24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Gambier, OH

Gambier is a village and college town in Knox County that was planned and founded in 1824 by Philander Chase, the first Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, at the same time as the college he created it to serve.

The village was named for Lord James Gambier, a British admiral and one of Kenyon College's early benefactors in England, while the college itself was named for another benefactor, Lord Kenyon.

Chase purchased 8,000 acres for his college and in 1827 laid the cornerstone of Old Kenyon, the massive Gothic hall completed in 1829, the same year the college's first class graduated.

Kenyon College, an Episcopal institution operating in Gambier since 1824, is the oldest private college in Ohio and enrolls more than 1,750 students.

Gambier is a village literally in the middle of a college campus — by design, the village sits at the center of Kenyon, and the college's tree-lined Middle Path serves as the main pedestrian artery for students and villagers alike, who share the same post office, market, bookstore, and coffee shop.

About two-thirds of Gambier's roughly 2,400 inhabitants are Kenyon students, which is why the village's median age at the 2010 census was just 21.2 years.

The 2020 census counted 2,213 people in Gambier, and because most residents are students in college housing, the 2010 census counted 2,391 people in only 343 households.

Gambier was incorporated as a village in 1870, nearly half a century after its founding.

The Kokosing River flows past Gambier, and the Kokosing Gap Trail — a rail trail on the old Pennsylvania Railroad line where the first train stopped in 1866 — runs through the village as part of the Ohio to Erie Trail from Cincinnati to Cleveland.

In the 1960s, Japanese writer Junzo Shono lived in Gambier for several years and wrote "A Sojourn in Gambier," which became quite popular in Japan.