Coal mining began here in 1819, before the village even had a name. The first settlers arrived around 1806 at what is now Kerr's Run; by the 1820s, taverns and a wharf-boat anchored the riverfront, and in 1827 a town was laid out as Nyesville. It was renamed Pomeroy for landowner Samuel Pomeroy, incorporated in 1840, and designated county seat of Meigs County in 1841. The Ohio River gave Pomeroy its economy: coal moved out by barge, manufactured goods came in, and for most of the nineteenth century the village was busier than its size today suggests. The salt works, the coal yards, and the riverfront landings made Pomeroy one of the busier ports on this stretch of the Ohio.

In the late 1880s, a school known as the Kerr's Run Colored School operated in the oldest part of town. It served Black children from first through eighth grade. Two of its students - James Edwin Campbell and James McHenry Jones - went on to complete their secondary education at Pomeroy Academy, becoming the first and second African-American graduates of that school: Jones in 1882, Campbell in 1884. Both went further. Campbell became a respected poet and educator and the founding president of what is now West Virginia State University. Jones became the third president of the same institution. That a small Ohio River village school produced two college presidents of a historically Black university, during the height of Jim Crow, is a fact that deserves more attention than it has received.

Pomeroy's history is marked by repeated disasters. Major fires destroyed its older wooden buildings in 1851, 1856, 1884, and 1927. The Ohio River flooded the village catastrophically in 1884, 1913, and 1937 - the last of these being one of the worst floods in Ohio River history. In July 1863, after the Battle of Buffington Island broke John Hunt Morgan's Confederate raiders, more than two hundred captured raiders were temporarily held in the Pomeroy courthouse. The same building - the one with three ground-floor entrances - served briefly as a Civil War prison. Through fire, flood, and war, Pomeroy kept rebuilding, in part because there was nowhere else to put it: the river was on one side, the bluff was on the other, and the village had to stay where it had always been.

For a village of fewer than two thousand people, Pomeroy has produced an unusual catalog of notable people. Ambrose Bierce - journalist, Civil War veteran, author of The Devil's Dictionary - was born in Meigs County in 1842, though his family moved to Indiana when he was a child. Jorma Kaukonen, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, grew up here. Mike Bartrum played in the NFL for over a decade. Benny Kauff and Cy Morgan played in the major leagues. Charlie Slack still holds the NCAA single-season rebounding record from his time at Marshall in 1955. And as a footnote: the Pomeroy McDonald's was, until August 31, 2017, one of the last two McDonald's locations anywhere in the world that still served pizza. The chain had abandoned the experiment in the late 1990s. Pomeroy and one other small-town location simply did not get the memo.

From the air, Pomeroy's geometry is immediately obvious: a single ribbon of buildings pressed against the Ohio River, with the bluffs rising sharply behind. The Meigs County Courthouse, a tall masonry building with the famously three ground-floor entrances stacked vertically, occupies the village center. The river bends gently here, with West Virginia visible on the far bank. Coal-loading facilities and barge slips line the waterfront. The old salt-works district at Kerr's Run sits a short distance downstream. From cruising altitude, the whole settlement looks like a string of beads laid along a curving wire, with the geography that created Pomeroy's no-cross-streets nature visible at a glance.