Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Ashville, OH

Ashville is a village in Pickaway County, Ohio, located about 17 miles south of Columbus and 8 miles north of Circleville, the county seat.

The land Ashville sits on was first settled in 1808 by Richard Staige, an Edinburgh-born settler who came by way of Virginia, and his sons William and Richard Jr. each built a distillery there in 1812.

The town was first known as Ashbrook, after Mahlon Ashbrook, who bought one of the distilleries in 1837, built a gristmill on Walnut Creek in 1845, and helped lay out the town.

Ashville was incorporated as a village in the spring of 1882, with W. R. Julian as its first mayor, after the Scioto Valley Railroad arrived and a depot opened in 1876.

Railroad workers, many of them Greek and Bulgarian immigrants, settled in the north end of Ashville in a neighborhood still known as Little Chicago.

Ashville's Scioto Valley Canning Factory, built in 1899, canned sweet corn and at its peak employed 540 people who could produce upwards of 200,000 cans of corn per day.

Ashville is home to Ohio's Small Town Museum, founded in 1978, a quirky local museum that has been featured by Oprah, the New York Times, and the book New Roadside America.

The Puppeteers of America organization was first incorporated in Ashville in 1961, and its Puppetry Journal was published locally by the Pickaway Publishing Company.

Long before the village existed, Hopewell people built the Snake Den Mounds a few miles outside present-day Ashville, a site believed to date from before 500 C.E.

The 2020 census counted 4,529 people in Ashville living in 1,808 households, making it the second most populous community in Pickaway County.