MARTINS FERRY

city, Belmont county, eastern Ohio, U.S. It lies along the Ohio River (there bridged to Wheeling, W.Va.). Squatters in the 1770s and '80s formed settlements (Hoglin's, or Mercer's, Town and Norristown) on the site. In 1795 Absalom Martin of New Jersey laid out a town called Jefferson, which was later abandoned; his son Ebenezer replanned the site as Martinsville in 1835, but it was later renamed for his father's ferry. It developed as a farming community and prior to the American Civil War was a station on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. The arrival of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh (later called Penn Central) Railroad in 1852 and the discovery of coal in the locality gave impetus to the town's industrial growth. Its manufactures include fabricated metals, castings, ferroalloys, and pipe couplings. A port authority was established in 1966. The novelist William Dean Howells (18371920) was born at Martins Ferry, where the Western writer Zane Grey set some of his early works. Inc. village, 1865; city, 1885. Pop. (1990) 7,990.