Circleville Historic District

Downtown Circleville, Ohio, occupies the site of a town laid out in 1810 inside a circular Indian earthwork, with the courthouse at the center and streets curving around it. The circular plan proved inconvenient, and from 1836 the plat was gradually squared, which erased the earthworks and led to many mid-nineteenth-century buildings near the courthouse. The district covers about 35 acres and roughly 85 buildings. Its northern half is a typical Midwestern main street of two- to four-story commercial blocks, while the southern half is residential, with small gardens. Notable buildings include the 1861 City Building designed by carriage maker William Doane, the 1876 Italianate Masonic Lodge, the Pickaway County Courthouse remodeled in the 1890s, and houses such as the Moore and Denny-Renick-May houses. The town grew with the Ohio Canal, which reached it in 1831, and later the railroads, and it has kept an unusually cohesive collection of nineteenth-century architecture.