BARNESVILLE — The saga of Barnesville from its founding to the present day was featured during the Barnesville Area Chamber of Commerce Spring Banquet on Thursday.

John Rataiczak, who served as master of ceremonies for the event, started the program after announcing awards to community leaders.

“Why is Barnesville so great?” he asked by way of introducing speaker Bruce Yarnall, a village resident who works with the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office. He has worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Columbus Landmarks Foundation. He was also the Victorian Village project coordinator for Barnesville and has been a local historian since age 13.

Yarnall’s talk looked back to 1809, when James Barnes, a Quaker, selected a hilltop meadow that made Barnesville the highest incorporated municipality in Ohio.

He described the early days of Barnesville’s founding, with its unique mix of Quakers and farmers, Irish Catholics and communities of free African Americans. He said the influence can still be felt today, noting the consensus orientation of the Quakers and the independent yet interdependent farmers.

“Consensus and cooperation,” he said. “This is what lies at the heart of everything Barnesville is, was and shall be.”

He added that there was a strong Catholic presence in Temperanceville, in Somerset Township, and that Underground Railroad conductors were active in Quaker City, Barnesville and Somerton.

Yarnall said Barnesville led the way with commercially grown tobacco in 1819, grown by the Rev. John Price in Bailey’s Mills.

“During the 19th century, this was the cash crop for Barnesville, really up until the early 20th century. In town there were packing houses. Tobacco from here was shipped by wagon and later by rail to Baltimore.”

Yarnall related that in 1818 and the 1840s, there was some discussion that a new county might be formed between Cambridge and St. Clairsville with Barnesville as the county seat. The plans were abandoned, but there were many opportunities in the area.

“In 1854 our fortunes changed when the Central Ohio Railroad came through town,” he said. “For the next 50 years, that dramatically changed Barnesville.”

The area also almost saw action during the Civil War, when locals feared Morgan’s Raid of Confederate cavalry under the command of Gen. John Hunt Morgan would target them.

“They thought they were going to travel east … to Bailey’s Mills and burn down the wooden trestles so that the rail line between the east and the west would be destroyed. Instead, Morgan went north,” he said. “But Barnesville men, and from Somerton and Hendrysburg, went and defended the trestle. It was called Camp Trestle.”

Yarnall said there were only four home guards in Ohio during the Civil War.

In 1867, Barnesville had the first Jersey cattle west of the Alleghenies, Yarnall said. And developments in refrigerated rail cars allowed Barnesville strawberry farmers to ship their produce as far as Chicago.

“Barnesville was known in the 1800s as the strawberry capital of the world,” Yarnall said. “This also gave rise to the box factories of Barnesville.”

Other industries were the Watt Foundry, later called Watt Car and Wheel in the 1880s after its owners got a patent for the self-oiling wheel.

“By the 20th century, this was the largest mine car company in the entire world,” Yarnall said.

Olney Friends School came to Barnesville in the 1870s as the presence of Quakers shifted to Barnesville from Mt. Pleasant. The Memorial Park was home to the Barnesville District Fair and fall races through the Great Depression.

“Then in 1895 we had the great fire,” he said.

This resulted in the loss of many buildings, including the Barnesville Enterprise office and records going back to 1866.

Yarnall said Barnesville boasted 12 industries by the turn of the 20th century, including two glass factories, a shoe factory, and box factories, and the population increased 500 percent with 700 men employed in local factories. In 1903, United Dairy was formed with headquarters in Barnesville.

His presentation touched on the garment industry that was active in the first half of the 20th century. He said Barnesville was also “in the running” to host a state university.

Yarnall showed a photograph from the time of World War I, when a 100-foot flagpole was raised in the middle of the Chestnut and Main Street intersection. Barnesville continued to fly the flag after the war, until the state highway department forced the community to take it down about five years later.

Following World War II, the park was rechristened Memorial Park. Downtown was the site of a spontaneous outburst to celebrate the end of the war.

The Great Depression doomed the four-story Harrison Department Store, the largest department store in Belmont County, but Yarnall said there is still the promise of future use for the building.

“The 1920s also brought coal mining development,” Yarnall said.

While there was conflict between the companies and unions, most of those jobs also departed during the Depression.

Another landmark that has persisted is Barnesville General Hospital.

“That hospital started from the grass roots, as did many of the things I’ve covered here today, and we’re blessed to have Barnesville Hospital, which is now WVU Medicine Barnesville Hospital, with us yet today,” he said.

In 1940 Barnesville earned city status with a population of 5,002, but after learning this would mean having a paid volunteer fire department and city health department, a family asked to be “de-annexed,” bringing the population down to 4,998.

Interstates were being built and rail traffic was down. June 30, 1961, was the date when the last passenger train traveled through the village.

“A lot of people put their kids on the train and they rode from Barnesville all the way to Bethesda,” Yarnall said.

Additions in more recent years include the Barnesville Airport, Barnesville Hutton Memorial Library and the Belmont County Victorian Mansion Museum.

“Look at what we have because of that foresight and that grass roots. This is another jewel of Barnesville,” he said.

A major event in the village is the Barnesville Pumpkin Festival.

“This is the premier event of Barnesville and one of the premier events of Belmont County,” he said.

Yarnall said the village saw a future in tourism and economic redevelopment, with downtown Barnesville hosting a multitude of events. He pointed out newer businesses such as WesBanco.

“It’s a new century, there’s new changes and there’s new things going on,” he said. “These are all the jewels of Barnesville, too.”

Yarnall described his presentation as a “Cliffs Notes” history, with an expanded version coming to the Watt Center in Barnesville this fall.