Alexander Township, Athens County

How Alexander Township, Athens County began

Alexander Township was one of the four original townships into which Athens County was first divided, surveyed in 1795 as one of the two 'college townships' endowing Ohio University and, for years, familiarly called 'Southtown' because it lay south of Athens. Its earliest documented residents date to 1798-99, including the Armstrong, Brooks, Bobo and Haning families; a wave of settlers from Washington and Greene counties, Pennsylvania, followed in the 1830s. Hebbardsville, in the western part of the township, takes its name from the Rev. Ebenezer Hibbard, who settled there in 1831; Pleasanton, on the road between Athens and Pomeroy, grew from a single house built by Simon Pierce about 1817. The township is home to the unincorporated community of Pleasanton and a small part of the village of Albany, shared with Lee Township.

Settled 1798-99 (Thomas Armstrong and family among the first arrivals), incorporated 1795 (located and surveyed as one of the county's original four townships and one of its two college townships), by Ohio Company/Ohio University college-lands survey, 1795; earliest trustees (after township records were destroyed by an 1827-28 house fire) were Caleb Merritt, John Brooks and Thomas Sharp.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted gives a documented origin for the township's name; it was for a long time familiarly called 'Southtown' because, as one of the two Ohio University 'college townships,' it lay immediately south of Athens Township.

Before the town

No source consulted documents a Native American village, mound, trail or treaty boundary specific to Alexander Township. The township lies in the same Hocking Valley/southeastern Ohio hill country where Adena and Hopewell mound-building activity is documented elsewhere in the county (see Athens Township's Plains mounds) and where the Shawnee were the predominant historic-era nation; nothing site-specific to Alexander Township itself was found.

Timeline

1. 1795 — Alexander Township is located and surveyed as one of Athens County's original four townships and, with Athens Township, one of the two 'college townships' whose lease income was to support Ohio University.
2. 1799-03 — Thomas Armstrong and his wife Alice, with a three-month-old child and the Charles Harper family, float down the Monongahela and Ohio rivers by flatboat and pirogue to the mouth of the Hockhocking, then travel overland to settle in Alexander Township — one of the township's first documented pioneer families.
3. 1805 — The Hocking Valley history says the Brooks, Bobo, Thompson, Armstrong, Merritt, Sharp and other families named among the early settlers had all come 'as early as 1805.'
4. 1817 (about) — Simon Pierce builds the first house at what becomes Pleasanton, on the road between Athens and Pomeroy.
5. 1827 or 1828 — A fire at John McKee's house destroys the township's early records; the first trustees are afterward remembered as Caleb Merritt, John Brooks and Thomas Sharp.
6. 1829 — The township's earliest surviving trustees list begins this year (Ziba Lindley Sr., Samuel McKee, N. Misner) after the older records were lost in the McKee house fire of about 1828; Caleb Merritt was the first justice of the peace.
7. 1831 — The Rev. Ebenezer Hibbard, a Vermont-born minister of forty years, settles at the site that becomes Hebbardsville, giving the village his name in slightly altered form.
8. 1832 — Abram and Jacob McVey and a large wave of families from Washington and Greene counties, Pennsylvania, settle mostly in Alexander Township.
9. 1832 — The First Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Alexander Township is organized October 10 at a camp-meeting on Ziba Lindley's farm, with six elders chosen and about fifty original members; it still had 130 members in 1883.
10. 1851 — A post office is established at Pleasanton.
11. 1869 — McKendree's Methodist Episcopal church is built at Pleasanton, then a village of nearly 100 people.
12. 1880 — A post office called Woodyard's is established in the extreme south of the township.
13. 1883 — The township has nine churches (three Baptist, three Methodist Episcopal, two Methodist Protestant and one Cumberland Presbyterian) and no saloons.

Stories

Sixty-five bears and a barrel of whiskey

Jeremiah Clements and Israel Bobo, noted hunters in the township's early years, once killed sixty-five bears in a single season in the neighborhood that became the town of Hebbardsville. Fond of whiskey and wanting a supply, the two men loaded a horse with bearskins and rode to the Ohio River to trade for a barrel of it — then faced the problem of hauling a full barrel back through trackless woods. They cut two poles from the forest, rigged them into a drag with the barrel lashed between, and dragged their prize home behind the horse: by local memory, the first barrel of whiskey ever brought into Alexander Township. Its use afterward became, in the county historian's dry phrase, 'common and greatly the fashion,' though by 1869 no place in the township sold it at all.

The Armstrongs' journey and the apple tree that outlived them

Thomas Armstrong and his wife Alice — daughter of Revolutionary War veteran Col. William Crawford — left Pennsylvania in March 1799 with a three-month-old child, forty young apple trees, and the Charles Harper family, floating down the Monongahela and Ohio by flatboat before poling up the Hockhocking to Athens and continuing overland to Alexander Township, since no road yet existed. They lived on hunted meat and wore clothing from the skins of the game the men brought in. One of the forty apple trees Armstrong carried in was planted that year on the family's new farm; seventy years later, in 1869, the tree was still bearing a good annual crop and measured over seven and a half feet around, tended by Armstrong's youngest son Elmer on the same land his father had settled.

A township that once held eleven

When Athens County was organized in 1805 Alexander Township was one of the four townships into which it was divided, but it was far larger than today's. The 1883 Hocking Valley history says it originally took in the land of eleven present townships: Bedford, Scipio and Columbia in Meigs County; Vinton, Clinton, Elk, Madison and Knox in Vinton County; and Lee, Lodi and Alexander in Athens County. It was as large as Ames Township and twice the size of Athens. Located and surveyed in 1795 as one of the two 'college townships' (with Athens) that supported Ohio University, it was long called 'South Town.' By 1883 it was a congressional township in the south tier of sections, hilly, and given over to stock-raising and wool-growing.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Athens76% of residentsHocking River Valley aquifer (wells)
• Albany Village18% of residentsHocking River Valley aquifer (horizontal collector wells)
• Leading Creek Conservancy District4% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Sunday Creek Valley Water1% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Le-ax Regional Water District1% of residentsHocking River Valley aquifer (horizontal collector wells)
• Zaleski Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Athens Co., the Plains S.d. 10% of residentsHocking River Valley aquifer (wells)

High-hazard dams (2)

Public schools (2)

Shale and injection wells (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Money issues on the ballot since 2022: 2 of 2 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-07-15

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