West Jefferson: The Town That Picked Up and Moved

There is a certain kind of story that only happens in the nineteenth century, when a road could remake a town overnight. West Jefferson, Ohio, is one of those stories.

In eighteen twenty-two, a man named Samuel Jones and another named Samuel Sexton arrived from New Jersey and platted a village called New Hampton along Little Darby Creek, a small settlement of ninety-three lots on eight streets. It sat along the Ludlow Road, Ohio's first state road, and for a decade it grew modestly as a farming community in Madison County.

Then, in the eighteen thirties, the federal government extended the National Road westward through Ohio. The National Road was the first major federally funded highway in the country, running from Cumberland, Maryland, eventually all the way to Vandalia, Illinois, the spine of westward migration. And when surveyors drove stakes through Madison County, they ran the road about a mile north of New Hampton.

The residents did not argue. They moved.

Using rollers made from felled logs, the people of New Hampton physically relocated their barns and houses up to the new road. The settlement they built there was renamed in honor of President Thomas Jefferson, the man who had done so much to acquire and open the western lands, with the prefix West added later by the post office to distinguish it from other Jeffersons.

A post office called West Jefferson has operated continuously since eighteen thirty-three. Today it is a village of around four thousand people along what is now United States Route Forty, the modern successor to the National Road.

The story is a small one, but it captures something essential about how roads shaped the American Midwest. Towns did not wait for the road to come to them. They chased it, sometimes literally rolling their buildings to meet it.