Blue Ash, Ohio

Pioneer families began settling this Hamilton County land around seventeen ninety-one. Six years later, in seventeen ninety-seven, those first settlers built Carpenter's Run Baptist Church, and they built it from logs cut out of the blue ash trees covering the hillsides.

That choice of timber gave the community its name. The surrounding area became known simply as Blue Ash, after the wood used to raise its first house of worship. Families with names like Ferris, Craig Carpenter, Thompson, and Denman cleared the land and established farms through the early federal period.

Today Blue Ash is a prosperous Hamilton County suburb, better known for its corporate parks and road network than for forest timber. But the name carved into its identity two hundred years ago still comes from those blue ash logs, and the little Baptist church that put them to use.