1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Zanesville

ZANESVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Muskingum county, Ohio, U.S.A., on the Muskingum river, at the mouth of the Licking river, about 60 m. E. of Columbus. Pop. (1890) 21,009; (1900) 23,538, of whom 1435 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 28,026. Zanesville is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus, the Ohio River & Western, the Wheeling & Lake Erie, the Zanesville & Western, and the Ohio & Little Kanawha (B. and O. system) railways, by a belt line around the city, and by the Ohio Electric and the South-Eastern Ohio electric interurban lines. By a series of locks and dams the Muskingum river has been made navigable for small vessels to the Ohio and above Zanesville to Dresden, where connexion is made with the Ohio Canal extending north to Cleveland. Within the city limits the Muskingum is crossed by seven bridges (including a notable concrete Y bridge) and the Licking by two. The business districts of the city lie on both sides of the two rivers; the residential districts being chiefly on the hills to the north and west. Among the principal buildings are the Federal building, the county court-house, the Soldiers and Sailors' Monumental Building, containing, a large auditorium, the Masonic and Oddfellows' temples, the Market building, containing city offices, a National Guard armoury, the John McIntire public library, the John McIntire Children's Home (1880), the Helen Purcell home for women, the county infirmary, the Bethesda Hospital (1890), and the Good Samaritan hospital (1902; under the Franciscan Sisters). The John McIntire public library (about 20,000 volumes) is a consolidation of the Zanesville Athenaeum (1827) and the Eunice Buckingham library of the former Putnam Female Seminary (1835) here; Andrew Carnegie contributed $50,000 for the erection of the building. John McIntire (1759-1815), one of the early settlers, provided by will for the maintenance of a school for poor children, and such a school was maintained from 1836 to 1856, when it was transferred to the city school system, annual contributions being made from the fund for poor children; later the McIntire Home was founded, and in 1902 donations to the city school system were discontinued and the entire revenues of the estate devoted to the maintenance of the Home, which is a model of its kind. Zanesville is an important centre for the manufacture of art and domestic pottery, plain and ornamental tile, building and paving bricks, and other clay products. In 1905 it ranked sixth among the cities of the country in the amount of pottery produced, and third in the degree of the specialization of that industry. In 1905 the value of all factory products was $7,047,637, of which $1,144,384 (16.2 per cent.) represented pottery, terra-cotta, and fireclay products.

Zanesville was first platted in 1800 by Ebenezer Zane (1747-1811) of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), his brother Jonathan, and John McIntire, his son-in-law, of Alexandria, Va., who under an act of Congress of 1796 surveyed a road from Wheeling to what is now Maysville, Kentucky, and received for this service three sections of land. Jonathan Zane and McIntire selected the land at the point where the new road crossed the Muskingum river. The settlement was first called Westbourne and later was named Zanesville; a post office was established in 1802. Zanesville became the county-seat upon the creation of Muskingum county in 1804, was the capital of the state from 1810 to 1812, was incorporated as a town in 1814, and was chartered as a city in 1850.