The Definitive Dwiggins no. 101—Martinsville, Ohio

“Welcome to Martinsville” sign on eastern outskirts of town. Photograph by Paul Shaw (2006).

Clinton County. Detail from Topographical Map of Clinton, Fayette, Greene, Pickaway, and Ross Counties (1872).

Martinsville, Ohio. Detail from Map of Clinton County, Ohio by H.E. Walling (1859).

Martinsville, Ohio—the town where W.A. Dwiggins was born in 1880—is in Clark Township, Clinton County. It lies nearly due south of Wilmington, the county seat. In 1889, Henry Howe described it thusly:

Martinsville, on the M. & C. Railroad, has 1 Friends and 1 Methodist Episcopal church. Two flouring-mills and A.J. Darbeshire’s tile brick and lumber factory, employing 17 hands. Census in 1880, 355. School census in 1886, 193; E.P. West, principal. [1]

The town has barely changed in the nearly 130 years since then. The population at the last census in 2010 was 463. Main Street (now also Rte. 28) is still the main artery with South High Street as the major cross street. The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Friends Monthly Meetinghouse are in the same locations along Main Street as they were then, though the latter was not the one that Moses Dwiggins, WAD’s father, attended during his nearly four years there. That frame building was destroyed by fire and replaced by the current brick one in 1883. The Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad depot (see below), located on the west side of South High Street is long gone. [2] It was the shipping point for hogs and wheat from the surrounding farms.

Martinsville Depot, Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad (n.d.). Courtesy Clinton County Historical Society.

The photograph of the depot above is one of two of Martinsville from the 1880s that survives in the collection of the Clinton (Ohio) Historical Society. The other is of the C.H. Irwin Drug Store (see below) in about 1883–1884. It appears to be located at the corner of Main Street and what is now Short Street (unmarked in the 1859 map above), the only other cross street in town back then. T.E. & D. Carey had sold “Drugs & Jewelry” at that intersection back in 1859 but the business was gone by 1880. [3] And no other druggist is listed in Martinsville in the 1880 United States Census. That lack may have prompted Charles Irwin (b. 1859) to move to Martinsville a few years later from nearby Highland County. [4] Was the absence of a local druggist a problem for Moses Dwiggins as a physician?

C.H. Irwin Drug Store, Martinsville, Ohio (c.1883–1884). Courtesy Clinton County Historical Society.

Based on the enumeration sequence in the 1880 United States Census Moses and Eva Dwiggins lived along Main Street, probably between High and South Streets. Theirs was the 26th dwelling listed, after that of a boot and shoemaker and just before that of a merchant.

Although W.A. Dwiggins was born in Martinsville, he lived there for less than a year, making the town barely a memory, if even that.

Notes
1. Historical Collections of Ohio in Two Volumes: An Encyclopedia of the State… (The Ohio Centennial Edition) by Henry Howe (Columbus: Henry Howe & Son, 1889), vol. I, p. 433.
2. The Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad was taken over by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1889 and renamed the Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern Railroad.
3. This information comes from the 1859 map of Clinton County made by H.E. Walling. The owners were Thomas E. Carey (1835–1902) and his father Daniel Carey (b. 1810), a botanic physician. The doctor lived directly behind the store on the next street. By 1870 he had died and his son had moved to Indiana.
4. Irwin is listed as a druggist in Highland County in the 1880 United States Census.

Main Street (looking west), Martinsville, Ohio (2006). Photograph by Paul Shaw. The scene in Google Street View (2012) is nearly identical.