The village of Bainbridge will dedicate its new Nathaniel Massie Memorial Park at 3 p.m. today, Friday, Nov. 6, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony honoring the Revolutionary War soldier and surveyor who founded the Ross County village in 1805, the Scioto Valley Guardian reported. Litter Media, a Chillicothe outlet, also reported the park’s Friday ribbon-cutting in its Nov. 4 coverage of Ross County events.
The ceremony programme, released by the Bainbridge Fire Department and reported by the Scioto Valley Guardian, opens with the national anthem performed by McKenna McFadden and a welcome from Village Administrator Lewis Ewry. American Legion Post 14 Ladies Auxiliary Chaplain Mindy Campbell is scheduled to speak, local performer David Tillis will portray Massie during the programme, and Lydia Mihalik, director of the Ohio Department of Development, will deliver the keynote address before joining village officials and other dignitaries for the official ribbon cutting and a closing benediction, according to the Guardian.
The dedication is being organized with American Legion Post 14, the Guardian reported. The post, also known as the Luther Giffin Post, has operated in Bainbridge since 1946, supporting local veterans and families alongside its Ladies Auxiliary and Sons of the American Legion squadron, according to the Scioto Valley Guardian. Organizers said parking and seating at the park will be limited and are asking attendees to bring a lawn chair, the Guardian reported.
Massie is one of the foundational figures of early Ohio. Born Dec. 28, 1763, in Goochland County, Virginia, he served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War and was appointed a deputy surveyor in 1790, going on to plat roughly 750,000 acres across the Virginia Military District over the following decade, the Scioto Valley Guardian reported.
He founded more than a dozen early Ohio towns, including Manchester in 1791 and Chillicothe — Ohio’s first capital — in April 1796, before founding Bainbridge in 1805, according to the Guardian and the inscription on the Massie monument that has stood along U.S. Route 50 just west of the village, near his Paint Valley home site, since 1938. Massie served as a Ross County delegate to Ohio’s 1802 Constitutional Convention, led the Jeffersonian faction supporting statehood, and became the first president — the first Speaker — of the Ohio Senate. He died Nov. 13, 1813, and is buried in Grandview Cemetery in Chillicothe.
For a village of Bainbridge’s size, a park bearing its founder’s name ties the community’s identity to that history in a permanent, public way. The existing Massie monument west of town has marked his nearby home site for nearly nine decades, but the new park puts his name on a gathering place inside the village itself — one built for the everyday use of the families who live there now, in the Paint Creek valley he surveyed as a young man.
The dedication also arrives as Ross County communities invest in the places that serve them. Earlier this week, four Southeast Ohio school districts, including New Lexington in neighboring Perry County, received state bus safety grants, and volunteers across the region have delivered free medical equipment to more than 4,000 Southeast Ohioans through local churches.
Bainbridge has honored its founder before. The Massie monument along U.S. Route 50, just west of the village near the Paint Valley home site where Massie built a house in 1800, was dedicated on Sept. 21, 1938, by the Ohio Society Daughters of the American Colonists — a reminder that local families have been marking his place in the valley’s story for generations. The new park extends that remembrance from a roadside monument to a named public space at the heart of the village he founded, arriving in the year the United States marks its 250th anniversary and communities across Ohio are revisiting their founding stories.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on: The dedication time, programme and speakers are confirmed through the Bainbridge Fire Department programme reported by the Scioto Valley Guardian, and the Friday ribbon-cutting was independently noted by Litter Media. The park’s street address was not published in the reports available Friday morning, so attendees should follow village direction to the site and plan for limited parking, as organizers advised through the Guardian.
What happens next is simple and immediate: the ceremony begins at 3 p.m. today, the ribbon is cut, and Nathaniel Massie Memorial Park opens to the public — 221 years after the man it honors laid out the village around it.
Photo: Aesopposea, CC BY-SA 3.0