Vaughnsville, Ohio

Vaughnsville (pronounced VAWNZ-vil) is an unincorporated community in southern Sugar Creek Township, Putnam County, Ohio, United States. Although it is unincorporated, it has a post office, with the ZIP code of 45893. It lies along State Route 115 at its intersection with State Routes 12 and 189. Sugar Creek flows along the west and south of Vaughnsville.

Vaughnsville was originally called Monterey, and under the latter name was laid out in 1847. An addition was made by Daniel C. Vaughn, who gave the town his name. A post office called Vaughnsville has been in operation since 1848.

Vaughnsville's most unusual claim to fame is the first location in the World to use individual communion cups for the Lord's Supper. Though contested. John G. Thomas—a physician and pastor of the Vaughnsville Congregational Church—designed a communion outfit after noticing “a communicant with a diseased mouth condition”. Thomas applied for a patent for his invention on August 2, 1893, in which he wrote that he “invented certain new and useful improvements in communion service” which would “provide an individual or separate cup for the use of each person at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, commonly called the communion service…” (Serial No. 482,186). According to The Lima News, Thomas and his church elders first experimented with the individual cups “sometime during 1893” (January 16, 1955, p. 5B). The patent for his invention was granted on March 6, 1894, and marked the first time an individual cup service received letters patent in the United States (Patent No. 516,065). Thomas moved to Lima and started the Thomas Communion Service Company in 1893 and it was sold in 1972.

For many years the Northern Ohio Railroad maintained a passenger and freight station in Vaughnsville, and later a telegraph outlet, later Northern Ohio Railroad was bought by the Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railroad, Trains #90/95 were known as the "Delphos Bullet", it was a mixed use train of freight and passenger that ran the entire 165 mile run from Akron to Delphos. The last run of this trip was on July 20, 1951 and was Ohio's last mixed train. The tracks were abandoned soon after and removed completely in the 80's.

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