Bloomfield Township, Trumbull County

How Bloomfield Township, Trumbull County began

Bloomfield Township, one of three Bloomfield Townships in Ohio (the others in Jackson and Logan counties), centers on the unincorporated community of North Bloomfield and its New England-style town green, flanked by a Methodist church and an 1893 township hall. It was settled from 1815 on land that Ephraim Brown and Thomas Howe bought in 1814, organized in 1816, and has three National Register listings: the Charles Brown Gothic Cottage (1975), the Brown-Wing House (1975) and Brownwood farmhouse (1971), all on or near State Route 45. Brownwood is the Brown family homestead, rebuilt in brick in 1820.

Settled 1815, incorporated 1816 (organized), by Ephraim Brown and Thomas Howe, proprietors from 1814; Lyman Perry of Brookfield, first settler.

Where the name comes from

The township was first called West Moreland, a name Ephraim Brown gave it for his home town of West Moreland, New Hampshire, when S. E. Ensign of Mesopotamia surveyed and divided it for Brown and Thomas Howe; why it later became Bloomfield is not recorded; it is one of three Bloomfield Townships in Ohio.

Before the town

No Native village, camp or treaty event specific to Bloomfield Township is recorded. The township lies in northeastern Trumbull County within the wider region the county's 1882 history describes as Delaware-occupied hunting ground used seasonally by Seneca and Mingo bands through the 1700s, but no site inside the township's present boundaries is named.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Seneca, Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga).

Timeline

1. 1814 — Peter Chardon Brooks of Boston, owner of the land, sells it to Ephraim Brown of West Moreland, New Hampshire, and his uncle Thomas Howe of Williamstown, Vermont; S. E. Ensign of Mesopotamia surveys the township for them and calls it West Moreland.
2. 1815 — Lyman Perry of Brookfield reaches the township after six weeks' travel, the first settler, and spends the winter in a cabin with a hole in the roof for a chimney; his wife is the first white woman in the township. Ephraim Brown's log house is built the same year.
3. 1816 — Bloomfield is organized and the first township officers are elected at Ephraim Brown's house; Aaron Smith builds the first frame building and Jared Kimball is the first justice of the peace.
4. 1817 — Thomas Howe moves his wife and five children to Bloomfield; Chester Howard teaches the first school that winter in a log schoolhouse on the Perry farm, and Rev. Ira Eddy organizes a Methodist class of seventeen the next year.
5. 1820 — Ephraim Brown's log house of 1815 is rebuilt as a handsome brick home with bricks brought from Warren, the house that still stands and, with its blue-and-white wallpaper, is kept as it was; it is a station on the Underground Railroad.
6. 1821 — Rev. Giles H. Cole organizes the Presbyterian church (later Congregational) with four or five charter members, which has twenty-eight members by 1830.
7. 1835 — The Methodists and Congregationalists build a joint church; it burns in 1852 and the two groups build the present church together five years later.
8. 1849 — The Disciples, organized in 1832 under Rev. Marcus Bosworth, build their church at the center under their first pastor, Isaac Errett; one passage of the county history dates the building 1849 and its cost $1,600.
9. 1860 — George W. Andrews and his wife, both Oberlin graduates, begin a private school in Bloomfield that draws pupils from neighboring townships and as far as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Massillon, and lasts five or six years.
10. 1869 — Joseph K. Wing, Bloomfield merchant and Civil War officer brevetted lieutenant colonel, is elected to the Ohio legislature, and again in 1871.
11. 1893 — The township hall on the North Bloomfield town green, still standing today, is built.
12. 1909 — The Bloomfield schools are centralized, with no district schools left, and Miss Anne Brown, last of Ephraim Brown's children living in the township, lives on in the old homestead.
13. 1971-09-03 — Brownwood, a farmhouse on State Route 45 in North Bloomfield, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
14. 1975-05-28 — The Charles Brown Gothic Cottage, on State Route 45 south of North Bloomfield, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
15. 1975-06-20 — The Brown-Wing House, on Park West Road in North Bloomfield, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
16. 2020 — The census records 1,249 residents in Bloomfield Township, centered on North Bloomfield.

Stories

Three National Register listings at North Bloomfield

North Bloomfield's built-up center is a town green and a short stretch of State Route 45, and that stretch carries three National Register listings: Brownwood, a farmhouse listed in 1971, and the Charles Brown Gothic Cottage and Brown-Wing House, both listed in 1975. The green keeps the New England-town layout common across the old Western Reserve, its eastern side lined by a Methodist church and the township hall, built in 1893 and still the seat of local government. The Brown family were the township's proprietors from 1814, when Ephraim Brown bought the land with Thomas Howe, and Joseph K. Wing, who came in 1831, married Brown's eldest daughter Mary.

The house on the divide

Ephraim Brown and Thomas Howe set out in 1814 meaning to take land near Cleveland, but found the Cuyahoga and the lake shore dreary and chose Bloomfield instead. Brown's log house of 1815 was rebuilt in 1820 as a brick home with bricks brought from Warren, and in 1909 the guest-room walls still held the delft-blue-and-white paper hung eighty-two years before, put up in squares before wallpaper came in rolls. Brown sat in both houses of the Ohio legislature, and his home was one of the stations of the Underground Railroad, where abolition and politics were talked and Joshua R. Giddings was a frequent guest. The last of his children living in the township, Anne F. Brown, could see from her library window the watershed just east of the house, where water to the north runs to Lake Erie and to the south to the Ohio. She had been taught by her mother, who read aloud to the children before breakfast, and kept every number of the Woman's Journal from its start, which she gave to Oberlin College.

Argus, the dog who would not be stolen

The Bloomfield pioneers of 1815 brought a dog named Argus, who somewhere in New York state either tired of the trip, was dissatisfied, or was stolen. Months later Thomas Howe, passing through the same place, saw the dog and claimed him. The landlord who had him said he had raised the animal from a pup. Howe ordered Argus into his cutter, told him to watch it, and dared the landlord to take anything out of it; the dog stood guard and let no one come near, and went on with his master.

Photographs

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

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