Buckskin Township, Ross County

How Buckskin Township, Ross County began

Buckskin Township was organized on August 10, 1807 out of parts of Paxton and Concord townships in western Ross County, and takes its name from Buckskin Creek, which drains the township; no source found records who first applied that name or why. Its main community, South Salem, grew up around a Presbyterian academy: minister Hugh Stewart Fullerton opened Salem Academy in 1842 to serve a rural district with no upper-level school, and landowner John Sample platted the village around it in 1846. The academy taught more than 1,500 students, including future Ohio governor Joseph B. Foraker, before closing in the early twentieth century; its 1842 limestone building still stands and is listed on the National Register. A mile or so away, the 1873 South Salem Covered Bridge carries Lower Twin Road over Buckskin Creek and is the last covered bridge standing in Ross County. The township is rural farm country today, with a 2020 population of 1,828 and no other incorporated village besides South Salem.

Settled 1804, when the family of early settler Henry Haute arrived from Pennsylvania, among the township's first settlers, incorporated 1807-08-10 (Buckskin Township organized from parts of Paxton and Concord townships), by Ross County commissioners; early settlers named in the county history include Henry Haute's father, James Wilson, John H. Wilson, Frederick Parrott, John Wallace, S. Scott and J. McGinnis.

Where the name comes from

The township is named for Buckskin Creek, the stream that drains it and that the South Salem Covered Bridge crosses; Ohio has no other Buckskin Township. No source we found states who named the creek or when, or whether the name refers to the deerskin trade with Native hunters and traders that was common across the Ohio country before and during early settlement; that connection is plausible given the name but is not documented in any source we found and should not be presented as established fact.

Before the town

No source found names a specific Native village, trail, treaty or documented encounter within Buckskin Township's boundaries; the township's own local histories, once settlement narratives begin in the early 1800s, describe farm families arriving from Pennsylvania and Virginia with no mention of Native residents already on the ground. The township's name, Buckskin, after the creek that drains it, may echo the deerskin trade that was central to relations between Ohio Native nations and early Euro-American traders, but that is inference rather than a sourced fact. Ross County's wider record includes the Shawnee towns on the Scioto, the Adena and Hopewell mound-building traditions, the Treaty of Greenville's bearing on the county, and the last documented Native presence in the county; nothing found narrows any of that specifically to Buckskin Township's ground.

Timeline

1. 1804 — The family of Henry Haute emigrates from Pennsylvania and settles in the future Buckskin Township, among its earliest settlers.
2. 1807-08-10 — Ross County commissioners organize Buckskin Township from parts of Paxton and Concord townships.
3. 1842 — Presbyterian minister Hugh Stewart Fullerton opens Salem Academy in southwestern Ross County after finding no upper-level school served the district; the stone building is completed the same year with stone from a quarry near Greenfield.
4. 1846 — Landowner John Sample plats the village of South Salem around the academy to serve its students and teachers; the first house in the new village is built by M. Douglas.
5. 1850 — South Salem records its peak population of 479 residents.
6. 1873 — The South Salem Covered Bridge, a Smith-truss wooden bridge built by the Smith Bridge Company and Robert Matthews, is completed over Buckskin Creek on Lower Twin Road.
7. 1907 — South Salem Academy closes, unable to compete with the growing number of public high schools in the region; the village's population declines afterward.
8. 1922 — The academy building is sold to the Buckskin Township Board of Education after decades of declining enrollment.
9. 1975-03-04 — The South Salem Covered Bridge, by then the only covered bridge surviving in Ross County, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
10. 1979-02-23 — South Salem Academy is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

A School Built Because There Wasn't One

In 1841 the Reverend Hugh Stewart Fullerton put a plain question to his Presbyterian congregation in the farm country of southwestern Ross County: should they try to build an academy, so that the young people of this remote district would not have to leave home to get an education past the common schools? The congregation said yes, and by the end of 1842 a two-story building of cut limestone stood on the site, quarried from a pit near Greenfield and finished in the Federal style with a cupola on the roof. Landowner John Sample saw an opportunity in the new school and in 1846 platted a village around it, South Salem, which grew fast for its first two years and then held steady near five hundred people through the mid-1800s. Over sixty-five years the academy taught more than 1,500 students, including three future U.S. congressmen and Joseph B. Foraker, who went on to become governor of Ohio -- an outsized legacy for a school built on one minister's conviction that his neighbors' children deserved better than what the district already had.

Ross County's Last Covered Bridge

By the early twentieth century Ross County had several covered bridges spanning its creeks, wooden structures roofed to protect their trusses from the weather. One by one, flood, fire, replacement and neglect took them, until only the South Salem Covered Bridge remained: built in 1873 by the Smith Bridge Company and Robert Matthews over Buckskin Creek, using a truss design patented by Ohio bridge-builder Robert Smith in the late 1860s, eight panels wide, resting on stone abutments under a metal roof. It carries Lower Twin Road a short distance from the village whose academy it long served, and its survival, more than its engineering alone, is what earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 -- the last of its kind standing in a county that once had several.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · sites.rootsweb.com · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Highland County on the full map

Eight wells in the buried Teays River Aquifer, in the Scioto valley north of Chillicothe The water here

• Ross County Water Co. Inc52% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Greenfield Village45% of residentsGroundwater wells (8 wells)
• Frankfort Village3% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Power plants (1)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

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