Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1979. 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
“The Great Western Schoolhouse was built in 1870 along the then-developing National Road, west of St. The schoolhouse is a traditional one room schoolhouse and was used until 1952.”
Wikipedia article Great Western Schoolhouse, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 15 National Register listings in Belmont County · listed in 1979 · category: Building.
National Register reference number.79001787- 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 Richland township, The inset identifies its exact
source book and publication year.
ORO EN A P M de e nr. ae uer peste RE Na TEE A a cin lh cr nf ll ors The First Election - The Battle of Captina - The First Squatters - An Indian Village - Another Indian Massacre - The Early Mills and Distilleries - Township Officials and Population - Powhatan - Town Officials - The Flour Mills - The Sehools - The Churches - Free Masons - The Ferries.
Mrs. Priscilla Baldwin says when her grandfather Isaachar Foulke above mentioned came ot the county in 1810 he located upon a farm three miles east of Newellstown (St. Clairsville) and on the road then leading to Flushing. She said that at that time the old Indian trail passed by her father's home and over this trail Indians traveled between Monroe and Guernsey pausing at the trading post at the foot of the "big hill" to exchange their copper. lead and furs.
Of Richland township in 1804 was the largest in Belmont County and in 1820 it was 3,379, with but one voting precinct, located at St. Clairsville. The census of 1900 shows a population of 4.367, a gain of 988. Because of the fact that Richland township is a purely agricultural township, the increase in population has not been as marked as in the townships along our river front. The assessor's returns however for 1902 show an increase over last year of $28,444 while the tax levy in the township has been increased from 1.49 in 1901 to 1.56 in 1902.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 12 fires within 5 miles of Great Western Schoolhouse between
2002 and 2020, burning about 59 acres in total. None started naturally. None was recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Debris and open burning
7
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
3
Equipment and vehicle use
1
Smoking
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 843 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Great Western Schoolhouse between 1829 and
1975: 590 Plantae, 144 Animalia, 108 Fungi, 1 Unrecorded. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A. D. Selby, A. D. Selby & E. L. Moseley, A. D. Selby & J. F. Hicks and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
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
1,213 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
and a small rectangular belfry with hipped roof and louvered vents at the front edge of the There is a narrow entablature board with slight returns on the gable ends just CONDITION DETERIORATED RUINS EXCELLENT CHECK ONE The interior single room has tongue-in-groove wooden flooring and a similar vertical XORIGINAL SITE board wainscoating.There is an elaborate tin ceiling and cornice trim. chicken wire mesh as a deterent to vandals.
The central doorway and flanking windows beneath the eaves of the main roof.All the window openings are within round arches and of the rolling lands of the Belmont County Branch Campus of Ohio University.It isa one-story one-room brick building with a rough sandstone foundation topped by a decor- feature 9/9 wooden sashes and flat stone lug sills.The openings are covered with a ative chiselled and hammered stone belt course.It has a gable roof with slate covering The Great Western Schoolhouse is located on the Old National Road and is now a part -UNEXPOSED are set within round blind arches: X_GOOD _FAIR AREAS OF
Statement of significance
established by Simon Lentz, a German stonemason. A small village was platted across the road from the Lentz hotel which included the old school land. It was, according to The 1870s saw a large number of brick schoolhouses constructed in the country. The 1880 History, in fact, recorded that Richland Township alone had 18 "substantial brick school buildings" and that 16 of them had been constructed in the 1870s. The Great 1400-1499 1870 1500-1599 today. 1600-1699 INVENTION COMMERCE PERIOD SIGNIFICANCE ARCHEOLOGY-HISTORIC LAW BUILDER/ARCHITECT PREHISTORIC THEATER SCIENCE AGRICULTURE PHILOSOPHY TRANSPORTATION MILITARY ENGINEERING XARCHITECTURE INDUSTRY ART _EXPLORATION/SETTLEMENT _COMMUNICATIONS Club.
LITERATURE The original log schoolhouse for this school district in Richland Township was _ECONOMICS built in 1835 directly south across the National Road from the current brick building. _CONSERVATION legend, named the Great Western after a ship whose captain was visiting the hotel. museum through the efforts of the Belmont County Chapter of the National Trail Questors Western is the only one to remain today and is almost completely intact. The Great Western Schoolhouse is architecturally a unique and well designed one- -1700-1799 Just to the west and north of the road from this early school was a brick hotel the proposed settlement.The Great Western Schoolhouse was built on this 1and in 1870.
The building continued as a classroom until 1952 when it was used by a coon hunters education system of the county. -RELIGION Lentz donated some land adjacent to his hotel in 1868 to build a new schoolhouse for -MUSIC - 1900- The settlement, however, never developed and no evidence of the original plat remains Eventually,it was abandoned.It was restored and reopened to the public as a
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 79001787, 11 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
2 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
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.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
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