George Washington, floating down the Ohio in 1770 on a surveying trip, looked at the flat shelf of alluvial deposits on which Wellsville later would be built, and in his journal proclaimed it “good bottom land.” Had he dug a little into the valley’s steep hillsides, Washington could have found both coal and clay in abundance here, minerals that would make possible the many clay industries that flourished widely in the region but found some of their highest expressions in Wellsville.

The packet boats that carried passengers and commerce on the Ohio switched from wood to coal to fire their boilers. So did the steam railroad engines that connected Wellsville’s river ports to Cleveland and Lake Erie.

Coal fueled the brick, sewer pipe and pottery kilns until later supplanted by locally abundant natural gas from shallow wells.

All these vast resources were laid down 300 million years ago during the Pennsylvanian Era, and later uplifted as part of the Appalachian Plateau. Ancient rivers in our region flowed mainly north until blocked a million years ago by the continental glaciers of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) Epoch. Retreating glaciers left huge ancient lakes that were drained by a new river, the Ohio, carving a deep valley toward the southwest, leaving endless deposits of sand and gravel and exposing sedimentary layers of sandstone, shale, coal and clay.

An anomaly in this pattern just south and west of Wellsville – an abandoned meander of an ancient river bed which over millennia filled with plant and animal remains – created the Diamond Mine, a thick seam of Upper Freeport cannel coal (from “candle”), a premium coal shale high in oil that burns with a bright flame and leaves no ash. It was so prized that the name “Diamond” was used by multiple other coal companies to describe their product.

The entrance to the Diamond Mine was on the Ohio River at the mouth of Yellow Creek, at Linton, a small collection of dwellings, a post office, hotel and rail station of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh line. A group of investors from Connecticut launched the Diamond mine in 1855. At the height of production in the 1870s it employed 20 miners and produced 250 metric tons of coal a day, an output often wholly consumed by the railroad.

But it was fossils in the cannel coal that gave Linton and the Diamond Mine worldwide fame. The Wellsville Patriot newspaper reported in March 1856 that “while perambulating . . . the deep, dark caverns to be found on the property of the Ohio (Diamond) Coal Company, we had the pleasure of encountering Dr. Newberry, Government geologist, in search of fossil fish and other remains.” (Hook and Baird, 1988) John H. Newberry visited Linton regularly over a 20-year period, collected thousands of fossils yielding previously unknown species of worms, crustaceans, and vertebrates including fishes and, most significantly, the earliest known amphibians. The impact of his collections was immediate, worldwide and for 140 years has continued to attract the attention of scientists. Linton, Yellow Creek and the Diamond Mine are in every paleontology textbook.

The same mouth of Yellow Creek in which the Diamond Mine entry was located is today a pleasant valley opening onto the Ohio, with a stream wide and deep enough for small watercraft and home to a seasonal trailer campground – a poor man’s paradise. Just so it was used by Native Americans, and in the fateful year 1774 it was home to the family of Captain John Logan, son of Chief Shikellamy, an oratory and leader of the Mingo “tribe,” an association of remnants of Seneca, Cayuga and Lenape peoples. Logan, named for a friend of his father’s and known as a friend to the white man, had migrated a year before to the Ohio country from Pennsylvania.

The peace and trust he had nurtured were shattered when a group of Virginia frontiersmen led by Daniel Greathouse came from Fort Henry in April 1774, bent on avenging raids by other tribes. Logan was absent, but members of his family were lured across the river on a ruse, then ambushed and murdered, his mother, brother and pregnant sister among them. Logan vowed revenge and led warriors on raids on white settlers, sparking frontier-wide bloody attacks and reprisals that became known as Lord Dunmore’s War, for the troops were sent by Virginia’s governor to put down the uprising. The war culminated in a great battle at Point Pleasant in which Logan was present and Chief Cornstalk led the attacking warriors.

Logan’s Lament, the great man’s moving personal statement of mourning and injustice, recorded after peace had been restored, is an oft-cited indictment of America’s treatment of Native Americans. Though the adjacent future site of Wellsville itself was doubtless used by indigenous peoples since ancient times, they left little record other than flint points and mussel shell piles.

In the 20th Century local collectors walked plowed fields and dug in rock shelters looking for Indian artifacts throughout the valley, but did not follow archeological methods or publish their finds. Among the most successful were Harry A. Cline, followed by his son Harry M. Cline, who founded and maintained the now-defunct Ohio Hills Indian Museum on the outskirts of Wellsville in order to share their finds with the public: bushel baskets of flint points and knives, stone tools for grinding grain and working hides, stone tomahawks and clubs, pipes and human figures of clay. Mammoth tusks, teeth and bones recovered from a sand and gravel quarry at nearby Georgetown, Pa., and such eclectic artifacts as John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman’s Bible, a “petrified” apple from Hillcrest Farms that the Smithsonian was supposedly unable to explain, and moccasins belonging to Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux.

The opening of the Northwest Territory began at Wellsville – at least in one sense, for the future village was part of the first township in the Survey of the Seven Ranges. The Point of Beginning for this historic survey is 10 miles upriver from Wellsville at the spot where intersect the state boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the future Ohio. Thomas Hutchins, appointed as geographer of the United States, carried out the survey as prescribed in the Land Ordinance of 1785. The quadrilinear system of ranges and townships was the beginning of the Public Land Survey for laying out the United States going westward.

With passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 by Congress, and the forced usurpation of Native Americans land rights by the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the land west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River to the Mississippi was opened to white settlement. A government blockhouse was erected at Wellsville prior to 1793 - the date known because that is when it was sketched by a keelboat passenger named John Hockenberry - and was burned in 1794. Among the men who did garrison duty there was Patrick Gass of Wellsburg, who later was in the company of the 1805 Lewis and Clark Expedition and was first to publish a journal of that trip.

James Clark and William Wells are credited as the first settlers at Wellsville, though both left the area during the Indian unrest of 1795 and returned before 1800. Wells was a farmer, justice of the peace and was a county court judge at Steubenville, Ohio. Wells bought 304 acres and laid out the town in 1820, naming it Wellsville. He and son James built a sawmill on Little Yellow Creek, at the north end of the town. Soon homes and buildings were being built on Wellsville lots. Grist mills were built on Little Yellow Creek by Daniel Swearingen in 1806 and Gwinn & Neff in 1810. Construction of a “mud turnpike” between Wellsville and New Lisbon provided a route for wagons to bring products of the interior for river shipment.

With a number of grist mills in operation, flour was an important product. As many as 50,000 barrels of flour a year were received at Wellsville for trans-shipment. “Joseph Wells says he remembers having seen as many as 150 loaded wagons at Wellsville in a day, waiting turn to discharge freight for the river and to reload with merchandise for the interior.

The height of business prosperity was enjoyed between the years 1832 and 1842, during which period the town controlled a large share of the river business of 15 Ohio counties, including the Western Reserve, with its important cheese trade.” (“History of Columbiana County” 1870) An excellent landing place and average river depth of 20 feet “contributed in no little degree towards making it a favored shipping point.”

In 1815, Robert Skillinger opened a shipyard in Wellsville to build flatboats. Boat-building began to become an important industry, with flatboats the principal product. In 1808 Henry Aten and companions floated to New Orleans on a flatboat loaded with cargo, sold both boat and cargo, and walked back to Wellsville. Keelboats of 20 to 70 feet were poled so they could travel upriver, though slowly.

In 1817, only five years after Robert Fulton built the river steamboat “New Orleans” at Pittsburgh and navigated it to its namesake city, Skillinger laid the hull of the “Robert Thompson” steamboat in Wellsville. It was the beginning of a steamboat building industry here, mainly on the pattern of a steamboat built at Wheeling in 1816 by Henry Shreve, a riverboat captain. They were flat-bottomed much like a keelboat, but the hull was decked over, with the engines and boilers on the main deck. Two smokestacks emerged above a second deck containing a pilot house.

In 1836, a foundry was opened to make steamboat machinery. It later became known as the Stevenson Company, and produced brick-making machinery and ball mills for the paint and chemical industries. It still exists today as a fabrication and machine shop. Steamboat traffic increased rapidly, and by the early 1830s river packets were making daily scheduled trips between Wellsville and Pittsburgh.

In the late 1830s P.F. Geise and Robert Ralston formed a company to build complete steamboats in Wellsville. Through the 1830s and ‘402, the village teemed with activity: streets were clogged with wagons, the wharf was filled with boats, the boatyard boomed and hotels overflowed. In 1846 the population was 1,066. In 1848 two boatyards were busy building steam packets and ferries; the steamer “Wellsville” was making twice-weekly trips between Pittsburgh and Wheeling; the steamer “James Nelson” advertised it could make the trip to Pittsburgh in six hours, and the “shipment extraordinary” – 10,395 pounds of coffee – arrived in Wellsville, ordered by a local grocer and shipped from Philadelphia by sea and New Orleans by river.

Population was 1,500, 75 tons of goods per day from the interior were being shipped out, and Wellsville laid claim to be the busiest port between Portsmouth and Pittsburgh. Yet, periods of low water in summer drought and ice in winter brought river traffic to a halt. Although river steamers continued operating into the 1920s, pre-1850 was its heyday. The railroad was coming, and it was coming first to Wellsville.

The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad was conceived to link Cleveland and the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and the inland waterway by the shortest direct line possible. The C&P not only came to Wellsville, it located its main rail yard, roundhouse and repair shops in the village, a situation which provided good jobs and spinoff industries well into the 20th Century. Wellsville had the largest collection of repair shops west of Altoona on the PRR.

The reason that the C&P repair shops, which employed 900 men by the 1920s*, were located in Wellsville has been attributed to J.N. McCullough, a landowner and civic leader in Wellsville and later superintendent and president of the C&P Railroad. The direction and relatively low gradient of this gentle valley offered the region’s best possible ingress to the deeply carved Ohio Valley. (Yet, train crews today pulling heavy loads still have to stop nine miles short of the Ohio and alter the braking mechanisms for the descent.) McCullough owned the land at the mouth of Yellow Creek, and according to oral accounts would not sell land to allow a rail split to the south, forcing locomotives to be turned on the roundhouse at Wellsville to take trains south to Wheeling.

First chartered in 1836, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad was delayed by the financial panic of 1837. Rechartered in 1845, construction began in 1847 and was completed in 1852. Jim Montgomery of East Liverpool, Ohio, age 94, whose father and uncles lived in Wellsville and worked for the railroad, remembers when Ohio Gov. Frank Lausche came to Wellsville in 1950 or perhaps 1952 and drove a symbolic spike to commemorate the centennial of the rail link between the East Coast and the Mississippi.

At the original event in 1852 the editor of the “Wellsville Patriot” newspaper proclaimed the pride every resident should feel at this great achievement, adding that the rail line was also important to “86 East Liverpool potters and traders who could now transport goods the three miles to Wellsville and ship them to points north.” East Liverpool’s rapidly growing pottery industry, however, wanted the rail line extended through its own town to enable it to reach new markets to the north. That finally happened in 1856, when the line was completed through to Beaver, Pa., and by linking with another rail line, the “Pittsburgh” in C&P’s name became an actuality.

Rail was both complement and competition for the riverboats, with lighter freight and passengers traveling by rail and heavier freight cheaper to ship by river. Iron ore from Lake Superior, for instance, was brought by rail and trans-shipped south on the river from Wellsville.

Boat building continued: in 1855 Geisse and Co. built five steam ferries and a passenger ferry. Another financial panic in 1857 had little effect on expansion of railroads, but riverboat traffic suffered. The Civil War, with its need to move huge numbers of troops and war materiel, bolstered the fortunes of riverboats as well as rail lines, especially after access to the Mississippi and New Orleans was restored when Vicksburg surrendered to Grant.

Showboats did exist before the war, but became a regular and popular cultural asset on the rivers in the late 19th Century, declining by the 1920s. River packets were briefly pressed into service as America mobilized during World War I, but their day had passed. A few relics remained, such as the showboat “Majestic,” which began its 1954 summer season at Wellsville with performances under auspices of the Hiram College Theatrical Department.

Commercial river traffic was bolstered by construction of 46 locks and “wicket” dams on the Ohio River by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers beginning around 1900. Lock 8 at Wellsville was completed in 1911. These dams maintained a river depth of at least 9 feet from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Ill., and increased average days per year of navigation possible on the Ohio from 161 to 202. These were replaced when the Corps built the modern “super dams” of the 1960s and ‘70s, including the Stratton Locks and Dam 7 miles south of Wellsville, providing flood control along with a stable pool of 18 feet for the diesel towboats and barges of the modern era.

The rail industry, too, saw its decline. The C&P Railroad, which had added branch lines to Akron, Ohio, and Wheeling, W.Va., was absorbed by the Pennsylvania Railroad on a 99-year lease in 1871, providing the larger line with a valuable connection to Cleveland. At its high point in 1908, the C&P line operated 256 miles of track and carried 1.8 million passengers.

The C&P rail yard at Wellsville, with its roundhouse and repair shops, which provided such stable employment for 60 years, was phased out in favor of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s huge new yard at Conway, Pa. As Conway greatly expanded between 1900 and 1920, Wellsville shops closed and employees and their families either relocated the 50 miles upriver to Conway, retired or found other work.

*From a 1924 write up by local banker Frank L. Wells.

The sensational Northern incursion by cavalry under Brigadier Gen. John Hunt Morgan in June and July, 1863, which aroused alarm and terror in Indiana and Ohio, came to an end when Morgan surrendered his 400 remaining exhausted troops at West Point, a tiny Columbiana County community, nine miles north of Wellsville. Morgan had been trying to find a place to ford the Ohio River and escape back to the South through (West) Virginia. He and his officers were treated with chivalry, hosted by C&P Superintendent J.N. McCullough, and put up in the town’s best hotel, the Whitaker House.

Before boarding the train that would take them to prison in Cincinnati, Morgan presented his sword not to the general who captured him, but to the owner of the hotel, Thomas M. Whitaker, for his hospitality. The sword was later donated to and remains in possession of the Wellsville Historical Society.

When newly elected President Abraham Lincoln journeyed by train from Springfield, Ill, to Washington, D.C., in February 1861 for his inauguration, the many companies in the young railroad industry tried to outdo each other in the extravagance of the engines and cars they provided. On this celebrated journey, Lincoln’s train traveled through Wellsville twice. The reason was that the engines on trains from the west had to be turned around on the C&P roundhouse to head south to Wheeling, then came through Wellsville again to connect to the Pittsburgh lines.

The grandeur of the inaugural train, however, was overshadowed by Lincoln having to “sneak” into Washington in disguise when Pinkerton detectives uncovered an assassination plot planned at Baltimore.

After Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, a nation in mourning stood at the stations and alongside the train tracks, and attended solemn services at major cities, as his funeral train, never going more than 20 miles per hour, retraced much of the same route as that of his inauguration back to Springfield for burial. This train, however, passed only once through Wellsville.

A different kind of railroad – an “underground” one - put Wellsville on the side of the angels. With the exception of the Devore stone house’s use as a hiding place for escaping slaves, very little information has come down to present day on Wellsville’s role in the underground railroad. However, in his book “Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroads” (1951), author Wilbur Henry Siebert states that the route from Wellsville to Ashtabula harbor and thence to Canada was one of the busiest.

Runaway slaves came up through western Virginia - which although part of a slave state was generally Unionist and anti-slavery in sympathy - and crossed Ohio River to Wellsville beginning about 1825, shortly after the village was founded by William Wells.

“The route along the turnpike from Wellsville to Ashtabula Harbor was a little less than 100 miles long. . . Mr. H.U. Johnson, late a citizen of Orwell in southwest Ashtabula County, and long conversant with the Underground Railroad, believed the pike from Wellsville more travelled by runaways than any other route in the country.” Escaped slaves reaching Wellsville were taken north to Lisbon and then either to Salem or Canfield and thence to Ashtabula, Siebert wrote.

One of the earliest black settlers was Edward Devore, a man of French and Negro ancestry, who arrived by flatboat.* In 1801-2 he built a stone house with walls a foot thick on the hillside in what is now the Kountz Avenue area of upper Wellsville. He had been a bond servant and had driven a freight wagon across the mountains until he earned enough to buy his freedom.

He, William Wells, and a Mr. Dobbins, paid the expense of the first school in Wellsville. His stone house became a station on the underground railroad. Abolitionist sentiments that supported the underground railroad in these Ohio towns help explain why relations between their black and white citizens have been relatively harmonious up to the present day.

A local history entitled “Reflections of our Black Heritage and History” cites the case of Daniel F. Spires, born a slave at Holiday Cove (Weirton) in 1803 in what was then Virginia. He worked in Wellsville for John McGregor, a prominent citizen, until he earned $600, walked back to the home of his master and bought his freedom. He returned to Wellsville and started the first dray (hauling) service in the village, married Mary Hopkins of Steubenville in 1847, was blessed with six children and lived to age 103. His son Phillip E. Spires was born in (East) Liverpool Township, worked in a rolling mill and was well known as a public speaker. Elected a constable, he was the first black elected to public office in Columbiana County, and later was elected to East Liverpool city council. Through a daughter, Mrs. Inez Carter of Wellsville, Phillip Spires’ descendants include the well-respected Carter families of East Liverpool and Wellsville.

Segregated schools were still the rule in West Virginia until Brown v Board of Education in 1954. Henry Martin, a black man in the little settlement of Congo, Va., across the river from Wellsville, built a room on his house and paid Miss Bernice Allen of East Liverpool to teach his children. In Chester, W.Va., children of the Johnson and Robinson families were registered at birth as whites to get around segregated schools; later the state sent teachers to teach black children in their own homes. Beginning in the 1930s, black children in Chester were tuitioned at state expense to schools across the river in East Liverpool.

Black men immigrating to the small Ohio Valley industrial towns of Wellsville, East Liverpool and Midland, Pa., in the early 1900s for work initially were given the least desirable jobs in the valley’s steel mills and other heavy industries, but their children went to the same schools and grew up together. Residents of these towns would generally tell you that local race relations are generally a non-issue today.

*Text from Reflections of Our Black Heritage and History, The Tri-State Black Research Team.

The four-lane State Route 7 between East Liverpool and Wellsville appears to take up all available space between the river and the nearly vertical escarpment of the adjacent rocky hillside. Who could believe that the community of Walker, with its homes and brick and sewer pipe plant and kilns – of which no vestige remains - once prospered on a narrow riverside shelf more than 500 feet below the crest of the hill?

Andrew Russell was first to make bricks at the site, and the next year George McCullough located nearby to make tiles. Phillip F. Geisse, an iron foundry owner of Wellsville, bought out both and made brick until 1852, when Nathan Uriah Walker bought and upgraded the brick plant. Skillful at blending local clays for different uses, he made refractory bricks to line furnaces, and the first paving bricks to be laid in neighboring East Liverpool. The new rail line ran alongside his plant, allowing him to ship many thousands of tons of bricks. But N.U. Walker was mainly known for his sewer pipe, chimney tops, flue liners and architectural and decorative terra cotta products.

William Calhoun’s authoritative list and description of local ceramics industries dates Walker’s entry into terra cotta products to the close of the Civil War. “In this line Mr. Walker was undoubtedly the pioneer in the central states, and the excellence and variety of his goods soon made him the largest manufacturer of this class of goods in this country, which he held as long as he was actively connected with the business.” N.U. Walker disposed of his interests with the formation of the “sewer pipe trust” in 1899 by the American Sewer Pipe Company. The plant was dismantled, and what was left of the yards and community of Walker disappeared underneath SR7 when it was made into a four-lane divided highway in the 1960s.

English potter James Bennett founded the Ohio pottery industry in East Liverpool in 1839, and soon other English potters followed his lead, making Rockingham and yellow ware bowls, dishes, pitchers and such, floating them downriver on flatboats to sell to settlers. The first kiln of ware drawn by Bennett returned a sale of $250, a considerable sum.

The East Liverpool pottery industry eventually spilled over into Wellsville. George Morley left East Liverpool pottery and in 1878 operated a two-kiln pottery in the village. George Morley & Co. made a variety of stoneware pottery, notably a dozen shapes of majolica, a fanciful type of decorated art pottery in bright colors featuring “gurgle fishes,” owl jugs, hall dogs and other animal shapes. (Majolica is the focus of an international exhibition set for 2021-22.)

James H. Baum operated an independent decorating shop in East Liverpool in the 1880s until entering the potting business himself in 1888, when he began the manufacture of cream ware, locating his pottery in a former schoolhouse. A Civil War veteran cited for bravery at Cedar Mountain and wounded at Atlanta, Baum was highly expert in the marketing field and experimented with the manufacture of sanitary ware. He struggled along for a decade without sufficient operating capital but with great inventiveness and ability. In the estimation of W.A. Calhoun, Baum could have led the sanitary ware industry if “the moneyed men of Wellsville had come to his aid at critical times.” William L. Smith Sr. and D.E. McNichol bought the Baum pottery in 1899 and refitted it to make semi-porcelain and decorated ware, later bringing Albert W. Corns to make the McNichol-Corns China Co. It operated successfully until 1928.

In 1902 Monroe Patterson, an East Liverpool industrialist, purchased and revitalized the Wellsville China Co. on Ninth St. for production of semi-porcelain and decorated ware. His business acumen made the pottery one of the most stable and prominent industries of Wellsville, continuing in operation until 1959.

Another Wellsville pottery which found success was the U.S. Pottery Co., launched in 1898 by John J. Purinton, Robert Hall and Silas M. Ferguson. They built an entirely new and up to date plant of six kilns in the west end of Wellsville and built a reputation for quality and durability, remaining in operation until 1932. A friend to the potteries of East Liverpool and Wellsville, Eastern Ohio Congressman William McKinley (US President 1897-assassinated 1901) pushed through a protective tariff in 1890 which imposed a fee of 50 percent on imported dinnerware, and required that products of Japan be backstamped “Nippon” and of China, “china.” Assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, McKinley’s funeral train came through Wellsville, as Lincoln’s had.

The most notable pottery in Wellsville was the Sterling China Co., which operated from 1917 to 2003 and for many years was the village’s leading employer. In 1882 John Patterson and sons started a yellow ware pottery which operated until 1914. A.B. Allen and three others took over the old Patterson pottery and refitted the plant to produce highly durable and fire-resistant vitreous porcelain ware, making it a leader in that field. Hotels and restaurants were its main customers from the beginning. During World War II Sterling was the main supplier of dinnerware to the military. Sterling expanded and remodeled in the 1950s, adding plants in Puerto Rico and New Jersey, and supplying an international market. Rising labor and energy costs, along with foreign competition, were blamed for the end of operations in 2003. A deal to restart the pottery under a new buyer with grants and loans fell through; 100 employees picketed as pensions were not funded, banks finally foreclosed and the plant was demolished.

Riding a strong local economy, Wellsville’s population increased by 50 percent every 10 years in U.S. Census numbers for 1870, 1880 and 1890 and continued strong until the Great Depression years. The highpoint was a census of 8,849 in 1920, and a significant percentage of the new residents were Italian, who found work in the mills and other industries of the valley. Some 4 million Italians came to America in this era. The Wellsville Sons of Italy Lodge and an annual Italian Festival are reminders of the village’s large and active Italian population.

Prohibition and a lax attitude toward the speakeasies of the ‘30s up and down the Upper Ohio Valley made it friendly territory for criminals. That helps explain why gangster Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the FBI’s Public Enemy No. 1, his associate Adam Richetti and two girlfriends were driving through Wellsville on Oct. 18, 1934. Driving in heavy fog, their car hit a telephone pole, they sent the women to find a tow truck and waited. When Wellsville Police Chief John H. Foltz and two officers investigated reports of suspicious two men, they found Floyd and Richetti camped up on a hillside. Richetti fled and was captured by officers, while Foltz got into a gun battle with Floyd in which both were wounded. Floyd escaped up the hill and was on the run for three days until found by law enforcement on a farm outside East Liverpool, shot and killed. Floyd was laid out at the Sturgis Funeral Home in East Liverpool, and 10,000 viewed his body. Death masks of the gangster were made and still exist.

As if the Depression weren’t bad enough, Wellsville and other Ohio River towns were devastated by the Great Flood of 1936 and two more in 1937. The town had flooded before, most notably in 1884 with a river crest of 44 feet above flood stage. Heavy rains and snow melt throughout the region flooded Pittsburgh on March 17, 1936. The Ohio River at Wellsville crested at 51.5 feet above flood stage two days later. Water flowed deep through the village, causing millions in damage to businesses and industries and destroying or damaging 700-800 homes. Congress reacted with funding for a flood control system: flood wall, dike, gates and pumps . . .but before it could be built, flooding returned in both January and April 1937, matching the 44-foot crest of 1884 both times.

Construction of the Wellsville flood wall was completed in July 1942 and has shown its worth in 14 floods since. With Wellsville’s main industries - potteries, rail and port operations - in decline at mid-century, workers found employment in the booming post-war steel mills and later in the massive coal-fired power plants such as the 2.2-gigawatt W.H. Sammis plant at Stratton, seven miles downriver, which went into production in 1962. Wellsville had become a bedroom town. Since 1979, area steel mills have closed or scaled back operations to a fraction of their high years. As the century turned, aging coal fired electric plants including Sammis began to be phased out.

A bright spot at mid-century was the basketball phenomenon of Clarence “Bevo” Francis, one of the most prolific high school and college scorers in history. The 6’-9’ Francis scored 776 points in 25 games his senior year at Wellsville High School and led the Tigers to the state playoffs. Enrolling at the tiny Rio Grande College, he averaged 48 points a game in 1953 and 1954 that set an NCAA record. After two years with the show team that opposed the Harlem Globetrotters, Francis was drafted by Philadelphia of the NBA but humbly opted to return to his hometown and family in Highlandtown. The Bevo Francis Award is annually given to the nation’s top small college player.

What’s old is new: Wellsville’s first destiny as a key river port has been renewed with the creation of an Intermodal Facility. It is also at the center of a modern boom in natural gas drilling, processing and electrical generation. A drilling technique called “fracking” and the discovery of huge reserves of natural gas and oil in the deep Marcellus and Utica shales have revitalized Rustbelt economies of eastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern West Virginia. The eastern Ohio counties of Belmont north to Columbiana are in the heart of the Utica shale “play.”

The Southfield Energy Plant, located three miles from Wellsville and within the Wellsville School District, is a $1.3 billion gas-fired electric generating plant. Scheduled to begin operations this year, it will employ 25 people. The plant gave an up-front contribution of $1.7 million to the school district, paying for an artificial turf football field, HVAC system for and elementary school, the return of art and music teachers and other improvements.

Upriver at Beaver, Pa., a $6 billion natural gas cracker plant under development by Royal Shell is in its final year of construction. It will produce 1.5 million tons of olyethylene beads a year, create 600 permanent jobs, and as many as 100,000 jobs in the region from spinoff industries making plastic products from polyethylene. Not many years ago, Ashland Oil and one other were the only companies making use of Wellsville’s obsolescent port.

In 1977 the Columbiana County Port Authority was created to own and operate port facilities and industrial parks, taking advantage of the excellent highway, rail and river infrastructure, the status of a Foreign Trade Zone, its central location in a U.S. major population zone, and the historic short distance between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. Wellsville is the last deep river port coming upriver before barge tows must be broken down to enter the smaller locks of older dams below Pittsburgh.

To create a modern port in Wellsville, in July 1998-99 the port authority purchased lots of 22 and 21 acres at the southern end of Wellsville, the first once known as The Brickyard, the other belonging to Wellsville Storage and Transport Inc.

The port authority has invested $32 million to create an intermodal port at Wellsville. Facilities include a 60-ton Virginia top-running bridge crane costing $3.6 million in 2008. A Mantsinen 120 Hybril-Lift crane and conveyor system costing $5.1 million in 2016.

The Intermodal port, added to private facilities in East Liverpool, make Columbiana the largest river port system in Ohio by tonnage, and help make Ohio the eighth largest maritime state by tonnage. The port provides customers with cargo access via New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., to international destinations. The expansion of the Panama Canal has resulted in volumes of high value cargo transiting the Gulf of Mexico to Wellsville for distribution to this region. Products handled have ranged from soybeans from Chile to rockets for NASA.

The natural gas boom has helped Wellsville enter the 21st century with a renewed sense of optimism about the future of the village and its people. The port authority is a focal point for out-of-state companies involved in natural gas drilling and production. It estimates that 6,000 new wells will be drilled in Columbiana and adjacent counties.

A moderate climate, low cost of living, inexpensive housing, a wealth of area colleges, community colleges and trade schools, effective and safe public schools, pride in community, and ongoing improvements to an aging infrastructure, are among community assets.

The flood wall at Little Yellow Creek, formerly a plain concrete wall, is an example of what creative thinking can accomplish. Motorists entering the village from the north pass through a gap in the flood wall that has been painted with mural panels which tell stories from Wellsville’s history. The St. Rocco Festival, a riverboat, Lincoln’s inaugural train, the Liberty Theater, a bottle kiln and the Indian Head rocks are among panels painted by Gina Hampton of Hanoverton, Ohio. Tourists stop and take photos of the murals, posting them on social media and travel websites.

In early 2021, five prominent individuals incorporated a new non-profit, the Wellsville Community Foundation, with a goal of raising funds and sponsoring projects to benefit the village, surrounding area, and citizens. One of the directors is Eddie Murphy, who returned to her hometown after 47 years in California as a corporate executive, bought and restored the McBean stone house as her residence, and got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. “I was born in Wellsville and though I left years ago it has forever remained in my heart. That’s why I’m involved in this,” she said. Another board member, Robert G. “Geno” Williamson, said, “Eddie went to L.A., I went to Rhode Island, and we came back to the ‘Ville. We all want to support the town any way we can, and raise revenue to spur growth.” In 2000, the retired executive and his wife bought a big house on Riverside Avenue, overlooking a beautiful stretch of the Ohio River. “We never completely left,” he said.