| Gallia County grew from its beginnings as a settlement at Gallipolis in 1790 by immigrants from France. To understand the growth of the county, we turn to the 1860 US Census. This census listed the post office at the top of the page as well as township and county. Each page had lines for 23 individuals. If we count the number of pages for each post office and multiply by 23 we arrive at a rough guess at the size of these population centers.
We need to remember: not all people were enumerated (there are always some families missed), there were some blank lines (this has been taken into account), some pages may have contained entries for people for more than one post office, and there were pages that did not list a post office. For these reasons, the figures are approximations but they still give us a picture of the settlement of the county in 1860. In addition, residents of Gallia County who lived near a county line may have gotten their mail from a post office in a neighboring county. For this reason, Huntington Township listed two post offices that were in Vinton County: Vinton PO and Keystone PO. Many of the post offices were not in towns, and some covered more land area than others.
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