Brush Creek Township, Highland County

How Brush Creek Township, Highland County began

Brushcreek Township occupies the southeastern corner of Highland County, Ohio, 43.4 square miles of hill country drained by Ohio Brush Creek. It holds the incorporated village of Sinking Spring, platted by Jacob Hiestand in 1815 around a losing stream that gave the place its name, and the unincorporated community of Carmel. The township's dominant landmark is Fort Hill, a 35-acre Hopewell hilltop earthwork enclosing a summit 500 feet above the creek, excavated and mapped by Squier and Davis in 1846. It remains rural and sparsely settled: 1,418 residents at the 2020 census, one incorporated village, farms, and a scatter of nineteenth-century houses and churches.

Where the name comes from

The township is named for Ohio Brush Creek, the stream that drains it; Wikipedia's township article notes it is "the only Brushcreek Township statewide," though Brush Creek Townships (two words) exist in Adams, Jefferson, Muskingum and Scioto counties. Sinking Spring, the township's one incorporated village, takes its own name from a "losing stream" (one that sinks underground) near the original townsite.

Before the town

The township's one substantial, site-specific Native American record is Fort Hill itself: a Hopewell-culture hilltop enclosure built roughly 2,000 years ago (Middle Woodland period, about 100 BC to AD 500), more than 1.5 miles in circumference, enclosing 35.3 acres on a summit about 500 feet above Ohio Brush Creek, with 36 confirmed constructed gateways and a second, harder-to-see earthwork (the Circle Mound/Circle Earthwork) nearby. Archaeologists read it as a ceremonial/gathering site rather than a defensive fort despite the name. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis surveyed and engraved it in 1846 for their 1848 'Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.' No source we found names a specific historic-era (1700s) Shawnee, Wyandot, or other nation village, camp, or trail within Brush Creek Township itself, and none of the sources consulted describes how the 1795 Treaty of Greenville line ran relative to this specific township.

Nations recorded here: Hopewell culture.

• Fort Hill (earthwork) — Brush Creek Township, on a hilltop above Ohio Brush Creek near Sinking Spring; now Fort Hill State Memorial / Fort Hill Earthworks & Nature Preserve, Middle Woodland, Hopewell culture, roughly 100 BC - AD 500 (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1815 — Jacob Hiestand plats the town of Sinking Spring in southeastern Brushcreek Township.
2. 1817 — A post office opens at Sinking Spring.
3. 1831 — The Octagonal Schoolhouse is built at Sinking Spring.
4. 1844 — Sinking Spring Methodist Church is built; it is later documented as the oldest church in Highland County still used as a church.
5. 1846 — Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis survey and excavate the Fort Hill earthwork, publishing their findings in 1848's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.
6. 1860 — Period of significance cited for the Eubanks-Tytus House, an Italianate house southeast of Hillsboro on State Route 41 in Brushcreek Township, later listed on the National Register.
7. 1937 — Historic American Buildings Survey photographer Eugene F. Schrand photographs the Octagonal Schoolhouse at Sinking Spring.
8. 1970 — Fort Hill State Memorial is added to the National Register of Historic Places; it is designated a National Natural Landmark four years later, in 1974.
9. 1979 — The Eubanks-Tytus House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

Fort Hill: a mountain-top enclosure, not a fort

On a summit some 500 feet above Ohio Brush Creek, Hopewell people built an earthen and stone wall over a mile and a half long, enclosing more than 35 acres of the flat hilltop and standing 6 to 15 feet high with dozens of gateways through it. Nineteenth-century surveyors who found it assumed it was a fortification and named it accordingly. When Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis mapped and excavated the site in 1846, their engraving of it became one of the plates in their landmark 1848 study of ancient American earthworks. Archaeologists now believe Fort Hill was not built for war at all, but as a ceremonial or gathering place for a Hopewell population that left no written record of why they raised such a wall. It stands today inside a 1,300-acre nature preserve managed by the Arc of Appalachia and the Ohio History Connection, one of the best-preserved hilltop enclosures in the state.

A schoolhouse built to a different shape

In 1831 the schoolhouse at Sinking Spring was built octagonal rather than the usual rectangle — an unusual choice for a rural Ohio school of the period. The building survived long enough to be documented in 1937 by Eugene F. Schrand for the federal Historic American Buildings Survey, and photographs from that survey are held at the Library of Congress and on Wikimedia Commons. It stands today as one of Sinking Spring's oldest surviving structures, alongside the 1844 Methodist church a few blocks away.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohiohistory.org · en.wikipedia.org · npgallery.nps.gov · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Highland County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Hillsboro City64% of residentsClear Creek (via Selph Road & Liberty Park Reservoirs)
• Highland County Water Company, Inc.22% of residentsSand-and-gravel aquifer wells (Ross/Highland Co. well fields; local wells)
• Peebles Public Water System10% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Adams County Regional Wd4% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)

Mounds and earthworks (1)

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.

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