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BELMONT COUNTY
Barnesville
Barnesville is a village in Belmont County, Ohio, United States. It is located in the central portion of Warren Township in the western side of Belmont County and is part of the Wheeling, West Virginia Metropolitan Statistical Area. The town was named after James Barnes, who was the first settler.
Area:
Total Area: of 1.95 square miles (5.05 km2)
Land:1.94 square miles (5.02 km2)
Water: 0.01 square miles (0.03 km2)
Elevation
1,270 ft. (387m)
Population
Total: 4,193
Fun Facts
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Barnesville is the birth home to Wilson Shannon. Shannon was Ohio's first native born Governor who served two non-consecutive terms and later governed the Kansas Territory for the longest consecutive term of 9 months of an 11-month term.
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Barnesville was considered the strawberry capital of the world, shipping strawberries twice a day by train to Chicago. It also was the first community in the state to grow cigar tobacco.
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Barnesville is home to Isaac Parker, the hanging judge. He served as judge here in Belmont county then served as judge at Fort Smith Arkansas in the late 1800s where he was sentenced 160 people to hang (Only 79 were actually executed. The rest died in incarceration, appealed, or were pardoned).
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Shannon Family from Mt. Olivet. Wilson Shannon, first native born governor (see above). His brother, Thomas, was born in Washington P A but moved with his parents to Belmont County. He served in the war of 1812 as a captain. He served as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives from 1819-1822 then came back to Barnesville to become a leaf-tobacco merchant. Another brother, George, was the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
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Elisha Gray, inventor, was born in Barnesville. There is controversy surrounding him and Alexander Graham Bell over who invented the telephone first. Gray reportedly submitted his patent first but there is controversy over what happened next. Some say that the patent office put a suspension on Bell's patent (since they were submitted at the same time, this was in order to give Gray more time to give a more detailed report since his was supposedly filed first). The story then goes that there was a conversation between Bell's lawyer and the patent office. Bell's claim won.