Brush Creek Township, Jefferson County

How Brush Creek Township, Jefferson County began

Brush Creek Township has an unusually mobile administrative history: when Columbiana County split off from Jefferson County on March 20, 1803, most of the land that would become Brush Creek Township fell inside Columbiana's new boundary, and it did not return to Jefferson County until a legislative redistricting act on December 5, 1832. Jefferson County Commissioners then formally organized the returned territory as Brush Creek Township on March 5, 1833, detaching a tier of sections from the north side of Ross Township and naming the new township for the principal stream running through it. Settlers including Cyrus Moore (arrived 1816), Kenneth McLennan (established after his father's 1834 death) and Scottish immigrant John C. McIntosh built farms here, and the township's only named village, Monroeville, anchored a rural community of farming, stock dealing, milling and droving.

Settled 1816 (Cyrus Moore), platted not applicable (township, not platted as a town), incorporated March 5, 1833, by Jefferson County Commissioners, from Ross Township.

Where the name comes from

Named for Brush Creek, the principal stream passing through the township.

Before the town

No source reviewed records a specific Native American village, mound or documented encounter within Brush Creek Township. The township's land was already open to settlement under the Treaty of Greenville (1795) by the time its first documented settler, Cyrus Moore, arrived in 1816.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Wyandot.

Timeline

1. 1803 — Columbiana County splits from Jefferson County on March 20, taking most of the future Brush Creek Township's land with it.
2. 1816 — Cyrus Moore, born 1783, arrives with his family and settles 160 acres in the northwest section; he later serves as justice of the peace for 21 years and dies in 1861.
3. 1832 — The Ohio Legislature passes a redistricting act on December 5, returning the future township's territory from Columbiana back to Jefferson County.
4. 1833 — Jefferson County Commissioners organize Brush Creek Township on March 5, detaching a tier of sections from the north side of Ross Township.
5. 1834 — Kenneth McLennan's father dies, and McLennan (born 1822) establishes himself in the township, eventually owning 643 acres and serving as justice of the peace for 24 years beginning in 1851.
6. 1800 — Joshua Downard and John Hutton, hunting deer at a salt lick, discover salt water in the creek near the mouth of Salt Run (Salt Works Run), where Irondale now stands, touching off rude salt furnaces that drew a wave of laborers to the Yellow Creek area.
7. 1814 — The township's first school house, a log building on Moses Marshall's farm near the future Chestnut Grove church, opens with Samuel Clark -- father of the future Rev. Alexander Clark, D.D. -- as its first teacher, hired for four months at $10 a month.
8. 1830 — Neighbors raise the 'old log school house' in a single day for about $32; it later became nationally known as the setting of Rev. Alexander Clark's book 'The Old Log School House,' since Clark received his own early education there.
9. 1879 — The township contains one village, Monroeville, population about eighty, with a post office, a store, a blacksmith shop and a shoemaker shop, plus four churches -- yet, the county history notes pointedly, 'neither a lawyer, doctor, preacher nor saloon.'

Stories

A township that changed counties before it existed

Brush Creek Township has a genuinely unusual origin: it was assigned to a different county before it was ever organized as a township at all. When Columbiana County split off from Jefferson County in 1803, the land that would eventually become Brush Creek Township went with it, remaining part of Columbiana for nearly three decades while settlers like Cyrus Moore, who arrived in 1816, built their farms there under Columbiana's jurisdiction. Only in 1832 did the Ohio Legislature redraw the line and return the territory to Jefferson County, and it took until March 1833 for county commissioners to formally organize it as its own township, carved from the north side of Ross Township and named for the creek running through it. The result is a township whose first generation of settlers spent their early years as residents of one county and their later years, without ever moving, as residents of another.

An empty Glass and a deadly barrel of whisky

At the mouth of Salt Run, near where salt water was first discovered around 1800, a man remembered only as Glass opened what the 1880 county history calls a 'tavern' -- though it adds dryly that his 'reputation for truth and honesty was considerably below par.' Glass bought a barrel of whisky on credit from Jacob Nessley of Virginia, to be paid for in salt, and on the very first night the salt boilers drank the whole barrel dry; a drunken brawl broke out and one man was killed. Glass eventually paid Nessley the salt he owed and tried to order a second barrel on the same terms, but word of his reputation had reached Nessley first, who took the payment for the debt already owed, refused any further credit, and sent Glass away -- in the county historian's pun -- 'an empty Glass.' The story captures the rough, transient world of Yellow Creek's earliest salt camps, populated by the 'hardy, rough class of men' the salt trade and the game-rich hunting grounds drew to the area.

The old log school house that became a book

In 1830, neighbors James Clark and Charles Marshall built a one-room log school house in a single day's 'frolic,' at a cost of about $32 -- whisky flowing freely enough at the raising that both builders overslept the next morning and spent the day missing each other while each went looking for the other at his own house. That modest building became locally famous decades later as the setting of Rev. Alexander Clark's book, 'The Old Log School House': Clark had received his own early education there, taught first by William Kerr and, at the township's earlier school nearby, by Clark's own father, Samuel Clark. The school district, three miles square, held its first election for school officers on September 8, 1830, at the house of Martin Adams, whose farm also supplied the ground for the Chestnut Grove church and cemetery.

Local history sources: ohiogenealogyexpress.com · archive.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Buckeye Water District - Ohio River100% of residentsOhio River

Shale and injection wells (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

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.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2025-08-28

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