16002, B05006, B11005, B11007, B12001); county population estimates, vintage 2025; IRS exempt organization master file; USDA rural-urban continuum codes 2023; USDA ERS rural-urban commuting area codes 2020; 2020 Census PL 94-171 redistricting file, group quarters (table P5); IRS Statistics of Income county migration, returns filed in 2022 and 2023; Census SAIPE 2024 county poverty and median income; decennial county counts from the Census Bureau report Population of States and Counties of the United States 1790 to 1990 · Census ACS · Census population estimates · IRS migration data · USDA ERS county codes · USDA ERS commuting area codes · 2020 Census redistricting data · Census SAIPE · IRS exempt organizations

Jobs and commuting

Businesses: 4 establishments in 2023 (ZIP Business Patterns).

Workplace safety (OSHA): no inspection since 2020 (5 on record since the 1970s). No worker death investigated since 2015.

County labor market: Licking County's unemployment rate was 3.3% in July 2026 (4.6% a year earlier), with 92,638 people in the labor force and 3,011 looking for work. Employers in the county paid an average of $1,289 a week in the first quarter of 2026 (up 8.5% on the year) to 77,041 workers at 4,027 establishments, employment up 5.5%; the largest private sectors are manufacturing (12,344 jobs, $1,501 a week), transportation and warehousing (8,171 jobs, $928 a week), health care and social assistance (7,971 jobs, $1,118 a week). (BLS)

Federal money: in fiscal 2025 the federal government obligated $1.7 billion in contracts performed in Licking County ($9,460 a resident) and $175 million in grants ($981 a resident) and $1.0 billion in direct payments to people and organizations (USAspending; Social Security, Medicare and most benefits are not counted).

County economy: Licking County produced $8.5 billion of real GDP in 2024 (2017 dollars, up 23.5% since 2019); personal income came to $61,466 a person in 2024, 24th of Ohio's 88 counties and up 31% since 2019 before inflation (BEA).

County type (USDA ERS, 2015 codes): Licking County is a metro county with a nonspecialized economy, with none of the ERS distress flags.

How they get there: 100% drive alone, 0% carpool, 0% transit, 0% walk, 0% bike, 0% work from home (ACS).

Where residents work: 0% inside this ZIP; 11% in Columbus (43215), 11% in New Albany (43054), 11% in Johnstown (43031) (shares of the 27 residents with an Ohio workplace).

Unemployment-insurance records tie each job to a workplace and a home address; large employers sometimes report every worker at a headquarters, which inflates a few ZIPs. Self-employment, the military, the Postal Service, most farm work and a large part of federal civilian employment are missing (federal jobs come from OPM records that omit several agencies and, in practice, most of Wright-Patterson).

Source: Census Bureau LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES 8), 2023, all jobs; populated census blocks assigned to ZIP Code Tabulation Areas by interior point, workplace-only blocks by the majority ZCTA of their block group or tract; Census ZIP Code Business Patterns 2023; OSHA enforcement data via the Labor Department open data catalog; BLS county unemployment (LAUS) and wages (QCEW); Census ACS 2020 to 2024 labor force by ZIP Code Tabulation Area (B23025); USAspending federal awards by county, fiscal 2025; BEA county GDP and personal income · Census LEHD · BLS local unemployment · BLS QCEW · BEA county GDP · USAspending · OSHA enforcement data · Census ZIP Business Patterns · Census ACS · USDA ERS county typology · CDFI Fund Opportunity Zones

Upward mobility

Meaning

a little better than the Ohio median of 42 for low-income children

Incarceration

2.08% of those children were in jail or prison on census day 2010

Coverage

100% of the ZIP's residents live in tracts with an estimate

The rank describes people born around 1980 who were children here in the 1980s and 1990s; neighbourhoods change, so it is a record of what the place did for one generation, not a forecast. Estimates for small tracts are noisy.

Source: Opportunity Atlas tract outcomes (Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones and Porter, 2018; Census Bureau and IRS data for children born 1978 to 1983), population-weighted to ZIPs through 2020 census blocks · Opportunity Atlas · Opportunity Insights data

Social vulnerability

Socioeconomic status

36th percentile: poverty, unemployment, housing cost burden, no high school diploma, no health insurance

Household characteristics

15th: people 65 and over or 17 and under, disability, single-parent households, limited English

Racial and ethnic minority status

25th

Housing and transportation

16th: multi-unit and mobile homes, crowding, no vehicle, group quarters

The index ranks tracts on how much help their residents would need in a disaster or disease outbreak, using American Community Survey 2018 to 2022 figures. Ranks are within Ohio; a ZIP is the average of its tracts weighted by residents.

Source: CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index 2022, census tracts ranked among Ohio tracts, population-weighted to the ZIP through 2020 census blocks · CDC/ATSDR SVI

Community health

CDC publishes no estimate for this ZIP.

County (County Health Rankings 2025): Licking County sits in health group 4 of 10 among U.S. counties for population health (1 is healthiest) and group 3 for community conditions. Premature death 8,469 (Ohio 9,740) years of life lost before 75 per 100,000; one primary care doctor for every 2,693 people (Ohio 1,328), one mental health provider for every 605 people (Ohio 286), one dentist for every 2,628 people (Ohio 1,535); preventable hospital stays 3,012 (Ohio 3,033) per 100,000 Medicare enrollees; injury deaths 85.8 (Ohio 100.7) and suicides 15.6 (Ohio 14.7) per 100,000; infant deaths 6.1 (Ohio 7.0) per 1,000 births; teen births 14.1 (Ohio 17.4) per 1,000 girls 15 to 19; children in poverty 11.9 (Ohio 17.5) percent; fine-particle air pollution 8.3 (Ohio 7.8) micrograms per cubic metre; no community water system in the county had a health-based drinking water violation in 2023. Drug overdoses: 27 deaths in the 12 months ending December 2025 (34 a year earlier, 80 at the highest since 2020, in the 12 months ending March 2022), about 14.7 per 100,000 residents against 20.8 statewide (CDC provisional counts).

Cancer (NCI State Cancer Profiles): Licking County records 511.9 new cancers a year per 100,000 people, age-adjusted, for 2018 to 2022 (Ohio 472.9, U.S. 448.6), about 1,152 cases a year, with the rate stable; cancer deaths 165.7 per 100,000 (Ohio 160.3, U.S. 145.4), falling. By site, per 100,000 (Ohio in parentheses): lung 71.9 (63.6), colorectal 40.2 (38.4), female breast 148.4 (133), prostate 130.5 (120.8), bladder 22.3 (21.8), leukemia 14 (13).

Medicare: 38,391 people in Licking County were on Medicare in 2025 (21% of residents): 34,329 aged 65 or over and 4,062 younger people with disabilities. 57% chose a Medicare Advantage plan, 12% also had Medicaid and 83% had Part D drug coverage; enrollment is up 8% since 2020 (CMS).

Source: CDC PLACES, 2025 release (BRFSS 2023 and 2022, ACS 2019-2023), model-based ZCTA estimates of crude adult prevalence; County Health Rankings 2025 and CDC provisional overdose counts for the county; HRSA shortage area designations weighted to the ZIP; Census ACS 2020 to 2024 (insurance, disability); CMS Medicare Monthly Enrollment, county, 2025 · CDC PLACES · County Health Rankings · CDC overdose data · NCI cancer profiles · HRSA data

Life expectancy

Ohio's statewide figure for the same years was 77.6; the United States 78.7. Differences of a year or two between neighbouring ZIPs are within the estimates' error; differences of five or more are real and track income, smoking and access to care.

Source: CDC National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project (USALEEP), 2010-2015, census tracts weighted by 2020 block population · CDC USALEEP

Nearest hospital

117 beds · no trauma designation listed · 0 general or critical-access hospitals within 10 miles, 3 within 25.

Medicare rating: ★★★☆☆ · emergency room: yes · typical ER visit 198 minutes door to discharge (Ohio median 155)

Patients' verdict: 65% would definitely recommend it, 73% rated their stay 9 or 10 out of 10 (★★★☆☆ patient-experience rating, 349 surveys).

Outcomes: 30-day death rates after heart failure 12.7% (about the national rate), heart attack 13.3% (about the national rate), pneumonia 19% (about the national rate), July 2022 to June 2025; the patient-safety composite for serious complications (July 2022 to June 2024) is about the national value (Medicare).

Community health center: nearest Behavioral Health of Mount Vernon Health Center, Mount Vernon, 9.7 mi away; 0 within 3 miles, 4 within 10. These federally funded clinics see anyone and charge on a sliding scale.

Veterans: nearest VA site is Daniel L. Kinnard VA Clinic, Newark (multi-specialty outpatient clinic), 14.9 mi away; 0 VA sites within 10 miles, 1 within 25.

Providers: 1 active health care providers list a practice address in this ZIP (NPPES registry, August 2026).

Dialysis: nearest Fmc - Knox County Kidney Center, Mount Vernon, 10.6 mi away, 14 stations, Medicare ★★★★☆ (Fresenius Medical Care); 0 within 5 miles, 4 within 15.

Source: federal HIFLD hospital inventory (via FEMA) with Medicare Care Compare star ratings, emergency-service flags, median emergency department times (measure OP_18b), HCAHPS patient survey results and 30-day death rates and patient-safety composites (Complications and Deaths file; a campus with no record of its own carries its parent hospital's figures, labelled); NPPES NPI registry, August 2026 monthly file, active records by practice ZIP; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center (some listings lag closures and mergers); HRSA health center sites, CMS dialysis facilities (geocoded with the Census geocoder) and the VA facility list · CMS Care Compare data · HIFLD · HRSA data · CMS NPI files

Nursing homes

0 certified homes within 5 miles, 14 within 15.

Medicare rating

★★☆☆☆ overall; inspections ★☆☆☆☆; staffing ★★★★☆

Beds

84 certified

Ownership

For profit, corporation

Penalties

fined $15,593 in 1 federal penalty since 2023, the latest on 2023-12-05 (CMS)

Stars are Medicare's Care Compare ratings; a 1-star home failed inspections or is thinly staffed, and the abuse flag means a citation for harm in the past year or two. Ratings shift every quarter.

Source: Medicare Care Compare nursing home provider and penalties files (CMS), geocoded with the Census Bureau; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · CMS Care Compare data

Crime

Violent

96 offenses: 2 murders, 7 rapes, 2 robberies, 85 aggravated assaults (1.3 per 1,000 residents; Ohio 3.2)

Property

486 offenses: 76 burglaries, 358 thefts, 49 vehicle thefts (6.5 per 1,000; Ohio 16.9)

Other

314 simple assaults, 166 vandalism reports, 99 drug offenses, 31 weapons violations

Reporting

12 months of 2024 on file; 74,472 residents served

Rates cover the whole agency's territory, not this ZIP alone: a city's downtown and its quiet edges share one number. Murders, rapes and assaults are counted once per victim and other offenses once per incident, as the FBI's Crime Data Explorer does; a large department's figures can still fall somewhat short of the Explorer's, which takes in later submissions, and a sheriff's population is only the unincorporated area it serves.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer, NIBRS incident data for Ohio, 2024 (2023 for the trend): Group A offenses per reporting agency (violent = murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault; property = burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson), murders, rapes and assaults counted once per victim; the agency is the police department of the ZIP's largest local government (city, village or township) when it has one of its own, found in the FBI's 2023 and 2024 rosters or the USGS police station inventory, otherwise the sheriff of the ZIP's county; a rate needs at least six months of 2024 on file and is annualized from fewer than 12; the Ohio figures pool the 511 police departments and sheriff's offices with all 12 months on file · FBI Crime Data Explorer · USGS structures service

Police and post office

0 stations within 3 miles, 1 within 8.

Nearest post office: Utica Post Office, 3.9 mi.

Townships without their own department are policed by the county sheriff, whose office may be at the county seat; the state highway patrol covers the roads. The inventory lists stations, not patrol zones. It also misses some departments and still lists some that have closed; the atlas adds the departments that reported at least six months of 2024 crimes to the FBI but had no station in it, and drops the closed and duplicate records it found.

Source: USGS National Map structures inventory (police stations, post offices), with closed and duplicate records dropped, wrong names corrected and departments it lacks added from OpenStreetMap and the Census Bureau geocoder (September 2026); straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · USGS structures service · OpenStreetMap · Census Bureau geocoder

Fire and EMS

1 station within 3 miles, 3 within 8.

No station sits inside this ZIP's boundary.

Source: USGS National Map structures inventory (fire and EMS stations; most Ohio records last updated 2019 to 2022), Columbus- and Cleveland-area stations checked against the cities' station lists, September 2026. Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania stations near the line are included; Kentucky and West Virginia stations across the Ohio River are not. Straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center. Stations open or close without the inventory always catching up. · USGS structures service · Columbus fire stations · Cleveland fire stations

Public library

1 library within 3 miles, 2 within 8.

Open

about 47 hours a week

Building

7,800 square feet

Homer Public Library

1 building, serves 1K people, 2.9 visits per resident a year, 25K items lent, 174 programs, $273K annual income

Museums: nearest Utica Historical Society, Utica, 4.7 mi away; 2 within 5 miles, 20 within 15 (IMLS 2018 directory: museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos).

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services, Public Libraries Survey fiscal 2024 (outlet and system files) and Museum Data Files 2018 (museums); straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · IMLS Public Libraries Survey · IMLS Museum Data Files

Grocery access

Distance

98% of residents live more than half a mile from a supermarket, 95% more than 1 mile

Without a car

0% live in a tract flagged for low income and low vehicle access

Poverty

3.6% of residents below the poverty line

SNAP stores

no supermarket or grocery store inside this ZIP take SNAP, alongside 0 convenience stores; nearest supermarket or grocery store Smithhisler Meats Inc. (grocery store), 7.6 mi from the ZIP's center, and the nearest supermarket or superstore Lanning's Foods, 8.3 mi; 0 supermarkets and grocery stores within 3 miles (USDA, 2026)

Setting

0% of residents in urban tracts, across 1 tract

A "supermarket" here is a large grocery store, supercenter or club; dollar stores and corner groceries do not count, and stores that opened since 2019 are missing from the distance figures; the SNAP store list is current. Rural distance flags mean a long drive, not necessarily hardship.

Source: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Access Research Atlas: 2019 Large Retailer Access Map (2010 census tracts, 2019 supermarket list; ERS's name for this file since July 2026), tract values weighted into ZIPs by 2020 census block population; SNAP store counts from USDA Food and Nutrition Service retailer locations, 2026; SNAP and no-vehicle households from Census ACS 2020 to 2024 · USDA ERS Large Retailer Access Map · USDA SNAP retailers · Census ACS

History

Before the settlers

No source found ties a named historic nation or village site to Burlington Township specifically; the record here is entirely about the Mound Builders and their earthworks, with the historic-era Wyandot, Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) presence attested only at the county and regional level. The 1881 county history counts seven or more mounds within the township: one a mile west of Homer on the former Fulton farm, one on the Butcher farm, two (originally three) on the Hunter/Yocum farm, one west of Utica on the McKnight/Hanger farm, one near Homer on the Woodruff farm, and "the largest and most entire" immediately at Homer on the Edwin Williams farm, about thirty rods around and nearly thirty feet high. Under one of the Hunter-farm mounds diggers found a domed stone vault about ten feet across and three feet high, capped with a large fieldstone, but empty when opened. In 1824, near an old fort whose outline was still visible on the creek bank by the Homer cemetery, workmen uncovered an unusually large human skeleton, which the county history speculates, without evidence, might have been "some pre-historical Indian chief." A circular embankment with a ditch on the inside and a central mound, on Joseph Conard's farm on the township's western line, is described as belonging to the same class of "sacred enclosures" as the Newark earthworks. None of this material is tied to a named historic people, and no county-level file yet exists for Licking to point to for the wider treaty and removal record.

Peoples named in the record: Adena culture.

• Dixon Mound mound · off South Street, Homer village · Adena culture; listed on the National Register of Historic Places (ref. 73001494) source
• Mound at Homer (Edwin Williams farm) mound · Homer village, on the Edwin Williams place · unspecified Mound Builder era source
• Stone-vaulted mound, Hunter/Yocum farm mound · Hunter (later Yocum) farm · unspecified Mound Builder era source
• Circular embankment and mound, Conard farm earthwork · Joseph Conard's farm, western line of the township · unspecified Mound Builder era; compared by the 1881 history to the Newark "sacred enclosures" source

Licking County

No county in Ohio carries a heavier concentration of Native American history than Licking County, and its record begins with stone. Flint Ridge, a vein of unusually colorful, glass-hard Vanport flint exposed along a ridge on the Licking-Muskingum county line in Hopewell Township, was quarried by Native people for more than 10,000 years; hundreds of shallow pits, some over 20 feet deep and covering more than a hundred acres, still mark the ridge. Colonel Charles Whittlesey, Dr. S. P. Hildreth (in an 1838 report to the Ohio legislature) and antiquarian Caleb Atwater (1818) independently… more

Ohio before the treaties: peoples, earthworks and cessionsstatewide

Periods

• Paleo-Indian, about 13,000 to 8,000 BC
• Archaic, about 8000 to 800 BC
• Early Woodland / Adena, about 800 BC to AD 100
• Middle Woodland / Hopewell, about 100 BC to AD 500
• Late Woodland, about AD 500 to 1000
• Late Prehistoric / Fort Ancient and Whittlesey, about AD 1000 to 1650
• Protohistoric, the Erie and the Beaver Wars, roughly 1650s
• Historic, 1700s resettlement
• Removal, roughly 1795 to 1843

Nations of the 1700s

Shawnee, Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Miami, Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga), Seneca (of Sandusky), Ottawa (Odawa), Erie, Ojibwe (Chippewa) / Potawatomi.

Treaties that ceded Ohio land

• Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785): US commissioners George Rogers Clark, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee; Wyandot, Delaware (Lenape), Ojibwe (Chippewa), and Odawa (Ottawa).
• Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789): US commissioner Arthur St. Clair (governor, Northwest Territory), with Josiah Harmar and Richard Butler; Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Sauk, Wyandot…
• Treaty of Greenville (1795): US commissioner Major General Anthony Wayne; twelve nations of the Western Confederacy — Wyandot, Delaware (Lenape), Shawnee, Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa),…
• Treaty of Fort Industry (1805): US Indian agent Charles Jouett; Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Wyandot, Munsee, Delaware (Lenape), and Shawnee.
• Treaty of Detroit (1807): William Hull (governor, Michigan Territory); Ottawa, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Wyandot, and Potawatomi.
• Treaty of Brownstown (1808): William Hull for the US; Ojibwe (Chippewa), Ottawa, and Potawatomi (Council of Three Fires), plus Wyandot and Shawnee.
• Treaty of Fort Meigs / Maumee Rapids (1817): US commissioners Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur; Wyandot, Seneca, Delaware (Lenape), Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwe (Chippewa).
• Treaty of St. Marys (1818): US commissioners Jonathan Jennings, Lewis Cass, and Benjamin Parke; across the six agreements: Wyandot/Seneca/Shawnee/Ottawa (September 17), Wyandot again (Sept…
• Treaty of Lewistown and Treaty of Wapakoneta (1831)
• Treaty of Upper Sandusky / Wyandot (1842): The Wyandot Nation and the US government. I could not confirm the US commissioner's name from any source I opened — flagged gap.

Earthworks that survive

• Newark Earthworks (overall complex) (Licking County), Hopewell
• Great Circle Earthworks (Licking County), Hopewell
• Octagon Earthworks (Licking County), Hopewell
• Serpent Mound (Adams County), Disputed
• Fort Ancient (Warren County), Hopewell
• Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (Ross County), Hopewell
• Miamisburg Mound (Montgomery County), Adena
• Shrum Mound (Franklin County), Adena
• Fort Hill (Highland County), Hopewell
• Marietta Earthworks (Washington County), Hopewell
• Flint Ridge (Straddles the Licking–Muskingum county line; the Ohio History Connection's preserve itself sits in Hopewell Township, Licking County, about 3 miles north of Brownsville. County), Used by essentially every prehistoric culture in the region across more than 10,000 years, with especially intensive use by the Hopewell

Statewide notes researched from archive.org, delawaretribe.org, en.wikipedia.org and others; every entry carries its own links in the research file.

How Burlington Township, Licking County began

Burlington Township, on Licking County's northern line against Knox County, was organized in 1817 and named for Colonel Wait Wright's native Burlington, Vermont, after Wright reportedly bought the naming privilege from the settlers with two gallons of whiskey. Its first cabins went up in 1806 on Otter Creek and the North Fork, and its village, first also called Burlington, was laid out by John Chonner in 1816 and renamed Homer around 1825 when it took a post office. The township is thick with Mound Builder earthworks, and on May 18, 1825, it took the brunt of a tornado so violent that the county still calls it "the Burlington storm." Homer's own claim on the wider world rests on two people who spent part of their youth there: Victoria Woodhull, born in the village in 1838 and later the first woman to run for President of the United States, and Union General William S. Rosecrans, whose family kept a store there in his boyhood, though modern biographies place his actual birth in Delaware County.

Settled 1806 (James Dunlap, Cornelius Vanausdal, Henry Oldacre, Nathan Conard, John Johnson, Jonathan Beaty, Hugh McKindley, Adam Patterson, John and Thomas Dixon), platted Homer (first called Burlington) laid out by John Chonner in 1816; renamed Homer c. 1825 when it became a post town, incorporated 1817; by township named by Colonel Wait Wright, who is said to have paid for the naming privilege with two gallons of whiskey for the settlers. source

The name. "It is said that Colonel Wait Wright treated the 'boys' to two gallons of whiskey for the privilege of naming the township, and thereupon called it after his native place in Vermont," the 1881 county history records. The village at its center went by the same name, Burlington, until residents had to pick a new one for their post office and settled on Homer instead. source

Timeline9

• 1806First settlers reach the township, among them James Dunlap, Cornelius Vanausdal, Henry Oldacre, Nathan Conard and John and Thomas Dixon. source
• 1810Settlers build a block-house on the "Indian path" near the Dunlap residence, on the road from Utica to Johnstown, as a defense against Indian attack. source
• 1816John Chonner lays out the village, first called Burlington like the township around it. source
• 1817Burlington Township is formally organized. source
• c. 1825The village takes a post office and is renamed Homer to avoid confusion with another Ohio Burlington. source
• May 18, 1825A tornado, remembered ever after as "the Burlington storm," tears across Bennington and Burlington townships, killing Colonel Wright's teenage son and two sons of a Mr. Vance and flinging livestock, wagons and buildings for miles. source
• 1828Homer's Congregational (later Presbyterian) church is organized on May 5 by Rev. Jacob Little of Granville. source
• September 23, 1838Victoria California Claflin, later Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States, is born in Homer, the seventh of the Claflin family's ten children. source
• 1916Homer celebrates its centennial in August; the oldest resident present, Elizabeth Burner, aged ninety-three, had lived in the village since 1845. source

Stories

The Burlington Storm

On the afternoon of May 18, 1825, a tornado dropped out of the sky in southeastern Delaware County, lifted, and came down again with even greater violence as it crossed into Bennington and Burlington townships, cutting a swath one-third to three-fifths of a mile wide. It crossed the Newark-to-Mount-Vernon road just above Utica, flattening forest and orchard alike; a heavy ox-cart was carried forty rods and smashed, a cow was found dead eight feet up in a fallen treetop, and a coat torn from a cabin turned up the following November forty miles away in Coshocton County. Colonel Wait Wright's teenaged son was killed instantly when the family's log house came apart around him; two sons of a Mr. Vance died as their family fled to the orchard and the house's upper story tore free and sailed through the trees. Witnesses said the ground itself trembled, and the storm advanced, by their estimate, at nearly a mile a minute. It remains the storm the county named a village's misfortune after, even though Burlington itself, by then, had already become Homer. source

Homer's Native Daughter and the General's Boyhood Home

Homer's two most famous names never fit comfortably into the pious 1881 county history that otherwise recorded every mill and church in the township. Victoria California Claflin was born there on September 23, 1838, the seventh of the Claflin family's ten children; she grew up to become a stockbroker, newspaper publisher, spiritualist and advocate of free love who in 1872 ran for President of the United States as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party, decades before women could vote. A separate Homer family, the Rosecrans, produced both Sylvester Rosecrans, the first Catholic bishop of Columbus, and William S. Rosecrans, the Union general who won at Stones River and lost catastrophically at Chickamauga; the 1881 county history places his father as a Homer merchant and farmer and recalls "Billy" Rosecrans himself clerking as a teenager in a store fourteen miles away in Alexandria, restless and eager to enlist. Modern biographies, however, put the general's actual birth in Kingston Township, Delaware County, in 1819, which suggests the family moved to Homer sometime after his birth rather than before it. Neither Woodhull's scandalous later career nor Rosecrans's Chickamauga disgrace found much of a welcome in the centennial pieties of 1881; both are remembered today mostly by people who never set foot in the township. source

The Mound That Kept Its Secret

The largest and best-preserved of Burlington Township's Indian mounds stood, and still stands, close beside Edwin Williams's house at Homer, about thirty rods around at the base and nearly thirty feet high, with the usual saucer-shaped hollow at its crown. Roughly fifty years before the county history was written, a party of five or six curious settlers decided to dig into it in search of relics. They got about fifteen feet down before giving up, having found nothing at all for their trouble. Other, smaller mounds in the township were less fortunate: one on the Hunter farm turned out to hide a carefully built dome of fitted stone, ten feet across and three feet high, capped with a boulder the settlers called a "nigger head" — and it too, when finally broken open, proved empty. What the Mound Builders intended by these structures, the 1881 historian could only guess, but he was certain of one thing: whoever they were, they had not built them to hide treasure, and generations of township diggers came away with nothing to show for their curiosity but the holes they left behind. source

Not found: The National Register listings sharing this township's ZIP codes (the Fuller House at 43080, and the Newark courthouse-district buildings and Johnstown/Monroe Township buildings at 43055 and 43031) were checked and found to stand in Utica, Newark and Johnstown respectively, none of them inside Burlington Township, so none are listed here. Sources disagree sharply on William S. Rosecrans's birthplace: the 1881 county history and a local genealogy compilation place his family, and by implication his birth, in Homer, while Wikipedia's biography puts his birth on a farm in Kingston Township, Delaware County, in 1819; this file presents both accounts rather than picking one. No source found gives an exact date for the Homer congregational schism or for most of the township's smaller mounds beyond "unspecified Mound Builder era." (confidence medium)

Licking County

Licking County was organized out of Fairfield County by an act of the Ohio General Assembly passed January 30, 1808, effective March 1, 1808, and named for the Licking River and the salt licks along it that had drawn game, Native travelers and, in 1798, the county's first white settlers. Its seat, Newark, was platted in 1802 by General William C. Schenck at the forks of the Licking, and the county grew around the Ohio and Erie Canal (broken ground at Licking Summit on July 4, 1825), the National Road, its railroads, and industries in glass, stoves, baskets and fiberglass. Licking County holds the richest concentration of Native American earthworks anywhere in Ohio: the Hopewell culture's Newark Earthworks, the largest set of geometric earthen enclosures ever built, whose surviving Octagon and Great Circle were inscribed, together with Flint Ridge's ten-thousand-year-old flint quarries and Granville's Alligator effigy mound nearby, into a landscape that in September 2023 became part of Ohio's first UNESCO World Heritage Site. The county has since drawn Denison University, the Dawes Arboretum, Owens Corning's fiberglass works, and, in the twenty-first century, Intel's multi-billion-dollar chip campus on its western edge near New Albany.

Settled 1798 (Elias Hughes and John Ratliff settle on the Bowling Green, on the Licking River in present Madison Township, the first permanent white settlement in the county), platted 1802 (Newark platted by Gen. William C. Schenck at the forks of the Licking River; the plat was recorded at the Fairfield County recorder's office on March 16, 1803), incorporated 1808-01-30 (act passed by the Ohio General Assembly); 1808-03-01 (effective date, county organized out of Fairfield County); by Ohio General Assembly; first officers, 1808: William Wilson, president judge of the court of common pleas; Alexander Holmes, Timothy Rose and James Taylor, associate judges; Samuel Bancroft, clerk; John Stadden, sheriff; Elias Gilman, treasurer; Archibald Wilson, Elisha Wells and Israel Wells, commissioners. source

The name. Licking County and its river take their name from the salt licks along the Licking's banks, which drew game and, by the 1770s, Native travelers and white explorers alike; Rev. David Jones's 1773 journal already calls the stream 'Salt Lick Creek.' Some scholars offer an alternate origin, deriving 'Licking' from a Lenape (Delaware) phrase meaning roughly 'where the flood waters recede.' Either way, the name predated the county by decades and was simply carried over when the legislature organized it in 1808.

The county seat. Newark was platted in 1802 by Gen. William C. Schenck, a Warren County surveyor who came to the forks of the Licking to survey military-district land and, finding the spot promising, laid out a town and named it for his birthplace, Newark, New Jersey; the plat was recorded in March 1803, while the area was still part of Fairfield County. When Licking County organized in 1808, commissioners James Dunlap, Isaac Cook and James Armstrong selected Newark as permanent county seat over its only rival, Granville; the first court, held that year, convened in the house of Levi Hays, four miles west of Newark, because no courthouse yet existed - and the grand jury, finding no room indoors, held its inquest under a tree.

Timeline23

• 1798Elias Hughes and John Ratliff, with their families, become the first permanent white settlers in the future county, squatting on the Bowling Green on the Licking River. source
• 1801/1802Welsh emigrants buy 2,000 acres in future Granville Township and build the first Welsh Hills cabins in 1802, the year Gen. William C. Schenck plats Newark at the forks of the Licking. source
• 1804-1805Massachusetts subscribers form the Licking Land Company on April 23, 1804, to settle a colony in Ohio; its advance party reaches Granville on November 2, 1805, and 45 families arrive by winter. source
• 1807Wyandot residents sell their village of Raccoontown, on Raccoon Creek near Johnstown, to settlers and abandon it; a remnant Wyandot presence on the Brushy Fork persists until 1812. source
• 1825-07-04Ground is broken for the Ohio and Erie Canal at Licking Summit, with Governor DeWitt Clinton turning the first spadeful; a dike built there through 1830 creates the reservoir later named Buckeye Lake. source
• 1828The Black Hand petroglyph at the Licking Narrows is destroyed when its rock face is blasted away to build the canal towpath. source
• 1831-12-13Classes begin at the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, chartered by Ohio Baptists; it becomes Granville College in 1845 and Denison University in 1853. source
• 1832-1834The National Road is surveyed and built across the county's northern townships; the town of Carthage (later Etna) is laid out on its line in 1832 and the road is finished to that point by 1833-34. source
• 1855/1857Newark is connected by rail on the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (April 1855) and, westward to Columbus, on the Central Ohio Railroad (April 1857). source
• 1860David Wyrick finds the inscribed 'Keystone' near Newark in June and the 'Decalogue Stone' in a burial mound that November, artifacts later shown to be a forgery known as the Newark Holy Stones. source
• 1883/1885James Moser founds an iron foundry in East Newark that, with Joseph Wehrle's 1885 partnership, becomes the Wehrle stove works, later one of the city's largest employers. source
• 1894The state renames the Licking Summit Reservoir 'Buckeye Lake' and begins developing it as a recreational resort. source
• 1895The A. H. Heisey Glass Company begins operations in Newark, a business that runs until 1957. source
• 1910The Octagon Earthworks are leased to the newly formed Moundbuilders Country Club, which builds a golf course over the ancient enclosure. source
• 1913-03The regional Great Flood of 1913 swells the Licking River and floods Newark and the surrounding valley, part of a disaster that struck rivers across Ohio between March 23 and 26. source
• 1929-06-01Beman and Bertie Dawes formally establish the Dawes Arboretum near Newark, built out from their 140-acre 'Daweswood' farm. source
• 1938Owens Corning Fiberglas Corporation is formed from a joint venture of Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works; its Case Avenue plant in Newark becomes one of the company's first fiberglass manufacturing sites. source
• 1962The Air Force guidance and metrology facility in Heath is formally named Newark Air Force Station; redesignated Newark Air Force Base in 1987, it continues today as an Air Force metrology and calibration center. source
• 1975Black Hand Gorge, on the Licking River east of Newark, becomes an Ohio State Nature Preserve. source
• 2022-01-21Intel announces an initial investment of more than $28 billion to build two computer-chip factories on nearly 1,000 acres in Licking County near New Albany. source
• 2022-12-07The Ohio Supreme Court rules that Ohio History Connection may use eminent domain to reclaim the Octagon Earthworks from the Moundbuilders Country Club. source
• 2023-09-19UNESCO inscribes the Octagon and Great Circle Earthworks, with six other Hopewell-culture sites, as the 'Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks' - Ohio's first World Heritage Site. source
• 2025-01-01The Octagon Earthworks open to full, unrestricted public access for the first time since 1910, after the Moundbuilders Country Club's departure. source

County stories

The Canal's First Spadeful

On July 4, 1825, thousands converged on a muddy field at Licking Summit, four miles south of Newark, to watch the state break ground on the Ohio and Erie Canal, under booths hastily built in the woods after days of rain. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, builder of the Erie Canal, took the ceremonial spade first and raised the first shovelful of earth to wild cheering; Ohio's own Governor Jeremiah Morrow followed, then a militia captain from Chillicothe wheeled the full barrow to the bank himself while the crowd, by one account, shouted itself hoarse and wept. Antiquarian Caleb Atwater, watching cavalry horses stamp at the flies before the speakers' stand, remarked that it was just as well to put the horses there, 'for they cannot read, and we can.' Laborers who dug the canal afterward earned eight dollars for twenty-six days' work, sunrise to sunset, and drew regular rations of whiskey until commissioners Micajah Williams and Alfred Kelley, alarmed at the toll of four daily 'jiggers' apiece, ordered contractors to stop supplying it or forfeit their pay. source

The Welsh of the Hills

In 1801, Thomas Phillips and Theophilus Rees, two Welsh-born men of means living among fellow Welsh emigrants in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, sent scouts to inspect 2,000 acres of Ohio land they were considering, sight unseen, in what became northeastern Granville Township. Satisfied, they bought the tract from a Welsh land dealer in Philadelphia, and in 1801 and 1802 a small vanguard - David Lewis, David Thomas, Rees himself, his son-in-law Simon James, and a frontiersman named Jimmy Johnson picked up along the road near Wheeling - built the first cabins on what settlers called the Welsh Hills. Rees, a scholar who never fully mastered English, became the settlement's patriarch, walking to services in nearby Granville after the New England colony arrived there in 1805 until his countrymen organized the Welsh Hills church in 1808. More Welsh families followed, planting a community whose language lingered in the hills for a generation and whose place names still mark the townships around Granville today. source

Flint Ridge, the Great Indian Quarry

Long before any county existed here, Native toolmakers were digging into a ridge of glassy, rainbow-colored chert running some eight miles along the Licking-Muskingum line, leaving hundreds of pits, some cut twenty feet into the rock, across more than a hundred acres. Colonel Charles Whittlesey, examining the ridge in the nineteenth century, found the old pits still holding water and surrounded by rejected, flawed stone, discarded by workers who kept only the clearest pieces for knives and arrowheads; Dr. S. P. Hildreth, reporting to the Ohio legislature in 1838, and Caleb Atwater, writing as early as 1818, both marveled at the scale of the digging and agreed it could only have been done to reach fresh, workable stone beneath the weathered surface. No one studying the ridge in the 1800s could say what tools the ancient quarriers had used, or how long the work went on; archaeology has since shown the answer was more than 10,000 years, with Hopewell-era artisans especially prizing the ridge's flint and carrying it into a trade network reaching Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico. The state protected the ridge as Flint Ridge State Memorial in 1933, and a museum today stands built directly over one of the ancient pits. source

The Octagon and the Moon

For more than a century, most visitors to the Octagon Earthworks in Newark saw it as a golf course rather than a monument: the Moundbuilders Country Club leased the enclosure in 1910 and built its links across the fifty-acre octagon and its Observatory Circle, renewing the lease in 1997 through 2078. Yet in 1982, Earlham College researchers Ray Hively and Robert Horn showed that the earthwork's walls and gateways were laid out to track all eight rise and set points of the moon across its 18.6-year cycle, the extreme northern moonrise aligning, from the Observatory Mound, within half a degree of the earthwork's own center - a feat one researcher found twice as precise as the solstice alignments at Stonehenge. As Ohio History Connection worked toward UNESCO recognition, it moved to buy out the club's lease through eminent domain, a fight the Ohio Supreme Court settled in the History Connection's favor on December 7, 2022, comparing the site to Stonehenge or Machu Picchu. After further appeals failed, the sides settled in August 2024, the golfers departed, and on January 1, 2025, anyone could walk the full octagon and watch, unobstructed, for the moonrise its builders once tracked so precisely. source

The Newark Holy Stones

In June 1860, David Wyrick, a Newark surveyor convinced that American Indians descended from the lost tribes of Israel, announced he had found a small stone near the city's earthworks bearing Hebrew inscriptions reading 'Holy of Holies' and 'King of the Earth.' That November, digging inside a burial vault south of town, he produced a far more elaborate find: a sandstone box holding a smaller stone carved with a robed, turbaned figure labeled Moses and a compressed Hebrew rendering of the Ten Commandments. The finds seemed, to those who wanted to believe it, to settle a heated debate of the era over whether all races of humanity shared one common origin. The case did not hold up: scholar Abraham Geiger told the New York Times within weeks that the lettering looked distinctly modern, and later researchers, comparing Wyrick's published copies against the stones, counted dozens of transcription errors too large to be innocent. Ohio Historical Society curator Bradley Lepper traced the Decalogue Stone's central image to an 1849 illustrated volume on the ruins of Nineveh circulating in Ohio at the time, evidence, he argues, that someone manufactured the stones and planted them to be found. The stones are on display today at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, a lesson in how a genuine archaeological landscape could be pressed into a story its builders never told. source

Black Hand Gorge, Erased for a Canal

Early hunters and settlers who pushed through the dark half-mile gorge where the Licking cuts through sixty-foot sandstone cliffs east of Newark called it Black Hand Narrows, for a carving on an overhanging rock: a human hand and wrist, roughly double life size, thumb and fingers spread and pointing east, chiseled into the stone and darkened by weather. N. N. Hill's 1881 county history, drawing on early travelers' memories, describes the carving as a landmark everyone in the valley once knew - and records its loss: when the Ohio Canal turned the Narrows into a slack-water channel, engineers blasted away the very rock bearing the hand to make room for the towpath, a destruction Hill calls 'much to be regretted' even as he treats it as simply the price of progress. Other carvings nearby survived that first round only to be dynamited in 1890 for an electric interurban line. Nothing of the petroglyph remains today, but the gorge, protected since 1975 as Black Hand Gorge State Nature Preserve, still runs for miles along the Licking, a reminder of what nineteenth-century Ohio was willing to destroy for transportation. source

Buckeye Lake's Resort Years

The reservoir canal engineers diked into being between 1826 and 1830 to feed the Ohio and Erie Canal outlived the canal traffic it was built for by decades. In 1894 the state renamed it 'Buckeye Lake' and began developing it for recreation; interurban trolleys brought excursionists starting in 1902, and by the 1910s promoters called it 'Ohio's Inland Seashore' and the 'Atlantic City of the Middle West,' with hotels, a skating rink and amusement rides crowding its shore. The park came into its own in 1931 with the Dips, a wooden roller coaster anchoring a resort drawing as many as 50,000 visitors a day by the 1940s to its Crystal Pool and dance-hall bands. The Dips wrecked in 1958, and the park closed for good in 1970. The lake remained, becoming an Ohio state park in 1949 and, after a 2015 inspection found its dam unsound, the subject of a $107 million reconstruction finished under budget in November 2018 - proof the old canal reservoir outlasted its own resort heyday. source

Sources: archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · genealogytrails.com · commons.wikimedia.org · ohiohistory.org · courtnewsohio.gov · nps.gov · publications.newberry.org · newsroom.intel.com · theclio.com · pioneermillworks.com · buyinsulationproductstore.com · ia601606.us.archive.org. Researched 2026-09-15 by sonnet; every entry above links its own page. · Ohio History Connection · Internet Archive (county histories) · Wikimedia Commons · Remarkable Ohio (historical markers)

Historic places

Nearest listing: Thompson, Enoch, House, Mount Vernon, 1.1 mi (certified 1980).

Listing recognizes significance and brings review of federally funded projects; it does not restrict a private owner. Historic districts count once, at their center.

Source: National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places spatial data (point file); listings whose point falls inside the ZIP boundary · National Register data · USGS GNIS

School district

• Northridge Local100% of residentsLocal school district

0 public schools inside this ZIP. Nearest to the population center: North Fork Online Academy, 4 mi; 0 within a mile, 0 within 3.

Money, fiscal 2023: Northridge Local took in $21 million, 26% from the state, 64% local and 10% federal, and spent $15,638 per pupil on day-to-day operations for 1,171 students, 48% of it on instruction; capital outlay $1.7 million (Census school finance survey via NCES).

Child poverty: the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate puts 5.1% of Northridge Local's school-age children below the poverty line (78 of 1,517 aged 5 to 17; SAIPE).

Source: Ohio school district boundaries (OGRIP, 2014 edition, via ODOT) · 2020 census blocks · public school locations from NCES EDGE, 2024-25 · enrollment and meals from the NCES Common Core of Data 2023-24 · private schools from the NCES Private School Survey 2023-24 · district finances from the Census F-33 survey, fiscal 2023 · child poverty from Census SAIPE 2024 · ODOT GIS · NCES EDGE · NCES Common Core of Data · NCES private schools · Census SAIPE · Census school finances (F-33)

School report card

Components

achievement 3 stars, progress 4 stars, gap closing 5 stars, early literacy 3 stars, graduation 5 stars, college and career readiness 4 stars

Achievement

performance index 79.3% of ODE's maximum score for the year (the average of the top 2% of district scores, not the highest score possible) (score 87.1, 87.4 the year before)

Graduation

98.9% of the class of 2024 graduated in four years; 78.9% of that class (graduates or not) showed college, career, workforce or military readiness

Spending

$14,037 per pupil in 2023-24 against $12,759 statewide

Teachers

average salary $59,318, 11 years of experience, 59.3% with a master's degree, 21.7% in their first years of teaching

Enrollment

1,128 students in 2024-25

Three stars means the district meets state standards, five that it significantly exceeds them, one that it needs significant support. Achievement stars follow family income closely; the progress component (growth from year to year) is the fairer measure of teaching. Charter and private schools are not in the district figures.

Source: Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 2024-2025 School Report Cards (district overview, achievement, expenditures per pupil and educator files), for the district where most of this ZIP's residents live · Ohio school report cards

Colleges

Mount Vernon Nazarene University is a private nonprofit college with 2,615 students over the 2023-24 year; published tuition and fees $35,524 a year; 64% of a 330-student entering class graduated (six-year bachelor).

2 institutions within 10 miles, 15 within 25.

Next nearest: Knox County Career Center (8.8 mi).

Universities, community colleges, career schools and private colleges all count; branch campuses appear only where IPEDS lists them separately. Graduation rates follow first-time full-time students for 150% of normal time.

Source: NCES IPEDS 2024 directory, 12-month enrollment 2023-24, tuition and fees 2023-24 and graduation rates for the 2017 entering cohort at four-year institutions and the 2020 cohort at two-year ones; straight-line miles from the ZIP's population-weighted center · NCES IPEDS

Local government

• Burlington Township, Licking County100% of residentsTownship

Source: ODOT municipal corporation and township boundaries · 2020 census blocks · Ohio EPA grants awarded in 2025 (OEPA_Achievements map service) · Auditor of State unauditable entities list · ODOT GIS · Auditor of State · Ohio EPA grants (OEPA_Achievements)

Who represents this ZIP

U.S. Senate: Bernie Moreno (R), Jon Husted (R)

• Troy Balderson RU.S. House OH-12Zanesville · since 2018 · site
• Tim Schaffer ROhio Senate 20Lancaster · since 2019 · site
• Kevin D. Miller ROhio House 69Newark · since 2021 · site

Source: ODOT district boundaries · members from the U.S. House, Ohio Senate and Ohio House directories, September 2026 · U.S. House · Ohio Senate · Ohio House · ODOT GIS