Martins Ferry is a city in Belmont County, Ohio, United States, along the Ohio River across from Wheeling, West Virginia. It is the largest city in Belmont County. The population was 6,260 as of the 2020 census. It is share of the Wheeling metropolitan area.

Martins Ferry is known as the birth place of Boston Celtics legend John Havlicek.

Martins Ferry is the oldest European settlement in the disclose of Ohio, having been arranged at least as yet to be as 1779, almost a decade back Marietta. The settlement got its Begin as a consequence of a land agree to George Mercer of the Ohio Company in 1748 from the British Crown for 200,000 acres in the Ohio Country, a colloquial term for what is now much of Ohio, and western West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The comply called for among extra things, establishment of a fort. The come to was for house south of the Ohio River in West Virginia (then Virginia). Settlement was hampered by the outbreak of the French and Indian War. The pact was named Zanesburg (renamed Wheeling in 1795). The Ohio Company was dissolved in 1779, and claims issued by the Crown became scholarly after the Revolutionary War. The community across the river was a westward augmentation of Zanesburg, but at that time, settlement on the west bank of the Ohio River was prohibited by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1768. Through the years, it has been known as Hoglinstown, Mercertown, Norristown (1785), Jefferson (1795), Martinsville (1835), and Martin’s Ferry (1865).

Squatters from across the Ohio were the early settlers. The harmony formed in the shadow of Virginia’s Fort Fincastle, later renamed Fort Henry upon the Virginia side of the Ohio, built in 1774. The town was disbanded a couple of times before becoming acknowledged as Norristown in 1785. In 1795, the town of Jefferson was platted by Absalom Martin, one of the city’s very old settlers, who operated a ferry there. In 1801, he isolated his plat subsequent to St. Clairsville was prearranged as the county seat of the newly organized county of Belmont, one of the founding territories of the Northwest Territory.