Two Berlins Name One Village
Near Berlin, Ohio
The story of how Berlin got its name is one of the more charming origin tales in Ohio history. The village was first laid out on July second, eighteen sixteen, by a man named John Swigert. Swigert was a native of Berlin, the capital of what was then Prussia, who had traveled to the American frontier and put down roots in the hills of Holmes County.
He surveyed the initial layout of the lots and streets that would form the settlement. At the same time, a settler named Joseph Troyer was arriving in the area from Berlin, Pennsylvania, a community in Somerset County that had been named by earlier German immigrants for the same European capital. Two men from two different Berlins found themselves building the same new town in Ohio.
They agreed that the name both of them carried from their separate pasts was the right name for the place they were making together. The village's first school was established in eighteen eighteen. A post office followed in eighteen twenty two.
Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Mennonite churches came soon after. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Berlin had a foundry, blacksmith shops, machine shops, a hat factory, hotels, and a variety of retail businesses, making it a genuine commercial center in Holmes County long before the Amish and the tourism economy came to define it.
