Painesville is a city in Lake County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Located along the Grand River, it is a northeast suburb of Cleveland. Its population was 20,312 at the 2020 census. Painesville is included in the Greater Cleveland metropolitan area.
At a Glance
- County: Lake County
- County seat of Lake County
- State: Ohio
History of Painesville
Painesville is included in what is historically referred to as the Connecticut Western Reserve. General Edward Paine (1746 to 1841), a native of Bolton, Connecticut, who had served as a captain in the Connecticut militia during the war, and John Walworth arrived in 1800 with a party of sixty six settlers, among the first in the Western Reserve. General Paine later represented the region in the territorial legislature of the Northwest Territory.
In 1800 the Western Reserve became Trumbull County, Ohio, and at the first Court of Quarter Sessions, the county was divided into eight townships. The smallest of these townships was named Painesville, for General Paine, and encompassed what later became the townships of Perry, Leroy, Hambden, Concord, Chardon, Mentor, and Kirtland. The township government was organized in 1802. The post office in Painesville was opened in 1803 with John Walworth as postmaster.
In what was to become the commercial center of the township was a settlement called Oak Openings, its name being descriptive of the scrub oaks and sandy soil. It was here in 1805 that Gen. Henry Champion laid out a village plat and called it Champion, a name that it carried only until incorporation in 1832 when the name "Painesville" was chosen in honor of General Paine. Two of his descendants, Eleazer A. Paine and Halbert E. Paine, later served as Union Army generals during the American Civil War.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Painesville, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.