Neville, Ohio: A River Village Undone by Floods

Neville, Ohio was laid out in eighteen oh eight on the Ohio River in Clermont County, named for General Presley Neville, who owned the land and had served as aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolution. For much of the nineteenth century it was a working river village, storekeepers, warehouse operators, merchants loading flatboats with the agricultural surplus of the interior. A post office has operated here since eighteen sixteen, one of the longer continuous runs in southwestern Ohio.

But Neville's most consequential modern chapter came from water: a devastating Ohio River flood in March nineteen ninety-seven prompted the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy out roughly forty percent of the village's properties. The buyouts emptied Neville of more than half its population. What remains is a small, quiet community on a river that once gave it everything and then took much of it back.