{ "type": "place", "slug": "perry-township-licking-county", "key": "T61924-LIC", "name": "Perry Township, Licking County", "short_name": "Perry Township", "place_type": "township", "county": { "name": "Licking", "slug": "licking", "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/county/licking/" }, "population": 1671, "center": { "lat": 40.108164068377825, "lon": -82.26812974959978 }, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/place/perry-township-licking-county/", "api": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/api/place/perry-township-licking-county.json", "zips": [ { "zip": "43830", "name": "Muskingum Township and Nashport", "share": 0.0824, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/zip/43830/" }, { "zip": "43822", "name": "Frazeysburg", "share": 0.0591, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/zip/43822/" }, { "zip": "43055", "name": "Newark", "share": 0.0136, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/zip/43055/" } ], "water": [ { "pwsid": "OH4502314", "name": "Newark City", "share": 0.7001478062305015, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4502314/" }, { "pwsid": "OH6000412", "name": "Muskingum County Water - Se", "share": 0.20684689055125074, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH6000412/" }, { "pwsid": "OH6000612", "name": "Frazeysburg", "share": 0.07479931457641233, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH6000612/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4501712", "name": "Licking County Prescott Estates", "share": 0.005896178558016522, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4501712/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4500212", "name": "Lakeshore Court Mobile Home", "share": 0.005896178558016522, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4500212/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4504012", "name": "St. Louisville Village", "share": 0.0015910323093060454, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4504012/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4500312", "name": "Country Hills MHP", "share": 0.0015469444620425908, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4500312/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4500912", "name": "City of Heath", "share": 0.0014038520376229813, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4500912/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4500512", "name": "Winding Creek Estates", "share": 0.0007487210867322568, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4500512/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4503112", "name": "Valley Mobile Home Park", "share": 0.0006551309508907246, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4503112/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4503312", "name": "Wilkins Mobile Home Park", "share": 0.0004679506792076605, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4503312/" } ], "history": { "key": "T61924-LIC", "name": "Perry Township, Licking County", "kind": "township", "county": "Licking", "summary": "Perry Township was set off from Hanover Township in 1818, once enough settlers had reached its rough, hilly ground -- including the barren \"Bald Hills\" in the south -- to justify a separate organization, and was named for Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. Samuel Hickerson, who built a cabin in 1810, was its first settler and lived alone in the wilderness for ten months before others followed him to the Brushy Fork. Its one real village, Elizabethtown, was laid out in 1831 by Elizabeth Lemert and grew up around a post office called \"Perryton,\" the name the settlement still goes by today; a plain iron bridge built in the township in 1872 later became one of only three surviving Post-truss bridges in the United States, though it was long ago moved elsewhere. The township's own 1881 county history chapter, unlike most others in Licking County, records no Mound Builder works or Indian villages within its borders, leaving Perry's deepest history a documented blank rather than a story.", "founded": { "settled": "1810 (Samuel Hickerson)", "platted": null, "incorporated": "1818, organized from Hanover Township", "by": null, "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "source_host": "archive.org" }, "name_origin": { "text": "The 1881 county history states plainly that the township \"was named in honor of Commodore Perry,\" almost certainly Oliver Hazard Perry, the naval officer who won the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812 and whose victory was still recent and celebrated when the township organized in 1818. No source consulted gives further detail on the naming decision itself.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "source_host": "archive.org" }, "native": { "text": "Unlike the chapters on most other Licking County townships, the 1881 county history's chapter on Perry Township opens straight into topography and settlement, with no mention at all of Mound Builder earthworks or of any documented Indian village, camp, or trail inside the township. No other source consulted (the 1909 county history, Wikipedia, or the National Register list) supplies one either. The township's land, like the rest of Licking County, was ceded by the Treaty of Greenville of August 3, 1795, in which the Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware), Miami, Ottawa and other nations gave up most of what is now Ohio to the United States, but no source names a nation, village, or site specific to Perry Township itself. See the Licking County file for the wider county record.", "peoples": [ "Wyandot", "Shawnee", "Lenape (Delaware)", "Miami", "Ottawa" ], "sites": [], "sources": [ "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenville" ] }, "timeline": [ { "year": "1795", "event": "The Treaty of Greenville cedes most of what becomes Ohio, including the future Perry Township, to the United States.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenville", "datetime": "1795", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "1810", "event": "Samuel Hickerson builds a cabin and begins a clearing, becoming the township's first settler and its only inhabitant for more than ten months.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1810", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1811", "event": "James Thrap and Allen Hall arrive; Rev. Joseph Thrap preaches the first sermon within the township's limits.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1811", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1813", "event": "Rev. Michael Ellis, the first traveling minister to preach in Perry, forms a Methodist class at the house of James Thrap; separately, Phillip Denman builds the township's largest dwelling to that date, eighteen by twenty-eight feet, which becomes a preaching place.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1813", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1831", "event": "Elizabeth Lemert lays out the village of Elizabethtown; a post office there is named \"Perryton.\"", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1831", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1833", "event": "The Disciples congregation meeting at Elizabeth Lemert's house since 1829 or 1830 formally organizes, with John Dodson appointed elder, a position he holds for sixteen years.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1833", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1844", "event": "The congregation that becomes the Perryton United Methodist Church, still standing on Licking Valley Road, is built.", "source": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg", "datetime": "1844", "source_host": "commons.wikimedia.org" }, { "year": "1847", "event": "John Fry, assisted by John Crabtree and Joseph Sperry, constitutes a Baptist church in the township with seven original members.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "datetime": "1847", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "year": "1872", "event": "An iron Post-truss bridge -- later called the Falling Rock Camp Bridge -- is built over Brushy Fork Creek in Perry Township; it is relocated to Hebron in 1927 and again, in 1931, to Falling Rock Camp on the Rocky Fork in Eden Township, where it survives today as one of only three known Post trusses left in the United States.", "source": "https://oldohiobridges.com/county/lickin.htm", "datetime": "1872", "source_host": "oldohiobridges.com" } ], "stories": [ { "title": "The Third Angel", "text": "In 1813 Phillip Denman built the largest house yet seen in his part of Perry Township, eighteen by twenty-eight feet, and his neighbor John Livingston suggested that opening it for preaching would draw respectable settlers and raise land values. Livingston went looking for a minister on the road to Newark and found a man in unmistakable Methodist dress, who agreed to preach there once he returned from visiting his parents in Virginia, and asked Livingston to announce the meeting four weeks from the following Sunday. Livingston never learned the preacher's name, so he spread word that there would be preaching at Denman's new house by the \"third angel\" -- and the odd phrase drew a crowd, many of them curious to see who or what would show up. The preacher, John Cobler, the first minister the Methodist conference sent west of the Ohio River, satisfied his audience and made Denman's a regular preaching stop every two weeks until 1828.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "title": "The Hunter and the Panther", "text": "John Livingston, one of Perry Township's first settlers, was known through the neighborhood as its most successful hunter. Returning exhausted from one expedition, he was walking slowly through the woods when a panther dropped from a tree limb onto his back, tearing off two hunting shirts and raking him with its claws on the way to the ground. Livingston spun around and fired wildly, missing in his shock, then found himself facing the animal with an empty gun. Remembering that a steady stare could sometimes hold a wild beast at bay, he kept his eyes fixed on the crouching panther while he reloaded blind -- powder, then a bullet dropped in unpatched and unrammed -- and fired point-blank into its head from a foot away. The blast burst his gun barrel and mangled his hand, but it killed the panther outright. Bleeding and shaken, Livingston dragged himself to a neighbor's cabin and was a long time recovering; the county history calls it, of all his many encounters with wild game, the one that came nearest to costing him his life.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "source_host": "archive.org" }, { "title": "The Bear on the Chimney", "text": "One morning, with her husband Hathaway Denman away at work in the woods, Mrs. Denman was startled by her two-year-old son's screams and the savage bark of the family's dog. She ran outside to find her boy running toward her while a black bear, closely pursued by the dog, scrambled up onto the chimney's stone \"bench\" a few feet off the ground. The dog held the bear treed there while Mrs. Denman carried the child to where her husband was working; he came back with his gun and shot the bear off the chimney.", "source": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "source_host": "archive.org" } ], "photos": [ { "page": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg", "file": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg", "caption": "The Perryton United Methodist Church, 6139 Licking Valley Road in Perryton (the former Elizabethtown), built in 1844; photographed 2016", "credit": "Nyttend, via Wikimedia Commons", "license": "public domain", "year": "2016", "basis": "photographer released the file into the public domain worldwide", "thumb_url": "/history/photos/T61924-LIC_0.jpg", "w": 6016, "h": 4000, "license_url": null, "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" } ], "sources": [ "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "https://archive.org/details/centennialhistor0001embr", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Township,_Licking_County,_Ohio", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenville", "https://oldohiobridges.com/county/lickin.htm", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg" ], "gaps": "No Mound Builder or Indian site specific to Perry Township was found in any source consulted, and this appears to be a genuine gap in the historical record rather than an oversight, since the 1881 county history's Perry chapter (unusually among its township chapters) does not raise the subject at all. The batch's National Register hints (Cedar Hill Cemetery Buildings, Courthouse Center, Evans-Holton-Owens House, Home Building Association Bank, Hull Place, Licking County Courthouse, McNamar-McLure-Miller Residence, and Newark High School, all sharing Perry's 43055 ZIP) were checked and confirmed to stand in the city of Newark, not Perry Township, so none are used here. The \"Flint Ridge spur\" suggested by the batch hints could not be substantiated: Wikipedia's own account of Perry Township's boundaries shows it does not border Hopewell Township, where Flint Ridge lies, and no source consulted ties Perry Township to the flint quarries directly. The GNIS historical name \"Claypools\" (ZIP 43830) was not tied to a confirmed location inside Perry Township; the only \"Claypool\" mill this research found in the 1881 county history sits on the Licking River in neighboring Hanover Township. Denman's Cross Roads, a second small village the 1881 history describes, could not be further verified or dated beyond that one paragraph.", "confidence": "medium", "researched": "2026-09-15", "model": "sonnet", "founded_line": "Settled 1810 (Samuel Hickerson), incorporated 1818, organized from Hanover Township.", "wikipedia": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Township,_Licking_County,_Ohio", "sources_h": [ { "url": "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi", "host": "archive.org" }, { "url": "https://archive.org/details/centennialhistor0001embr", "host": "archive.org" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Township,_Licking_County,_Ohio", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenville", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "url": "https://oldohiobridges.com/county/lickin.htm", "host": "oldohiobridges.com" }, { "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg", "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" } ] }, "links": [ [ "archive.org", "https://archive.org/details/historyoflicking0000nnhi" ], [ "archive.org", "https://archive.org/details/centennialhistor0001embr" ], [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Township,_Licking_County,_Ohio" ], [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenville" ], [ "oldohiobridges.com", "https://oldohiobridges.com/county/lickin.htm" ], [ "commons.wikimedia.org", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perryton_UMC_closeup.jpg" ] ], "generated": "2026-09-16", "license": "CC BY 4.0 for the compilation; each source keeps its own terms", "cite": "Cracked Buckeye (Open Shower Co), \"Perry Township, Licking County\", https://crackedbuckeye.com/place/perry-township-licking-county/, built 2026-09-16, accessed [date].", "schema": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/api/schema.json" }