The story
Welcome to Kimmell
Kimmell grew up around a station of the Baltimore & Ohio, which began running trains through Sparta Township in 1874. The 1920 history says it practically occupies the site of Sparta, the village laid out in 1836 that was briefly Noble County’s first county seat and then emptied.
John L. Powers, an early tavern keeper of Perry Township, settled in Sparta Township in 1832, a short distance north of where the railroad later crossed the Goshen road, and John Dillon came the same year. Before the county was organized in 1836 they were followed by John Conklin, Richard Bray, Richard Jeffreys, James Mael, Robert McAfee and others.
In June 1836 Isaac Spencer and R. I. Dawson laid out the village of Sparta on sections 13 and 24: 236 lots in blocks of twelve, with ground given for a public square, a school and churches. A post office opened in the fall of 1836 with Isaac Spencer as postmaster, and within a couple of years Col. John Spencer and Wesley White kept stores. Sparta was named the first county seat of Noble County, but no courthouse or jail was built, only a small building for the county offices; its people probably never numbered more than twenty-five, and when the seat moved to Augusta in July 1837 the village was soon deserted. One of the early elections was held in the County Clerk’s office there, and the 1882 history tells of a later one in the township at which two men who tied for an office played euchre to decide it, the loser taking “the empty honor.”
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In 1882 the county history still counted only Cromwell and Indian Village as villages in the township. The Baltimore & Ohio was surveyed in 1871; early in 1872 Sparta and four other townships were asked to vote a tax in its aid, and trains began running in 1874, and a station was established at Kimmell, which, the 1920 history wrote, “has since developed into a small but lively village.” By then it had elevators, stores and churches, and Wolf Lake, six miles off, used it as its shipping point.
The Sparta Christian Church at Kimmell was organized in 1878, built a brick church costing $3,000 in 1880 and a parsonage in 1900, and in 1919 put up a new brick church costing $30,000; in 1920 it had 250 members and 275 in its Sunday school, and it baptized both by immersion and by sprinkling. The Methodists organized in 1901 and built a $7,000 brick church that year, sharing their pastor with Wolf Lake. The farmers of the neighborhood organized the State Bank of Kimmell, with $25,000 capital and Simon J. Strauss as president; before it the nearest bank was at Ligonier. Sparta Township counted 2,776 people in 2020.