Byesville: Coal Capital of Southeastern Ohio

Byesville was established in eighteen fifty-six in Guernsey County's Jackson Township, and coal defined almost everything that followed. At the industry's peak in the early nineteen hundreds, Byesville counted dozens of operating mines and held a reputation as the coal mining capital of southeastern Ohio.

Mines ran along the railroad spur into town, shipping out train after train of Guernsey County coal. The mines extracted that wealth at a terrible human cost: many coal miners died in the deep mines of Guernsey County. Byesville incorporated in the early eighteen eighties at the height of that era. The seams eventually played out, the mines closed, and Guernsey County's once-thundering coal economy went quiet. Byesville has been a small village ever since, sitting on the geology that briefly made it indispensable.

The name comes from Jonathan Bye, who owned a local mill, and the place was once nicknamed Bye's Mill. Its population peaked at three thousand one hundred fifty-six in nineteen ten, right in the coal boom, and has mostly slid since, to two thousand three hundred sixty-four in twenty twenty. The railroad that hauled the coal began as the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad and later passed to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Guernsey County bought the Byesville stretch in nineteen ninety-nine, and a tourist train ran on it for years. Interstate Seventy-Seven crosses the village today.