Reno, Ohio: Named for a Soldier

The small community along the Ohio River in Washington County was originally called Jericho. When a post office was established in eighteen eighty-seven, the name changed to Reno, honoring Major General Jesse Lee Reno, a career United States Army officer and one of the Union's most admired combat commanders.

Reno graduated from West Point in eighteen forty-six in the same class as George McClellan and Thomas Jackson, later known as Stonewall. He fought in Mexico, served on the frontier, and rose quickly when the Civil War began. By the summer of eighteen sixty-two he was a division commander in the Ninth Corps and fought at Second Bull Run and at Chantilly, and he went on to lead the corps. On September fourteenth, eighteen sixty-two, he was killed at Fox's Gap during the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland, a Union major general born in what is now West Virginia. Reno County in Kansas, El Reno in Oklahoma, Reno Nevada, and this small Ohio River community all carry his name. The river town near Marietta is the quietest of those memorials.