Big Spring Township, Seneca County

How Big Spring Township, Seneca County began

Big Spring Township, organized in 1833 and named for a creek in its southwestern corner, is the only township of that name in Ohio and covers 36.4 square miles in Seneca County's southwestern corner, bordering Wyandot and Hancock counties. It contains the village of New Riegel in its eastern portion, founded by German immigrant Anton Schindler and platted in 1850, and the unincorporated communities of Alvada, which has held a post office since 1877, and Adrian and Springville. The township's history is largely that of its constituent villages and hamlets, tied to German Catholic settlement in its eastern half.

Incorporated 1833 (organized), by organized by Seneca County.

Where the name comes from

Named for a large spring/creek in the township's southwestern part; it is the only Big Spring Township in Ohio.

Before the town

No Native American village, mound, trail, or treaty site specific to Big Spring Township is documented in the sources checked. Seneca County's historic-era Native history includes the Seneca reservation, which lay well to the east of this township, and the 1831 removal.

Timeline

1. 1833-03-06 — Big Spring Township is organized, named for a spring/creek in its southwestern part; Lang's county history gives the exact organization date as March 6, 1833.
2. 1833-04-04 — The township's first election is held, choosing Cornelius Bogart and Richard Reynolds trustees, William Brayton clerk, Hugh Mulholland treasurer, and Austin Knowlton constable; Lang, writing in 1880, notes Knowlton was still living.
3. 1833-1842 — Lang's history records that the township's first settlers were American-born with no German family among them, and that a large wave of German and French families arrived in this decade, including Anthony (Anton) Schindler, who bought land in section twelve and platted a town named for his native town in Germany.
4. 1834 — David Risdon surveys the town of Springville for proprietors Benjamin and John Jenkins; the town, built around a once-powerful spring that formed a small lake, never grew much.
5. 1844-02-17 — R. M. Shoemaker surveys the town of Oregon, later renamed Adrian, on sections 35 and 36 along the Mad River & Lake Erie Railroad (later the Cleveland, Sandusky & Cincinnati) for proprietors Erastus H. Cook and D. C. Henderson; early settlers named are Eli Gehr, Adam Vetter, John Gantz and Charles Foster.
6. 1850 — Anton Schindler, a German immigrant whose land had earlier been known as Schindler and Wolf's Creek, subdivides it into 43 lots and names the new village New Riegel for his hometown of Riegel, Germany.
7. 1877 — A post office opens at Alvada, in the township's western half.
8. 1880 — New Riegel has grown to a settled village of about sixty in its Society of the Precious Blood convent alone, with a large brick Catholic church that Lang's history calls one of the largest and most beautiful in northern Ohio, founded under Father M. Sales Brunner, the order's founder and the village's first priest.

Stories

The stranger in Indian dress

In the spring of 1833, John Young hired a four-horse team near Canal Dover and spent three weeks reaching a homestead in the woods between Springville and New Reigel, where roughly half of Springville's few residents were Native people. There he met Jacob Gwyer, a man he had known back in Stark County, who offered to guide him to his land but stalled and was seen peering into the family's loaded wagon as if sizing up its contents. That night, camped in a hastily built pole-and-clapboard shanty the family nicknamed the "Grand Hotel de Young," their Newfoundland dog charged a man lurking in the dark; Young's horse was found loose and the family cow driven off before morning, and Young became convinced Gwyer had tried to set up a robbery. Gwyer later confessed as much. Years afterward, Gwyer was arrested near Bucyrus for murdering a man named Boyd, confessed to that killing along with other unsolved robberies including the attempt on Young, escaped custody with three horse thieves, was recaptured near Dayton, and cut his own throat with a knife while awaiting execution in jail.

The lost boy of 1825

Elijah Brayton, an early settler who had lived in Crawford County (then including present Wyandot County) before moving to Big Spring Township, lost his roughly eight-year-old son on September 20, 1825. The boy had been sent home alone along a familiar path while his older brother and a neighbor searched the woods for missing cattle, and was never seen again. When the search party returned and raised the alarm, the whole neighborhood turned out, including Native people from the area, and scoured the country without finding any trace of him. During that search, Neal McGaffey of Fort Ball, the county's first clerk of the court of common pleas, camped overnight with others on ground later included in the town of Risdon, now part of Fostoria.

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

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