How Was Greenville Built

Greenville is a textbook Ohio county seat, and a well-preserved one.

The courthouse

The Darke County Courthouse of 1874 is Second Empire in style — a mansard roof, a projecting central pavilion, round-headed windows and a clock tower carrying a statue — built in sandstone at a moment when county governments across the Midwest were competing to build impressively. It sits at the head of Broadway Street rather than in the middle of a square, which gives the main street a closed vista.

Broadway Street

Two- and three-storey brick commercial blocks from the 1870s to the 1900s with cast-iron shopfronts, bracketed cornices and upper-floor windows in pairs. The street is unusually intact for a town this size, and has been restored rather than refronted.

Bear’s Mill

A timber-framed grist mill of 1849, four storeys, sheathed in weatherboard, with its French buhr millstones, elevators and chutes still in place and still working. It is one of very few operating water-powered mills left in Ohio.

The fort

Nothing survives of Fort Greene Ville above ground; its outline is marked and the site is partly under the town.

The memorial

Annie Oakley’s grave at Brock Cemetery, a few miles north, is a modest upright stone beside her husband’s, deliberately unremarkable — which is how she wanted it — and the contrast with the scale of her fame is part of the point of visiting.

Housing

Timber Italianate and Queen Anne houses on the residential streets, with brick farmhouses in the county.

The county fairgrounds

On the edge of town, a permanent complex of livestock barns, a grandstand and a half-mile harness track, most of it timber and steel built up over more than a century. Fairgrounds of this kind are among the most substantial pieces of public building in rural Ohio and are used for a single week a year, which is why they look both grand and slightly weathered.