Bearfield Township, Perry County

How Bearfield Township, Perry County began

Bearfield Township, in eastern Perry County on the Morgan County line, is one of the county's original townships, organized in 1818 and named, according to the 1902 county history, for the many bears found there early on; nine of its sections were taken in 1850 to help form Pleasant Township. James Black, who settled near the later Porterville before 1812, is usually named its first settler, and its farms sit on a four-foot coal seam, black-band iron ore and potter's clay that supported a stoneware pottery near McLuney from 1870. Its one old village is Porterville, laid out in 1848 on the ridge that divides the Muskingum and Hocking drainages, and its township historians claim James Moore of Bearfield built and ran the first portable steam sawmill. In the twentieth century the Sunday Creek Coal Company built the mining town of San Toy in the southeast of the township; it collapsed in the 1920s and voted itself out of existence in 1931.

Settled before 1812 (James Black); a claim of 1802 (Dusenberry, on Bear Run) is recorded but unconfirmed, platted 1848 (Porterville), incorporated 1818 (township organized), by James Black (first settler); John Porter (Porterville).

Where the name comes from

The 1902 county history says Bearfield was named for the numerous bears found there at an early date. The 1883 county history gives no origin for the name.

Before the town

The 1902 county history traces the Monongahela Trail, which it calls the principal Shawnee trail through the county, linking the Shawnee towns on the Scioto with the Monongahela Valley, up Wolf's Creek from the Muskingum to its source at Porterville on the Perry-Morgan boundary; from there it followed the divide westward across the county. The same history reports evidence of a trading post in the eastern part of Bearfield Township near the Morgan County line, where an eighteenth-century Spanish coin, bits of iron and vermilion, taken to be trade paint for Native customers, had been found a few years before 1902. No mound or village site is listed for Bearfield in the 1902 inventory of mounds.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee.

• Monongahela Trail at Porterville (trail) — up Wolf's Creek to its source at Porterville, Bearfield Township, then west along the divide, historic (1700s) (archive.org)
• Bearfield trading-post site (other) — eastern Bearfield Township near the Morgan County line (exact place not given), 18th century (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1812 — James Black, generally counted as Bearfield's first settler, is living near the later site of Porterville by this year.
2. 1815 — The father of Jacob Hearing settles as Black's neighbor; the Holcomb (Fletcher Chapel) Methodist class is probably organized about this year.
3. 1817 — Frank Harris probably builds the first mill in the township, on the South Fork, in land later transferred to Pleasant Township.
4. 1818 — Bearfield is organized as one of Perry County's original townships and holds its first election; Samuel Ogburn is probably the first justice of the peace.
5. 1820 — Robert Sandburn teaches school in the log schoolhouse of the Black neighborhood, after Abraham Striker and Samuel Younkin.
6. 1827 — An Associate Presbyterian society, later Goshen United Presbyterian Church, is formed by Rev. John Walker; it builds a church in 1839.
7. 1848 — John Porter lays out Porterville on the dividing ridge at the eastern edge of the township; a post office follows, with mail by horseback carrier from McConnelsville.
8. 1850 — Nine sections from the southwest corner of Bearfield are taken to form part of the new Pleasant Township.
9. 1870 — A stoneware pottery opens at the north edge of the township near McLuney, making about 700 gallons of ware a week, much of it first shipped to Maryland and Virginia.
10. 1880 — Bearfield Township's population is 997.
11. 1888 — Howe reports black-band iron ore mined a few miles south of McLuney Station, Bearfield Township, on the Whitlock farm, for the Moxahala furnace.
12. early 1900s — The Sunday Creek Coal Company establishes San Toy as a company mining town in southeastern Bearfield Township.
13. 1920 — San Toy's population is recorded at 976 at its coal-boom peak.
14. 1930 — San Toy's population has collapsed to 128, a decline so steep it is recorded as the largest per-capita population drop of any U.S. town in that decade.
15. 1931 — Seventeen of San Toy's nineteen registered voters vote to formally abandon the town.

Stories

A town that voted itself out of existence

San Toy was built by the Sunday Creek Coal Company in the early 1900s in the southeastern corner of Bearfield Township, and for a short time it was a real town: nearly a thousand residents by 1920, with the houses, stores and churches a coal company town needed. Then the coal ran out or the company pulled back, and the collapse was fast and total. In a single decade the population fell from 976 to 128, one of the steepest population losses of any town in the United States in the 1920s. By 1931 there were only nineteen registered voters left, and seventeen of them chose to dissolve the town outright rather than keep it going. Today around 50 people live in the area; foundations, old roads, and a road still called San Toy Road are what is left to mark where it stood.

The first portable steam sawmill

The 1883 county history credits James Moore of Bearfield Township with inventing and operating the first portable steam sawmill. Moore had an eight-horsepower sawmill and hired a Zanesville firm to build him a light engine to his own directions; he designed the attachments, set up the machinery himself, and ran the mill for eight or ten years with an interest held by his brother William. The historian wrote that it did its first work in Bearfield and that the well-known portable mills later built in Zanesville and shipped around the world all came after it. Before such mills, Bearfield farmers had ground their grain on a hand mill, like the one Levi Little kept on the site of Porterville, where a night's turning yielded about two bushels of corn, or rode to Zanesville leading a pack horse loaded with grain.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Crooksville46% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• New Lexington24% of residentsNew Lexington Reservoir(s) (Old & New Reservoir)
• Corning, Village Of13% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-hemlock6% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-buckingham4% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Portersville East Branch Water Co.3% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-congo3% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Southern Perry Co-mainesville2% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Oakdale Water District1% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Northern Perry Co.water #20% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)

High-hazard dams (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-07-22

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