Madison County Historical Society Museum

Madison County Historical Society Museum

Located in London, Ohio, the history of Madison County is masterfully preserved at the Madison County Historical Society Museum.

The Madison County Historical Society preserves the areas past and interprets the county’s place in American history. The museum is made up of a half dozen buildings that each capture a unique aspect of the county's past. One of the area's oldest known homes, Jonathan Alder’s two-hundred-year-old log cabin, is located on museum grounds. Alder, a settler from Virginia, was famously kidnapped by Shawnee Indians as a child and was later raised by a Mingo chief in Ohio. This ordeal made him one of the earliest non-Native settlers to call Ohio home. Having played an important role in Madison’s local history, his life and home are both preserved at the museum. The museum also possesses a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith's shop, a train caboose, and an agriculture building, but the central hub of the museum is the Wheeler Building.

Stepping into the wheeler building is like stepping into the past. Storefronts that once graced London's streets in the early-to-mid-twentieth century are present in their entirety with the shops nearly fully preserved. The shelves are stocked just as they once were with locally made goods and products from around the country.

The museum’s war room further highlights Madison’s County’s ties to broader American and world history. The room proudly displays items donated by the servicemen and women who called the county home. From Civil War patches to letters from Vietnam, this part of the museum underscores how Madison County touched the outside world and how the outside world touched Madison County.

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