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General John Hunt Morgan led 2,000 Confederate cavalrymen into Meigs County on July 18, 1863, during a 45-day raid north of the Ohio River. In pursuit, Union forces under Gen. James M. Shackelford and Col. Frank L. Wolford deployed near Bashan Church on the morning of July 19. Near this point five regiments of Kentucky cavalry and the 45th Ohio Mounted Infantry met Confederates retreating from the battle at Buffington Island, three miles east. During this skirmish, Confederate Colonels Richard C. Morgan, William W. Ward, and D. Howard Smith surrendered their commands, numbering about 400 men and officers.
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As Morgan’s Raiders rode eastward across southern Ohio during the third week of July 1863, the scattered defensive forces pursuing him consolidated and drew closer. Four regiments under Brigadier General Eliakim P. Scammon (including the 23rd Ohio, containing future U.S. Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley Jr.) arrived here by steamboat on July 18, preventing Morgan from entering Pomeroy. Brigadier General Henry Moses Judah’s division also arrived in Pomeroy on July 18, immediately marching east following Morgan. Following Morgan’s defeat at Buffington Island on July 19, both Judah and Brigadier General Edward H. Hobson returned to Pomeroy and headquartered at the Grand Dilcher Hotel. Of the approximately 900 Confederate prisoners captured in Meigs County, 227 were held here at the courthouse before being sent downriver to Cincinnati.
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General James V. Hartinger, 1925-2000, was born in Middleport, Ohio, and graduated from Middleport High School in 1943. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1949 and was a career-long fighter pilot with the United States Air Force, flying every type of fighter craft the Air Force procured during his 35 years of active duty. He saw military action during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Named commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs in 1979, he was promoted to four stars and became the “founding father” of Air Force Space Command. The headquarters building of Air Force Space Command is named the James V. Hartinger Building in his honor and the Hartinger Medal is awarded annually for extraordinary achievement in space.
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An influential American journalist of the late nineteenth century, Ambrose Bierce (1842 – c. 1914) was born in Meigs County and reared in Kosciusko County, Indiana. He fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, a formative experience related in his short stories “Chickamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Moving to San Francisco in the years after the war, he began his career as a writer and newspaper columnist. His cynical wit and elaborate puns reached a wide audience during the last quarter of the nineteenth century through such papers as William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Bierce’s best-known book, the Devil’s Dictionary (1911), is a lexicon of humorous definitions first published in his newspaper columns. In December 1913 or January 1914, Bierce vanished during travels in rebellion-torn Mexico.
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The Ohio River begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and flows 981 miles to join the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. The Iroquois called the river “Oyo” or “Ohio,” which the French translated as “La Belle Riviere,” the Beautiful River. It was an important transportation route for countless generations of Native Americans and, beginning in the 1780s, for Euro-American settlers. It was the main route to the opening West and the principal outlet for the region’s growing farm output. Congress first acted to improve navigation in 1824 and, later, by canalizing the river with a series of locks and dams beginning in 1878. River commerce has increased with industrialization, moving up to 150 million tons annually.
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Since it was formed in 1819, Meigs County was fostered by its location on 57 miles of the Ohio River, named by the Indians”Oyo,” meaning beautiful river. Pomeroy, the county seat, was named for Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, an early landholder. His company, Pomeroy, Sons & Company, and his son-in-law, Valentine B. Horton (1802-1888), were influential in developing the coal, salt, and iron industries of the region. Horton pioneered the transportation of coal by river, building the world’s first coal barges and, in 1835, the first coal-fueled towboat, the Condor. Coal, salt, and iron, in addition to other local products, were shipped from Pomeroy’s 125′ x 40′ wharf to ports from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. Excursion, passenger, shanty and showboats also visited Pomeroy’s port. Today, the Ohio River continues to be a busy waterway carrying commodities such as coal, petroleum, chemicals, steel, sand, and gravel. It is also a busy haven for recreational crafts as well as stern wheel boats.
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Situated in an agriculturally rich area, county fairs have long been a significant tradition and event in Meigs County. The Meigs County Agricultural Society held its first fair on October 22, 1851, in Middleport and its second at the Rock-Spring Hotel on October 31, 1852. Subsequent fairs occurred around the county until March 14, 1868, when the first section of a permanent location was purchased from Leonard and Jane Carleton near Rock Springs and became known as the Meigs County Fairgrounds. A popular place, the nearby natural springs, exemplified by the historic stone-carved springhouse, once supplied water to the grounds and community. Improvements to the fairgrounds included expanding the one-third mile racetrack to a half-mile in 1889, constructing the unique curved grandstand in 1890, and reconstructing the 1829 Foster-Jenkinson log cabin on the grounds in 1987. A single barrack from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp of the 1930s remains in use.
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James Edwin Campbell was born on September 28, 1867, in the Kerr’s Run area of Pomeroy to James and Letha Campbell. He graduated from Pomeroy High School with the class of 1884. After graduation, Campbell taught in various parts of Meigs County. Campbell achieved notoriety as an African American poet, editor, author of short stories, and educator. He began his writing in 1887 with the work Driftings and Gleanings. During the 1880s and 1890s, he wrote regularly for daily newspapers in Chicago and was employed on the literary staff of the Chicago Times-Herald. His dialect poetry attracted wide-spread popularity and he published a collection of his best works, Echoes From the Cabin and Elsewhere. Campbell was installed as the first president of the West Virginia Colored Institute (West Virginia State University), serving in the capacity from 1891 to 1894. James Edwin Campbell died in Pomeroy on January 26, 1896.