Decorative drawing: a row of nineteenth-century main-street storefronts. Not a photograph of this place.

Mount Sterling Historic District

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.

From the record

one of 7 National Register listings in Madison County · listed in 1974 · category: District.

Sources: the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 24 buildingss as contributing to the listing.
Address. Both sides of London St., Mount Sterling, 43143
When was it listed? 1974-10-01
Category. district
Township. Pleasant township
National Register reference number. 74001559 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

What happened here

An account from the chapter on Pleasant township, The inset identifies its exact source book and publication year.

From The History of Madison County, Ohio, published 1883 - Pleasant Township

Epidemic At Amity

EPIDEMIC AT AMITY. In 1849, soon after removing the mill-dam. b\ order of the court, spoken of in the history of Rosswell. Obil and (hen Beach, Asiatic cholera broke out in all its virulence ami horrors, sweeping away many of its inhabitants in the space of a few days, striking terror to the entire Inhabitants of Amity and vicinity.

Read the rest of this passage

The ground it stands on

270,911 words

This property stands in Pleasant Township. The History of Madison County, Ohio, published 1883; History of Madison County, Ohio : Its People, Industries and Institution with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Many of the Old Families, published 1915; History of Madison County Ohio, published 1915 gives that township a chapter of its own.

The chapter covers this township occupies the southeast corner of madison county, and the territory comprising it was one of the earliest settled portions of the county. this was doubtless brought about principally from its geographical position and its proximity to the older settled counties, especially that of boss, which in an early daj appears to have been the center, a kind of asylum for the emigrant, of this portion of the stati, from which they radiated and formed settlements in all the surrounding country, which was then an unbroken wilderness. from the ohio river up the valley of the scioto, early settlements were made, and chillicothe boob became the prin cipal trading point, upon the frontier. from this, as a base for supplies, the ever-onward pioneer and huntsman pushed up the scioto and its numerous tributaries, paint, deer and darby creeks; and it seems that the two lastmentioned streams were early visited by those in quest of game and a location, as it soon became known that along these streams were found plentiful herds of deer and immense flocks of wild turkeys, and what was more than all as good a body of land as the sun ever shone upon. as you ascend deer (.'reek some thirty to thirty five miles from its mouth, or where it empties its waters into the scioto, you strike the corner of madison county and the southeast corner of pleasant township.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Pleasant Township - 270,911 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

From the nomination file

4,933 words on record

When this property was proposed for the National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is, and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain. It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s typewriter's.

Description of the property

Moved - Unexposed (Check One) X] Original Site The Mount Sterling Historic District is located in a small community in the southeast corner of Madison County, Ohio. Town population has always been small (1,090 in 1930; 1,536 in 1970), and agriculture has always been the basis of its economic life. The district includes the Mount Sterling town hall, the Pleasant Township hall, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station and several commercial buildings. Most of the buildings are of brick construction and were built during the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are all in good condition. With little real commercial activity, Mount Sterling has remained a nineteenth century community in a twentieth century world.
The Mount Sterling Historic District is a pleasing cluster of well-preserved buildings which for decades have been the centers of the town's commercial and governmental life. Mount Sterling Town Hall: Main and London Streets. The town hall, a two-story Victorian building with a mansard roof and a dominant front tower, is the focal point of the district. building is built on a stone foundation and measures approximately fifty by ninety feet. The front (north) entrance is deeply recessed in an arched opening with a transom. The windows are rectangular with double-hung sash. On the second floor the windows have pointed segmental lintels. Stone hoodmolds and sills are employed throughout along with stone belt courses in the walls to provide a contrast to the brick.
The front tower on the north side is approximately twenty feet square and rises about thirty-five feet above the roof line of the building. The tower has a high slate mansard roof and gabled dormers. Originally the tower had a belfry and spire. The building roof is also slate mansard, penetrated by gabled dormers.

Read the complete 4,933-word case file.

Statement of significance

Mount Sterling is the largest town in Pleasant Township, Madison County. The township was settled late in the eighteenth century by several pioneers from other parts of Madison County and Ohio. The land on which Mount Sterling is located was purchased by John 3. Smith in 1805-06. Smith was from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and he named his new Ohio home after his birthplace. Smith surveyed and established Mount Sterling, Ohio, in 1828. On March 12, 1845, Mount Sterling became an incorporated village. Mount Sterling has been an agricultural community throughout its existence and has not had large commercial developments. Even today it retains its status as a small town located in a rich agricultural region.
Buildings in Mount Sterling are mainly com- mercial and are used by small retail establishments. The importance of the Mount Sterling Historic District is in the unchanged relationships between its principal buildings. The town hall, the railroad station and the large commercial buildings were intended when built to be the town's governmental, business and transportation centers. As such they formed a nomogeneous cluster unitied in style, plan and purpose. In the present age of decentralized living, the continuing unity of these buildings makes the Mount Sterling Historic District truly remarkable. Little is known about the town hall. The city has not been able to locate the original drawings or to discover who designed the structure.
It was built as the town hall in 1883, as the legend on the front tower announces, and it was also used as an opera house until live entertainment went out of fashion. The Masonic Building and the Alkire-Tenny Building were built by private organizations as meeting halls and sources of income from rents. Abbott's Building has apartments upstairs, providing additional revenue for the owners.

Read the complete 4,933-word case file.

The whole case file for this property - 4,933 words, 35 pages, reproduced complete.

Quoted from the National Register nomination for reference 74001559, 35 pages, held by the National Archives in Record Group 79. See the catalogue record.

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 74001559 in Record Group 79.
Madison County	All 7 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.