WILLIAMSBURG, Ohio — Harmony Hill Museum will celebrate the 256th birthday of Maj. Gen. William Lytle, the surveyor credited with founding Williamsburg, with a day of exhibits, reenactors and music on Sept. 19.
The celebration runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the museum and is free to attend, according to Discover Clermont, the county’s tourism agency, which promoted the event. It falls within Ohio Open Doors, a statewide celebration running Sept. 10-20 that gives the public free access to historic sites, according to the Ohio History Connection.
Visitors can tour new exhibits inside the museum’s rebuilt land office, see expanded displays in the property’s stone dairy house and take part in Pioneer Day learning stations and demonstrations from historical reenactors, according to the event announcement. A tree dedication tied to the America250 initiative marking the nation’s 250th anniversary is also planned, and the Williamsburg Community Band will close the day with a patriotic performance titled “Salute to America 250” from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Lytle, known locally as the “Father of Clermont County,” arrived in the area around 1794 as a deputy surveyor for the Virginia Military District, a 4.2-million-acre tract set aside for Revolutionary War veterans from Virginia. He surveyed more than 140,000 acres of what is now Clermont County and platted the town of Williamsburg, according to the museum.
In 1800, Lytle built a home, a stone dairy house and a land office on his property, which he named Harmony Hill. The land office briefly served as the Clermont County post office starting in 1803, and by some accounts more than 200,000 acres of land changed hands there in a single year, according to the museum. It was the only land office built within the Virginia Military District.
The original land office no longer stands, but the foundation of its west wall was rediscovered in 2019, prompting the Southwest Chapter of the Professional Land Surveyors of Ohio to partner with the Board of Harmony Hill on a replica reconstruction, according to the museum.
The dairy house, the only original structure still standing on the property, was preserved by the Harmony Hill Association, a group formed after Williamsburg’s 1996 bicentennial. The association raised $115,000 in 1997 to acquire and restore the building, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001, according to the museum.
Harmony Hill Museum, which also houses an office of the Clermont County Historical Society, is normally open to the public on the first Saturday of each month.
The information contained in this story was obtained from the Clermont County Convention & Visitors Bureau (Discover Clermont) and Harmony Hill Museum.