Meet the Communities

Marietta, OH

Marietta, Ohio is Ohio’s first city and the first permanent settlement established in the Northwest Territory is 1788.  It lies at the cross section of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers and is nicknamed “Riverboat Town.”  Marietta is the site of a number of other “firsts”: Campus Martius was the first permanent school in Ohio was established in 1791; Farmers Library built in 1796 was the first library in Ohio; The Muskingum Academy, founded in 1800, was the first Academy in the Northwest Territory; the Bank of Marietta built in 1808 was the first bank in Ohio; and the first children’s home in American funded by the public was opened in 1858. Today, it is the county seat of Washington County.

The area around Marietta is the site of the Marietta Earthworks, a Hopewell Native American complex that is estimated to be more than 1500 years old. The settlers preserved the Great Mound, or Conus, by planning their own cemetery around it.

They also preserved the largest platform mounds which they called Capitolinus and Quadrophenus. The former was developed as the site for the city library. As of 1900, Mound Cemetery had the highest number of burials of Revolutionary War officers in the nation, indicating the nature of the generation that settled Marietta.

Early industries included shipbuilding, ironworks, brick factories and furniture making. Currently, the primary industry is the ferromanganese plant located outside Marietta. It is the largest plant in the US for processing manganese used in steel manufacturing.

Marietta is home to two higher education institutions:

• Marietta College
• Washington State Community College

A number of famous people have called Marietta home:

• Hobart Bosworth, actor; early film pioneer and the first film star in a movie made in California
• Charles G. Dawes, politician; 30^th Vice-President of the US, served under Calvin Coolidge. Graduate of Marietta College. Cast the vote to make Ohio slave-free
• Nancy Putnam Hollister, politician; only female governor of Ohio. Served eleven days between the terms of George Voinovich and Robert Taft