{ "type": "place", "slug": "prairie-township-franklin-county", "key": "T64570-FRA", "name": "Prairie Township, Franklin County", "short_name": "Prairie Township", "place_type": "township", "county": { "name": "Franklin", "slug": "franklin", "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/county/franklin/" }, "population": 17347, "center": { "lat": 39.95213605610395, "lon": -83.15497246344863 }, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/place/prairie-township-franklin-county/", "api": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/api/place/prairie-township-franklin-county.json", "zips": [ { "zip": "43119", "name": "Columbus and Galloway", "share": 0.2291, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/zip/43119/" }, { "zip": "43228", "name": "Columbus", "share": 0.1782, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/zip/43228/" } ], "water": [ { "pwsid": "OH2504412", "name": "Columbus Public Water System", "share": 0.9120961813008527, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH2504412/" }, { "pwsid": "OH2502612", "name": "Aqua Ohio - Lake Darby", "share": 0.05302475790802374, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH2502612/" }, { "pwsid": "OH2501003", "name": "Sanitary District #4", "share": 0.023499365422853847, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH2501003/" }, { "pwsid": "OH2502712", "name": "Aqua Ohio - Timberbrook Pw", "share": 0.009437245156518432, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH2502712/" }, { "pwsid": "OH4900512", "name": "Greentree Mobile Home Park", "share": 0.0019424502117514546, "url": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/water/OH4900512/" } ], "history": { "key": "T64570-FRA", "name": "Prairie Township, Franklin County", "kind": "township", "county": "Franklin", "summary": "Prairie Township took its name from the tall grasses that once covered its level, poorly-drained ground along Darby Creek — reportedly tall enough to hide all but the head of a man on horseback. It was organized under that name in 1819, its bounds then reaching farther north than today, into what later became Brown Township. Settlement began around 1800 with a handful of families and grew through scattered mill hamlets — Alton on the new National Road in 1836, Rome (later New Rome) the same year, Galloway in 1861 — rather than any single town. In the twentieth century the insurance-company-built planned community of Lincoln Village and the notorious governance collapse of tiny New Rome, dissolved by the state in 2004, became the township's best-known modern chapters.", "founded": { "settled": "c. 1800", "platted": null, "incorporated": "1819", "by": "organized under its present name; bounds then extended farther north into present-day Brown Township", "source": "https://www.genealogybug.net/franklin_1858/prairie.htm", "source_host": "genealogybug.net" }, "name_origin": { "text": "The township was named for the tall prairie grasses that covered much of its level ground before settlement and drainage; local accounts recorded by the Southwest Franklin County Historical Society and repeated on Wikipedia describe the grass as tall enough to hide all but the head of a man riding a horse through it. Ohio has only one other Prairie Township, in Holmes County, in the state's hill country, which underscores how distinctive this stretch of flat, grass-covered ground was on the west side of Franklin County.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, "native": { "text": "Before settlement, Shawnee and Wyandot people hunted game and fished in the township's streams, especially Darby Creek and a smaller stream called Hell Branch, according to the Southwest Franklin County Historical Society. One compiled list of historic Ohio Indian villages places a Huron (Wyandot) village on the upper reaches of Darby Creek, roughly midway between present-day Columbus and Marysville — north and west of the township, in the same Darby Creek watershed the township's earliest settlers used. No source found names a specific mound, camp, burial site, or trail within Prairie Township's own boundaries, and the township's 1880 and 1858 county history chapters, which describe its first settler families in some detail, do not mention Native people at all. See the Franklin County file for the fuller county-level record of nations, treaties and removal.", "peoples": [ "Shawnee", "Wyandot" ], "sites": [ { "name": "Huron (Wyandot) village on upper Darby Creek", "type": "village", "where": "upper Darby Creek, roughly midway between present Columbus and Marysville", "period": "before Ohio settlement", "source": "https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-villages-towns-and-settlements-of-ohio.htm", "source_host": "accessgenealogy.com" } ], "sources": [ "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-villages-towns-and-settlements-of-ohio.htm" ] }, "timeline": [ { "year": "c. 1800", "event": "Samuel Higgins, Shadrick Postle and William Mannon are among the first settlers of the area that became Prairie Township.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "datetime": "1800", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, { "year": "1806", "event": "Joseph Hickman, a Virginia-born Revolutionary War soldier, comes to Ohio and settles first at Franklinton before later moving into Prairie Township.", "source": "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm", "datetime": "1806", "source_host": "ohiogenealogyexpress.com" }, { "year": "1813", "event": "Henry and Katharine Clover, with their fourteen children, settle in the northern part of the township, founding what becomes known as the Clover Settlement.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "datetime": "1813", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, { "year": "1817", "event": "Peter Clover, son of Henry and Katharine, opens the township's first school, in a small log building on the family farm, teaching about twenty pupils.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "datetime": "1817", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, { "year": "1819", "event": "The township is organized under the name Prairie; its bounds then extend farther north than today, taking in a considerable part of what later becomes Brown Township.", "source": "https://www.genealogybug.net/franklin_1858/prairie.htm", "datetime": "1819", "source_host": "genealogybug.net" }, { "year": "1832", "event": "Adam Gantz, whose father Andrew had bought land in the area in 1817, builds the brick farmhouse later known as the Gantz Homestead, in the Grove City area.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz_Homestead", "datetime": "1832", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "1836", "event": "Thomas Graham plats the village of Alton along the newly built National Road; the Alton House becomes the township's first tavern and hotel.", "source": "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm", "datetime": "1836", "source_host": "ohiogenealogyexpress.com" }, { "year": "1836", "event": "James Bryden and Adam Brotherlin plat the village of Rome, later renamed New Rome, with 64 lots.", "source": "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm", "datetime": "1836", "source_host": "ohiogenealogyexpress.com" }, { "year": "1848", "event": "The vernacular farmhouse later known as the Samuel Landes House is built on what is now Hibbs Road, near Georgesville.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Landes_House", "datetime": "1848", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "1861", "event": "Samuel and Jean Galloway found the village of Galloway; a railroad station follows by 1872.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio", "datetime": "1861", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "1941", "event": "New Rome incorporates as a village.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio", "datetime": "1941", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "1950-1953", "event": "Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (later Nationwide) develops Lincoln Village, a planned community on 1,120 acres in the township's east end.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio", "datetime": "1950", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "year": "2003-2004", "event": "Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro sues to dissolve New Rome over its speed-trap policing and financial corruption; a judge orders dissolution, and on September 9, 2004 the former village is absorbed into Prairie Township.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio", "datetime": "2003", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" } ], "stories": [ { "title": "The Clover Settlement", "text": "Henry and Katharine Clover arrived from Virginia in 1813 with fourteen children and put down roots in the northern part of the township, in a cluster of farms that became known simply as the Clover Settlement. Their children scattered into very different lives: Peter became the township's first schoolmaster, teaching about twenty children in a small log building on the family farm from 1817, and later served as a justice of the peace; Solomon became locally known as a skilled hunter in the years when deer and other game were still plentiful along Darby Creek; Philip left farming altogether and became a house painter in Columbus. A single large family, in other words, supplied the township's first teacher, one of its first law officers, and one of its links to the growing capital a few miles east.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, { "title": "Grass Tall Enough to Hide a Rider", "text": "Before drainage ditches and plows changed it, much of Prairie Township was exactly what its name says: a stretch of level, poorly-drained ground in the Darby Creek watershed covered in tall native grass rather than the forest that covered most of the rest of Franklin County. Local tradition, recorded by the Southwest Franklin County Historical Society, held that the grass grew tall enough to hide all but the head of a man riding through it on horseback — an image early settlers used to describe just how different this corner of the county looked from the timbered land around it. Shawnee and Wyandot hunters had used the same grassland and the streams running through it, Darby Creek and Hell Branch, for hunting and fishing before settlement began.", "source": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "source_host": "swfchs.org" }, { "title": "The Gantz Farmhouse", "text": "Andrew Gantz, a Pennsylvania emigrant, bought 200 acres near what is now the corner of Hoover and Home roads in 1817. His son Adam, born in 1805, married Catherine Pennix in 1830 and two years later bought land across Hoover Road, where he built a brick farmhouse — the clay dug and molded into bricks on site, dried in the sun, and fired in a scove kiln, with a center beam hewn from local timber and plaster mixed from lime and animal hair. The house stayed in Gantz hands for five generations, until Blodwen Jones Gantz, widow of Adam's grandson William, arranged in 1973 to donate the surrounding land to Grove City as a public park. The farmhouse, now within Gantz Park, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz_Homestead", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "title": "America's No. 1 Speed Trap", "text": "New Rome was platted in 1836 and stayed a small crossroads village on West Broad Street for more than a century. It found national notoriety instead through its police force: with a population of about 60, the village fielded as many as fifteen part-time officers who wrote citations at a spot where the speed limit dropped abruptly from 45 to 35 miles an hour, bringing in close to $400,000 a year — enough that Car and Driver magazine in 2003 called it 'a chickenshit town, a little police state.' Ohio's own transportation department found the signage violated state guidelines. Behind the tickets, the state auditor later found roughly $120,000 embezzled over a decade, falsified court records, and a council that simply reappointed the same mayor year after year without holding an election between 1995 and 2002 — and then refused to recognize a reform candidate who did win one. Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro sued to dissolve the village outright; a judge agreed in 2004 that 'the body is already dead,' and on September 9, 2004, New Rome ceased to exist, its streets and the businesses still standing along them absorbed into Prairie Township.", "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio", "source_host": "en.wikipedia.org" } ], "photos": [ { "page": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1842_Map_of_Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio_-_DPLA_-_801d66560327522c3df4ccda103e7b67.jpg", "file": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/1842_Map_of_Prairie_Township%2C_Franklin_County%2C_Ohio_-_DPLA_-_801d66560327522c3df4ccda103e7b67.jpg", "caption": "Property-ownership plat map of Prairie Township, Franklin County, Ohio, 1842, by E. F. Wheeler of Columbus.", "credit": "E. F. Wheeler; Columbus Metropolitan Library, via Digital Public Library of America", "license": "public domain", "year": "1842", "basis": "published 1842, well before 1930; Commons item marked public domain", "thumb_url": "/history/photos/T64570-FRA_0.jpg", "w": 4854, "h": 4666, "license_url": null, "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" }, { "page": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broad_Street_in_New_Rome.jpg", "file": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Broad_Street_in_New_Rome.jpg", "caption": "Businesses on the north side of Broad Street (U.S. Route 40) in the former village of New Rome, photographed in 2016, a decade after its 2004 dissolution into Prairie Township.", "credit": "Nyttend", "license": "public domain", "year": "2016", "basis": "photographer's own work released to the public domain", "thumb_url": "/history/photos/T64570-FRA_1.jpg", "w": 6016, "h": 4000, "license_url": null, "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" }, { "page": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Rome_houses_on_West_Street.jpg", "file": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/New_Rome_houses_on_West_Street.jpg", "caption": "Houses on West Street in the former village of New Rome, photographed in 2016.", "credit": "Nyttend", "license": "public domain", "year": "2016", "basis": "photographer's own work released to the public domain", "thumb_url": "/history/photos/T64570-FRA_2.jpg", "w": 6016, "h": 4000, "license_url": null, "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" }, { "page": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grant,_A.G._Homestead.jpg", "file": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Grant%2C_A.G._Homestead.jpg", "caption": "The A. G. Grant Homestead, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.", "credit": "Grovetucky", "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "year": "2018", "basis": "Commons license tag (CC BY-SA 4.0)", "thumb_url": "/history/photos/T64570-FRA_3.jpg", "w": 5184, "h": 3888, "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/", "host": "commons.wikimedia.org" } ], "sources": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio", "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "https://www.genealogybug.net/franklin_1858/prairie.htm", "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm", "https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-villages-towns-and-settlements-of-ohio.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz_Homestead", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Landes_House", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio" ], "gaps": "Could not identify what the GNIS historical place names 'Deems' and 'Sullivants' (both ZIP 43228) specifically were, beyond the strong likelihood that 'Sullivants' recalls the Sullivant family, who held large landholdings on Franklin County's west side from Lucas Sullivant's 1797 founding of Franklinton onward. Could not confirm that the Gantz Homestead and A. G. Grant Homestead, both associated with the 43123 (Grove City) ZIP code, sit inside Prairie Township's own boundary rather than a neighboring township with a Grove City mailing address; they are presented here on that ZIP association. No Native American site was found specifically inside the township's boundaries; see native.text.", "confidence": "medium", "researched": "2026-09-10", "model": "sonnet", "founded_line": "Settled c. 1800, incorporated 1819, by organized under its present name; bounds then extended farther north into present-day Brown Township.", "wikipedia": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio", "sources_h": [ { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "url": "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township", "host": "swfchs.org" }, { "url": "https://www.genealogybug.net/franklin_1858/prairie.htm", "host": "genealogybug.net" }, { "url": "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm", "host": "ohiogenealogyexpress.com" }, { "url": "https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-villages-towns-and-settlements-of-ohio.htm", "host": "accessgenealogy.com" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz_Homestead", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Landes_House", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio", "host": "en.wikipedia.org" } ] }, "links": [ [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Township,_Franklin_County,_Ohio" ], [ "swfchs.org", "https://www.swfchs.org/prairie-township" ], [ "genealogybug.net", "https://www.genealogybug.net/franklin_1858/prairie.htm" ], [ "ohiogenealogyexpress.com", "https://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/franklin/franklinco_hist_1880/franklinco_hist_1880_382_twp_prairie.htm" ], [ "accessgenealogy.com", "https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-villages-towns-and-settlements-of-ohio.htm" ], [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz_Homestead" ], [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Landes_House" ], [ "en.wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio" ] ], "generated": "2026-09-16", "license": "CC BY 4.0 for the compilation; each source keeps its own terms", "cite": "Cracked Buckeye (Open Shower Co), \"Prairie Township, Franklin County\", https://crackedbuckeye.com/place/prairie-township-franklin-county/, built 2026-09-16, accessed [date].", "schema": "https://crackedbuckeye.com/api/schema.json" }