Adams Township, Coshocton County

How Adams Township, Coshocton County began

Adams Township, in the far eastern corner of Coshocton County bordering Tuscarawas County, was carved out of Oxford and White Eyes townships and established in its present bounds by the county commissioners in 1832, one of ten Adams Townships in Ohio. Its earliest occupants were transient hunters and squatters before the War of 1812; permanent settlement, chiefly by families from Virginia and Pennsylvania, filled in through the 1820s. Its one recognized place, Bakersville, was laid out in 1848 by John Baker, whose father had brought the family west from Adams County, Pennsylvania, during the War of 1812. The township remains rural and sparsely settled, with 765 residents at the 2020 census.

Settled by 1815 (Mulford family cabin, pre-1812; permanent settlers Robert Corbit and Robert Addy by 1815-1818), incorporated 1832 (organizational election held June 23, 1832, at the house of Benjamin Headley), by organized by the Coshocton County commissioners out of territory earlier held by Oxford Township (from 1811) and White Eyes Township (from 1823).

Where the name comes from

No source, including the township's chapter in the 1881 Hill county history, states why the township was named Adams; Ohio has ten townships of that name. The history does record that one of the township's founding settlers, James Baker, brought his family from Adams County, Pennsylvania, during the War of 1812, but no source ties the township's name to that coincidence, so it is noted here only as unconfirmed.

Before the town

No Native American village stood in Adams Township; the 1881 county history states plainly that the Indian villages of Coshocton County were invariably in the valleys of the larger streams, and none of those crossed this township. It does record several smaller hunting encampments within the township's bounds: one, remembered by early settlers as three wigwams, stood in the southwest quarter of section 9 close by an open acre and a spring, where arrowheads, stone axes and a rusted gun barrel were later found; a second encampment of five wigwams stood near the mouth of Indian Camp Run. Deer licks scattered through the township were favorite hunting grounds for both the Indians who camped there and the earliest white hunters.

• Indian Camp Run encampment site (camp) — near the mouth of Indian Camp Run, Adams Township, pre-1812 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1810 — Coshocton County, of which Adams Township is a part, is formed from portions of Muskingum and Tuscarawas counties.
2. 1811 — Oxford Township is organized and its bounds embrace the territory that later becomes Adams Township.
3. 1804 — Robert Corbit, later one of the township's earliest permanent settlers, first comes from Hancock County, Maryland, to the Tuscarawas in Oxford Township; he returns after the War of 1812 service as a substitute for John Junkin and marries Susan Fuller in 1818.
4. before 1812 — A family named Mulford builds the first known cabin in the territory, on the southeast quarter of section 18; the squatters Murphy and Remembrance and Elijah Williams hunt here before moving west.
5. 1815-1816 — Robert Addy, from the Virginia banks of the Potomac, moves from Will's Creek in Linton Township to section 12; Enos Dean, Samuel Dean and John Norman settle the west of the township, and Dean names his hilltop cabin 'Mount Hope.'
6. 1818-1820 — Joshua and Benjamin Chance settle without owning land; Thomas Powell, an English merchant, enters the township about 1819 and later buys over a thousand acres.
7. 1823 — White Eyes Township is organized, taking the northwestern quarter of present Adams Township from Oxford.
8. c. 1820 — Jacob Meek, a Methodist farmer-preacher from Guernsey County, begins monthly meetings at the school-house or Robert McFarland's home, leading to the formation of the Taylor Methodist church.
9. c. 1825 — The first school-house in the township, a twenty-two-foot log cabin with puncheon floor and paper windows, is built on Robert Corbit's homestead; it is the only school in the township until 1832.
10. 1827-05 — S. H. Loveless and Archibald Leach, both from Jefferson County, enter the northwest quarter of section 10 together; settlers arrive rapidly about the time the Ohio canal is built.
11. c. 1828 — William Spencer holds Baptist meetings at the school-house, forming the nucleus of the later Baptist congregation.
12. 1831 — James Campbell, a Steubenville tailor, moves onto the Powell place near the center of the township.
13. 1832 — The county commissioners establish Adams Township in its present bounds; citizens meet at Benjamin Headley's house on June 23 to elect the first officers, including trustees Thomas Powell, Joshua Wood and Archibald Leach.
14. 1832 — The trustees divide the township into three school districts, soon increased to eight.
15. 1833-04-23 — The Presbyterian church at Bakersville is organized by the Rev. James Morrow of New Philadelphia, first meeting in a log church one mile south of the village.
16. 1834 — John Baker builds a sawmill on Evans Creek about a mile south of the future site of Bakersville.
17. c. 1836 — Dr. Kellis Hord, a talented but eccentric physician from Virginia, settles in the township.
18. 1837-1838 — George Werts builds a grist mill at the site of Bakersville, where he had put up a saw mill several years earlier.
19. c. 1840 — Joseph Duftee operates the only distillery known in the township, for only a few years.
20. 1843 — Wesley Chapel's Methodist society forms from members of the Evansburg congregation; its frame church at Powell's Cross Roads is built in 1860 for $2,000.
21. 1845 — The Bakersville Methodist Episcopal church is organized at the house of Thomas Hayes; the Evans Creek Regular Baptist church is also organized and lasts until 1865.
22. 1848 — John Baker lays out the village of Bakersville, the township's only village; Lane Baker surveys the plat.
23. c. 1850 — Dr. John Conoway, from Harrison County, becomes the first physician to settle at Bakersville.
24. 1861 — The Presbyterian church builds its present frame house in Bakersville.
25. 1875-02-07 — The Methodist church at Bakersville dedicates a new building put up in 1874.

Stories

A boyhood among the Indians, a village of his own

John Baker came to Adams Township as a child during the War of 1812, when his father James Baker brought the family from Adams County, Pennsylvania. As a young man Baker was, by his own account, extremely fond of the chase and spent much of his time with the Indians who still frequented the township, whom he considered among his best friends. He grew up to become one of the township's largest landowners, and in the spring of 1848 he laid out the village that took his name, Bakersville, on Evans Creek in the township's northeastern part, with Lane Baker surveying the plat. His father's War of 1812 sawmill on Evans Creek, built in 1834, stood about a mile south of the village he would go on to found.

A flask on the mantelpiece

Robert McFarland, a Virginian who entered the northeast quarter of section 19, was in his earlier days addicted to drink, as many frontiersmen were. He joined the Methodist church and gave up spirits entirely. According to the county history, he placed a tempting flask of whisky on the mantelpiece of his cabin in plain view, and it stayed there untouched until the day of his death, years afterward. Another settler, James Jones, a strictly temperate church-going man and an early justice of the peace, still treated his scholars to the customary holiday allowance of two gallons of whisky when he taught the school.

The doctor who burned his books

Dr. Kellis Hord moved to Adams Township about 1836 from Virginia, where he had lost three children to scarlet fever. In grief and disgust at his inability to save them, he threw his medical books into the fire and resolved never to practice again, and it was rarely that his services could be brought into requisition: only in a great emergency, such as a broken limb, and under urgent solicitation, would he apply his knowledge. He turned instead to mechanics. At Raccoon Spring, in the northern part of section 12, he built a tiny overshot water-wheel that powered a turning lathe, grafted fruit trees, and started a nursery above Bakersville. He moved on to Columbus and died at Cleveland while working on one of his inventions.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

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