Jefferson Depot

Jefferson, the seat of Ashtabula County, was laid out in 1803 by Gideon Granger, Postmaster General under Thomas Jefferson, who imagined it as a "Philadelphia of the West"; it became the county seat in 1811 and grew into a hotbed of abolitionism, home to Congressman Joshua Giddings and Senator Benjamin Wade. The railroad reached town when the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern built its Franklin Division line through Jefferson in 1871-72, tying it and neighboring communities such as Plymouth, Griggs, Leon, and Andover to Ashtabula with heavy freight and passenger service — a trip that had once consumed a day shrank to an hour or less. The rails outlived the passenger trains: in 1984 a local businessman chartered the Ashtabula, Carson & Jefferson Railroad to preserve the six-mile Jefferson industrial track, and its sister company, the AC&J Scenic Line, ran excursions out of Jefferson from 1991 to 2014. Today the village keeps its nineteenth-century past on display through a historical complex of several restored period buildings.