Circleville is a city in, and the county seat of, Pickaway County, Ohio, United States. The city is situated along the Scioto River, 25 miles (40 km) south of Columbus. The population was recorded to be 13,927 in the 2020 census.
Circleville is best-known today as the host of the Circleville Pumpkin Show, an annual festival held since 1903.
Circleville is named after its original layout created in 1810, which was based upon the circular Hopewell tradition earthwork within which the city was built. This earthwork measured in diameter, and was constructed in the early centuries of the Common Era. The county courthouse was built in the center of the innermost circle.
In the late 1830s, for various reasons, residents requested authorisation from the state legislature to change Circleville's layout to a standard grid format. This was accomplished by the mid-1850s.
All traces of the Hopewell earthwork were hence destroyed, although hundreds of other monuments of its kind remain in the Ohio Valley.
By the mid-18th century, the Lenape (Delaware Indians) were pushed west from Pennsylvania by European settlers flowing into the colony. The Lenape were given permission by the Wyandot people to settle in the Ohio country. One of their settlements was Maguck, a small village built before 1750 on the banks of the Scioto River. Modern Circleville was built to the north of this site.
Frontier explorer Christopher Gist was the first recorded European explorer of the Circleville area. On January 20, 1751, Gist visited Maguck, which had a small population of about 10 families. He wrote in his journal that he had stayed in the town for four days. Between the time of the establishment of the United States and of the city's settlement, the land was owned by the US federal government (As opposed to other land in the county, which was part of the Virginia Military District).
Circleville was founded by European-American settlers during 1810, as people relocated westward after the American Revolutionary War.
One such settler was George Hitler Sr.