 McClure was laid out in the late 1870s, and named after John McClure, an original owner of the town site.In the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, McClure had the distinction of being the last place in Ohio with a manual telephone system.Since the installation of the first telephone system in the 1890s, by The Ohio Bell Telephone Co., residents used the same method to signal their town's operator; they turned a crank on their phone.