Benton Township, Pike County

How Benton Township, Pike County began

Benton Township was organized by petition on March 7, 1842, carved from the eastern end of Mifflin Township. Its center, Morgantown, sits where the West Fork of Sunfish Creek meets Morgan's Fork, near Zane's Trace; a stone house there, used as an inn on the Trace, is dated by one 20th-century source to 1797 and by another to 1808. The Eager Inn, a National Register-listed building, stands within the township.

Incorporated March 7, 1842 (township organization), by carved from the eastern end of Mifflin Township by petition.

Where the name comes from

Not recorded.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or trail inside Benton Township is named in the 1884 History of the Lower Scioto Valley. Pike County's wider Native history includes the Scioto Valley Adena and Hopewell sites and the treaties.

Timeline

1. 1797 (also given as 1808) — A stone house near Morgantown, on Zane's Trace, was built and used as an inn; a 1958 county history gives both dates in different passages.
2. c. 1850 — One of the township's two grist-mills, on Morgan's Fork in the township's north, was first erected by John P. Dewey; the other, on Sunfish Creek in the extreme south, was owned by a Mr. Brammer.
3. 1850 — The census counts 639 people in the township, rising to 811 in 1860, 1,119 in 1870 and 1,474 in 1880, a steady growth the county historian says matched any township's despite its rugged surface.
4. 1875 — Morgantown's Methodist Episcopal Church, a new organization, was formed by Rev. Z. D. Hickman with a class of thirty members, and a church built the same year.
5. 1879 — The Christian Church at Morgantown is organized by Rev. Mr. Watts with twelve members and builds its own church; a Christian Union congregation is organized the same year in school district No. 7 by Rev. Shoemaker with fifteen members and grows to thirty, meeting in the Bond schoolhouse.
6. 1882 — Another Christian Union church is organized by Rev. Jacob Anderson with twenty members, four and a half miles northwest of Morgantown, and builds a neat meeting-house in 1883; land in the township is valued at $145,843 for taxation, about $6 an acre.
7. 1884 — Benton Township has seven school districts, including a colored school with 58 scholars and a joint district with Pebble Township; Morgantown has about seventy-five people, a general store kept by Marhoover and Eager, and a portable sawmill in use for some fifteen years.
8. 1888 — The hamlet of Idaho, in the Sunfish Valley, cornered within the surveyed limits of all four townships that meet there: Pebble, Benton, Sunfish, and Newton.
9. 2020 — The census counts 1,583 people in Benton Township.
10. March 7, 1842 — Benton Township was organized by petition from residents of the east end of Mifflin Township; the new township's inhabitants were directed to meet at the house of John Moore to elect its first officers.

Stories

Drawing a township along the ridges

The 1884 county history describes Benton as irregular in form, following ridges as its dividing lines without much regard to section or township lines, a rocky, hilly country of 24,562 acres, the third largest township in Pike County. When its inhabitants petitioned the commissioners on March 7, 1842 to be set off from the east end of Mifflin Township, the petition described the bounds line by line: from the point where the Mifflin line crosses the road from Piketon to Hillsborough, near Richard Rittenhouse's, east along the original lines to the Ross County line, then along the ridge between Morgan's Fork of Sunfish and Kincaid's Fork 'including Peter Brant, Jr., John Barton and William Magafech' so as to strike Enoch P. Brant's improvement, and due south along the ridge between Main Sunfish and Chenoweth's Fork. The auditor told the new township's inhabitants to meet at John Moore's house on the first Monday of April to elect their officers. The township's wealth, the historian says, was its timber and the famous Waverly stone, and the township records have since been lost.

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

Every historic place in Pike County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Waverly City28% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Piketon Village18% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Pike Water, Inc.-plant14% of residentsTeays Valley Buried Valley Aquifer (wells near Jasper)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc13% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Peebles Public Water System10% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Bainbridge Village7% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Adams County Regional Wd5% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Aqua Ohio - Lake White4% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Dawsons Mobile Home Park0% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

High-hazard dams (1)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Public libraries (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Money issues on the ballot since 2021: 1 of 1 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 2025-11-06

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