CENTERBURG THE GEOGRAPHIC CENTER 
OF OHIO-- Or is it?


As we saw in our on-line research, the above monument boulder and plaque are located in the village of Centerburg in a park at the intersection of SR 314 and US 36 on the east edge of town.

After exploring the site we visited an adjacent convenience store and inquired of the first three people we met about the actual location of Ohio's geographic center.  The clerk dismissively mumbled something like "Not live her long."

An older guy wandered in about then and explained the old timers will tell you the center is up across from a spring in Rich Hill.  You can see that little town on the map we published earlier.  A friendly younger guy standing nearby disagreed saying, "That's it right over there across the road," pointing to the marker Sue is reading above.

That graffiti blemished plaque simply says the town is the center of Ohio and has been, I trust, since it was established in 1834.

Armed with this perplexing information we headed for the town hall in search of some official perspective.

Two lady receptionists, upon hearing our frustration, promptly summoned a delightful young fellow who chuckled at our consternation and told us about yet another official plaque and monument in a new subdivision a bit north of the town hall.


That memorial was established in the allotment's common ground on April 30th 2011.  "How do you reconcile these two different locations in your town about 1/2 mile apart"  I inquired.  Pretending to look over the top of his glasses he gave me a mild grin.

We headed along his directions to Heart Ct., and did the photo (right).

It was then we energized our GPS and headed for the previously loaded coordinates which actually led us through the town of Rich Hill where I stopped and inquired of a pleasant young lady if she knew anything about the location of the center of Ohio or its being near a spring in her town the older fellow told us about earlier.

No, it didn't seem to be a topic that aroused her curiosity so we thanked her and continued on our way following the directions of the GPS.

After wandering a bit on local rural roads we wound up on County Rd 15, 8/10 of a mile west of County Rd 204--in Morrow County where, strangely enough the GPS was pointing into a field to the south where there was a path freshly mowed in the weeds flanked by two orange colored survey sticks.  There also were a pair of spiral, galvanized 6" culvert-type pipes laying in the grass as if they might soon be installed as gate posts across the visible path.

We wondered if this was just a farmer about to install a driveway into his field, or, just maybe, an under-construction entryway for the actual location of Ohio's geographic center.  (See photo below).

Since we were headed to Delaware for another touristy visit we decided to call on the Delaware County Engineer's office for some local enlightenment where we met a very friendly and helpful Jack Jennings, a professional surveyor and supervisor of the county map department.

They had no official connection with the state's determination of the geographic center of Ohio being in their jurisdiction.

We wound up having a penetrating discussion on just how do you(?) determine the precise center of an object with a random, geometric shape like the outline of Ohio and he concluded it would be quite easy to arrive at several different results depending on methodology which could find the actual center of the object to be somewhere inside a fairly small, say a few miles in diameter, circle.

A US geological Survey web site agreed with Jack with this statement:  "Because there is no generally accepted definition of a geographic center and no completely satisfactory method of determining it, there may be as many geographic centers of a State or county as there are definitions of the term.

The geographic center of an area may be defined as the center of gravity of the surface, or that point on which the surface of an area would balance if it were a plane of uniform thickness."

Thanks Jack!  I can see where that would be pretty hard to determine with an area as big as Ohio.

Later, in drafting this story I marked the various locations I had found for Ohio's center on a very detailed Ohio Atlas and Gazetteer.  All four sites; the one in Delaware County, the one my GPS found in Morrow County and both monuments in Centerburg of Knox County fit in a circle with a diameter of five miles.