Kate’s Notes: Fairview, population 81, is a village in Belmont and Guernsey counties in Ohio and is situated just off I-70 between Columbus, Ohio and Wheeling, West Virginia. For more information on the vilage of Fairview, see: http://www.roadmuseum.org/4_05_fairview,_ohio.htm

How the town of Fairview, Ohio got its name.

From: The Cambridge Jeffersonian
Cambridge, Ohio
August 6, 1885

   R. H. Taneyhill writes to the Barnesville Enterprise an interesting article detailing how Fairview  received its name. We make the following extract:
   John Gilliland, who died in California in the summer of 1849, was a schoolmate of mine, and when we had both grown to manhood he taught our common school in Barnesville. While he was here teaching, he and I were talking about Fairview, and I remarked that it was well named and gave him the same reason that Mr. Hall gives, as the cause of its name. Mr. Gilliland laughed and said that was not why it was called Fairview, but that he knew exactly how it got its name.
   The John Gilliland, of whom I have been speaking, was a son of Morgan Gilliland and was born in Kirkwood Township, Belmont county, about mid-way from Barnesville to Fairview. Morgan Gilliland was a brother to Jas. Gilliland, who owned the lands on which Fairview is built, and who laid out that town.
   Mr. Gilliland told me that after his uncle James had surveyed and platted the town, he called on his brother Morgan and two other of his neighbors, as a committee to give the new born village a name. The three gentlemen selected to give it a name met for the purpose on the flat where the old Bradshaw tavern used to stand. While standing there one of the committee proposed that they go to the top of the Bradshaw hill, nearly south of the village, so as to get a “fair view” of the village site. They did so. Having reached the summit of the hill and faced north Morgan Gilliland said: “Well, we have come here as we said to get a ‘fair view’ suppose we say, let ‘Fair View’ be its name.” To this all agreed, and the proprietor adopted it and that is the way Fairview got its name. Mr. Gilliland also said that he had heard his father tell that story many times and laugh at the oddity of the christening of the town of Fairview.

-- contributed and transcribed by Kate Maynard, 2009.