Georgetown, Ohio

Georgetown is the county seat of Brown County, Ohio. The first settlers arrived in 1819. The community grew very slowly, having approximately eight hundred residents in 1846. That same year, the town contained four churches and a newspaper.

Forty years later, Georgetown remained virtually unchanged. With 1,293 residents in 1880, the county seat boasted five churches, two of which were African-American churches, three newspapers, a bank, and a woolen mill, the town’s largest single employer with nineteen workers. City residents were active in the tobacco trade, shipping tobacco all over the world. Tobacco was the county’s largest crop.

Several prominent people lived in Georgetown during the nineteenth century. Among them was future President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant, who spent much of his youth in the community. Today, the house that Grant lived in and the school that he attended are Ohio Historical Society sites. United States Congressman Thomas Lyon Hamer, the man who appointed Grant to the United States Military Academy at West Point, also resided in Georgetown.

During the twentieth century, Georgetown remained relatively small. In 2000, only 3,691 people resided in the town. Only twelve percent of the community’s residents over twenty-five years of age had a four-year college education. Most townspeople found employment in manufacturing businesses with retail stores following closely behind.