Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Amesville Amesville, OH

Amesville is a village in Ames Township, Athens County, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Ohio, located on Federal Creek.

The village was laid out in 1837 and takes its name from Fisher Ames, the Massachusetts statesman who helped win federal support for the Ohio Company of Associates that settled the area; local historians note Ames Township is the only township in Ohio named by an act of Congress.

Amesville is best known for the Coonskin Library: at an 1803 town meeting held to discuss roads, settlers who wanted books but had no cash decided to trade animal pelts, and in the spring of 1804 Samuel B. Brown and Ephraim Cutler carried the skins east and returned with 51 books bought for $73.50.

The Coonskin Library, formally the Western Library Association, was the first library in Athens County, and its original books are now preserved by the Ohio History Connection and at Ohio University's Alden Library.

The Coonskin Library Museum opened in May 1994 in the former cafeteria of the Amesville Grade School.

In one of Ohio's strangest elections, Amesville voters in April 1903 deadlocked 21 to 21 between a local candidate and Alonzo Weed, a wandering drifter whose name had been put on the ballot as a joke, and Weed won the tie-breaker to become mayor of the dry town despite being an alcoholic with no government experience.

On June 28, 1998, more than 10 inches of rain sent Federal Creek 15 feet deep through the corner of State and Main streets, devastating the village's south side; most of the ruined buildings were demolished with FEMA grants and the cleared land became Gifford Park.

In 2007 Amesville became the first village in Ohio to pioneer a new aerobic wastewater treatment system.

The 2020 census counted 171 people in Amesville, up from 154 in 2010, when the census recorded 63 households in the village.