24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Waynesville, OH

Waynesville is a village in Warren County that was founded in 1797 by Samuel Heighway, an engineer from Shropshire, England, who settled there on March 8, 1797 with a small party of English frontiersmen — making the village older than the state of Ohio itself.

Heighway and his partners had invested in 30,000 acres of the Symmes Purchase between the Little and Great Miami Rivers, and he dreamed his town would become the capital of the Northwest Territory, a dream that never materialized.

The village was named in honor of General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, the Revolutionary War commander who had recently defeated a Native American confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Heighway laid out Waynesville on an English-style plan of formal parks and squares arranged around a central public square, and the village's twelve squares still hold the original names he gave them.

Waynesville was originally built up chiefly by Quakers, and a post office has been in operation in the village since 1804.

Waynesville has trademarked its claim as the "Antiques Capital of the Midwest," with dozens of antique shops packed into its historic twelve-square downtown.

Waynesville hosts the Ohio Sauerkraut Festival, which began on October 3, 1970 as a sidewalk sale serving 528 pounds of sauerkraut to about 1,500 visitors and now serves some 7 tons of sauerkraut to roughly 350,000 visitors every second weekend of October.

The village was also an important stop on the Underground Railroad, and its Quaker heritage is preserved at the Museum at the Friends Home, housed in the 1905 Friends Boarding Home in the Quaker Historical District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 2020 census counted 2,669 people in Waynesville, down from 2,834 residents in 1,128 households at the 2010 census.

Caesar Creek State Park, built around a large reservoir lake, is located about five miles east of the village.