As a child in Miltonsburg, I heard stories adults told about the “old days” in this rural village in Southeastern Ohio’s Monroe County, and I began asking questions such as: Why did the first settlers choose this location for their town? Who were they and where did they come from? What did they do on a typical day? Why were the ridge lines of houses parallel to the street and the other buildings perpendicular? What out buildings were on the lots? Over the years, conversations with family members and town residents and excerpts from various town and county documents provided enticingly vague answers to some of these questions but most remain unaddressed.

During a recent visit to our family home in Miltonsburg, my sister Judy and I decided to combine the organizational capability of spread sheets and the information available on internet search engines with a few days of research in village and county records in an attempt to get better answers to these questions or, as a minimum, to preserve our collection of random bits of information in a form that others could contribute to and expand upon. What follows in this on-going website project is a kind of “story of Miltonsburg,” with the progenitors being the residents and property owners between 1833 and 1950. These dates were chosen because in 1833 David Pearson first laid out the town and by 1950 Miltonsburg was no longer the self-sufficient community that had generated the questions we were trying to answer.

Our exploration has not been easy and this summary of what we found is based on entries in various Monroe County documents and notes taken during conversations over a period of several years. Unfortunately, we cannot document all of the sources. We believe they are reliable; however, some official documents contain difficult-to-read handwriting and all of the information is slanted by our interpretation of it. Because our main interest is in the questions noted above, we have included family genealogical information only when it helps to understand the relationships among the residents of the village.

We welcome comments, corrections, and different interpretations.