Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Windham Windham, OH

Windham is a village in eastern Portage County, Ohio, formed from Windham Township, one of the original townships of the Connecticut Western Reserve.

Windham was settled in 1811 by sixteen families from Becket, Massachusetts, whose Beckett Land Company had bought about 14,825 acres from Caleb Strong, a former governor of Massachusetts.

The township was first called Strongsburg, then Sharon, before taking the name Windham in honor of Windham, Connecticut, home of some of its first settlers.

The village of Windham was incorporated in 1892, decades after the surrounding township was settled.

In 1942 the U.S. government chose Windham as the site of an army camp housing workers for the newly built Ravenna Arsenal, a munitions complex of more than 21,000 acres that employed over 14,000 people at its World War II peak.

Thanks to the arsenal, Windham grew by 1,148.7% during the 1940s - from 316 residents in 1940 to 3,946 in 1950 - the largest percentage population increase of any municipality in the nation in that census.

Windham counted 1,666 residents at the 2020 census, living in roughly 670 households, far below its arsenal-era peak.

Windham High School, founded in 1883, fields teams called the Bombers, a nickname coined in 1939 for its state-champion six-man football team, which in 1940 beat a Canadian school team for an unofficial international title.

The village is served by the Windham Exempted Village School District, whose two buildings are Katherine Thomas Elementary and the Windham Junior/Senior High School.

Windham has a public library that is a branch of the Portage County District Library, and although it is officially part of the Akron metropolitan area, it sits closer to Warren and Youngstown.