Beaverdam, Ohio: Named for the Builders

Beaverdam is one of those Ohio villages whose name is exactly what it sounds like. When the first settlers arrived in Allen County in the early eighteen hundreds, they found the streams here thick with beaver dams, and the name stuck to the settlement that grew up among them. A post office called Beaver Dam opened in eighteen fifty, and the village was formally incorporated in eighteen seventy-eight.

It remains one of the small agricultural villages of northwest Ohio, sitting in Richland Township where the old canal-era road system connected Lima and the surrounding farmland. Population today hovers around a few hundred, much as it has for generations.