Home to Wilmington College, founded in 1870 by the Society of Friends, the city and the surrounding area include more than one dozen Quaker meeting houses.

[5] In 1833, Wilmington contained a brick courthouse, a jail, fourteen stores, two taverns, two groceries, four churches, and 100 residential houses.

[6] Wilmington was featured in Time magazine on December 8, 1997, as a small town that is attractive to suburban families.

In the early 1950s, the city became home to a number of U.S. Department of Defense facilities, most notably the Clinton County Air Force Base.

After a number of small attempts to reuse the abandoned air force base, Airborne Express purchased the facility in 1979 for $850,000, a fraction of the estimated $100 million spent to construct it[citation needed].

During the next 24 years, Airborne invested more than $250 million to build a hub for its national delivery network, including new sort centers, a 9,000-foot (2,700 m) runway, aircraft hangars, machine shops, flight simulators, a state of art control tower, and a modern administration building to accommodate an estimated 6,000 employees and its fleet of 125 DC-8, DC-9 and Boeing 767 aircraft.

ABX Air is a contract freight forwarding business whose primary customer is DHL, one of the world's largest international shipping firms.

Owned by the Deutsche Post WorldNet, a German holding company, DHL consolidated its US flight and sorting hub operations in Wilmington in 2005.

[13] The facility closed in July 2009, and DHL moved to a much smaller sorting operation at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Wilmington's airport hosts a comparatively smaller Maintenance Repair and Overhaul venture, along with Airborne Maintenance and Engineering Services, employing several hundred employees under the auspices of the ABX Air parent company, ATSG (Air Transport Services Group).

The City Council passed the measure in response to an economic grassroots movement initiated in October 2008 by two Wilmington High School graduates, Mark Rembert and Taylor Stuckert, aided by Pure Blue Energy, LLC a consulting firm out of North Carolina.

From its base of operations at Clinton Memorial Hospital, the non-profit corporation has established health clinics in almost a dozen satellite locations in Southwestern Ohio.

In the mid 1990s, the annual Banana Split Festival[20] was started to commemorate the town's alleged creation of the famous treat in Wilmington in 1907.

[22] Aside from the annual events, Wilmington played host to a festival each year that a new Harry Potter book was released.

Thousands would gather in downtown Wilmington at the Books 'N' More bookstore and surrounding businesses to celebrate each release.

Most notable is the campus of Wilmington College, a Quaker established college that dates from the nineteenth century, which focuses on liberal arts education with themes of global peace and understanding and majors in agriculture, education, athletic training, and small business.

[28] Southern State Community College operates its North Campus in Wilmington, with other campuses in Washington Court House, Hillsboro, and Sardinia, with primary focus on transfer credits and health sciences, such as Nursing and Medical Assisting and Respiratory Therapy, as well as a Practical Nursing.

[30][31] The city and surrounding areas are served by a daily newspaper published in Wilmington, the News Journal, and by two radio stations.

Freight railroad service is provided by the Indiana and Ohio Railway on a line owned by CSX Transportation between Cincinnati and Columbus.