Atwater Township, Portage County

How Atwater Township, Portage County began

Atwater Township, the only Atwater Township in Ohio, was laid off as Town 1, Range 7 of the Connecticut Western Reserve and fell to proprietor Capt. Caleb Atwater, who gave it to his son Joshua but never settled it himself. Asa Hall and his wife, who arrived with Atwater's exploring party in April 1799 and stayed on alone, were the township's only residents until 1801; their son, named Atwater in the proprietor's honor, was born in 1800 and is remembered as the first white child born in Portage County. The township grew into a center of stoneware and pottery manufacture in the 19th century and coal mining in the 20th, and its Congregational Church, organized in 1818, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today it has 2,564 residents (2020).

Settled 1799 (Asa Hall and wife, first and only residents until 1801), by Capt. Caleb Atwater (Connecticut Land Company proprietor, did not settle personally); Asa Hall (first actual settler).

Where the name comes from

Named for Capt. Caleb Atwater, a Wallingford, Connecticut lawyer and an original proprietor of the Connecticut Western Reserve, who drew this township (and parts of others) at the land company's division and gave it to his only son, Joshua Atwater.

Before the town

No Native American village, camp or mound site specific to Atwater Township is documented in the sources consulted, and the township is not among those the 1957 county history 'Portage Heritage' lists as holding recorded prehistoric sites. For the county's broader Native history.

Timeline

1. April 1799 — Capt. Caleb Atwater, with Jonathan Merrick, Peter Bunnell, Asahel Blakesley, and Asa Hall and his wife, arrive from Wallingford, Connecticut; all but the Halls return east that fall, leaving Asa Hall and wife the township's only white residents.
2. 1800 — A son is born to Asa and Mrs. Hall and named Atwater in the proprietor's honor; it is recorded as the first white birth in Portage County.
3. 1801 — David Baldwin Jr. arrives from Wallingford, Connecticut on June 20 and settles two miles south of the Center as Caleb Atwater's land agent; for the next three years the Baldwin and Hall families are the township's only residents, living five miles apart.
4. 1805 — Deacon Joshua Atwater, the proprietor's son and the township's namesake landholder, rides in from Connecticut on horseback for his first visit to the land his father had given him.
5. 1815 — The township holds its first organizational election, April 3, at the store of Elkanah Morse, choosing Ira Morse as Justice of the Peace and David Baldwin Jr. as Treasurer, an office he would hold for 21 years.
6. 1818 — Eleven settlers, including Deacon Jonathan Baldwin and John H. Whittlesey and their wives, organize into a Congregational church at the house of Sylvester Baldwin on March 20; the congregation's present church building, dedicated November 7, 1841, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
7. 1850 — Amelia Folsom, later a wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, settles as a child at Atwater Station with her Mormon parents before the family leaves for Nauvoo, Illinois.
8. 1871 — The Atwater Stone-ware Company and the Atwater Coal Company both organize; an explosion in the coal company's mine soon after kills ten men and the mine is later closed.
9. 1973 — The Atwater Congregational Church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, February 23 (#73001517).

Stories

The proprietor who never stayed, and the couple who did

In April 1799, Capt. Caleb Atwater led a small party out of Wallingford, Connecticut to see the township the Connecticut Land Company had awarded him: Jonathan Merrick, Peter Bunnell, Asahel Blakesley, and Asa Hall, who brought his wife. They put up a cabin and stayed through the summer, but by fall everyone except the Halls had turned back east, leaving Asa and his wife the only white residents in a township that would one day carry Atwater's name, though Atwater himself never lived there. Soon after their arrival, the party's horses broke loose into the forest; Jonathan Merrick spent three days lost trying to find them, reaching the Mahoning River before finally stumbling back into camp, exhausted and given up for dead by companions who feared he had been taken by wild animals or a roving band of Native people. In 1800 the Halls had a child, a first for white settlers anywhere in Portage County, and named the baby Atwater in honor of the absent proprietor. Caleb Atwater instead passed the land to his only son, Joshua, who did not make his own first visit until 1805, riding out from Connecticut on horseback to see, at last, the place that bore his family's name.

Stoneware, coal, and a mine disaster

By the 1870s Atwater's economy had turned from farming alone to industry built on the clay and coal beneath it. The Atwater Stone-ware Company's Works, founded by Pardee & Loomis, organized as a $50,000 company in February 1871 and, after a period in liquidation, was bought and revived by George Stroup; by the mid-1880s it employed ten men making stoneware and tile sold across the eastern and western states. The Atwater Coal Company organized the same year with $300,000 in capital to mine and sell coal and build railroads, but the promise of the enterprise was cut short by tragedy: an explosion in its mine, not long after the works opened, killed ten men, and the mine was shut down for good afterward. A separate coal bank continued operating on the Spires family's land into the 1880s, alongside a pottery works making some 6,000 gallons of stoneware weekly, a reminder of how quickly a farming township on the Connecticut Western Reserve could be reshaped by what lay under its fields.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Portage County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Spring Lakes Mobile Home Park92% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• All Seasons MHP8% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (3)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-12-30

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