Buffalo Township, Noble County

How Buffalo Township, Noble County began

Buffalo Township, in the northern part of Noble County, traces to a Buffalo Township that Guernsey County erected on June 5, 1810, which then covered much of the northwest of the present county. The land was surveyed by John Beaver in 1798 and sectioned by William R. Putnam in 1805; Jacob Gregg entered a quarter-section about 1806, and in the spring of 1810 Abraham Rich and Abraham and John Miley built a camp and lived through the winter mostly on potatoes, followed about 1812 by a group of Virginia families who had been neighbors at home. The township was cut down when Morgan County was formed in 1819 and split again in 1851, leaving twelve sections in Guernsey County and twenty-four in Noble. It has no village; its best-known ground is the farm where the control car of the Navy airship USS Shenandoah fell on September 3, 1925. The 2020 census counted 885 residents.

Settled about 1806 (Jacob Gregg); spring 1810 (Abraham Rich and the Miley brothers), incorporated erected June 5, 1810 in Guernsey County; re-erected in Noble County May 1, 1851, by Guernsey County commissioners, on a petition of inhabitants; later the Noble County commissioners.

Where the name comes from

The township carries forward the name of the original Buffalo Township organized in Guernsey County in 1810, a name common across early Ohio townships for the American bison once found in the region; no source specific to this township's naming beyond that lineage was found.

Before the town

No Native American village, mound, trail or camp inside the present Buffalo Township is recorded in the sources read. The 1810 Buffalo Township of Guernsey County, however, took in what is now Noble Township to the south, and there the 1887 county history describes an Indian trail along the West Fork of Duck Creek, worn buffalo paths still visible after settlement, Native hunters frequenting the valley until about the War of 1812, and a recently used Indian camp that John Noble found standing on the creek bank when he arrived in 1812. When Abraham Rich and the Mileys camped here in 1810 they blazed trees toward Washington and Barnesville for friends expected from Pennsylvania.

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

Timeline

1. 1798 — The township, township 8 of range 9, was surveyed by John Beaver.
2. 1805 — William R. Putnam divided the township into sections.
3. 1806 — Jacob Gregg came from Washington County, Pennsylvania, about this year and entered 160 acres; he died about 1853.
4. 1810 — In the spring Abraham Rich, then a boy, and Abraham and John Miley built a camp, cleared a patch and raised potatoes, living on them through the winter; John and George Rich joined them the next year.
5. 1810-06-05 — Guernsey County granted a petition for a new township called Buffalo and ordered an election for two justices at the house of Jacob Jordan, near Hiramsburg, on June 23.
6. 1812 — Several Virginia families who had been neighbors at home, among them Levi Lyons, John Drake, George R. Johnson, Abraham Booher and Samuel and Isaac Kackley, settled together in the township about this year.
7. 1817-03-17 — Jacob Shriver, from Greene County, Pennsylvania, arrived with his family at the cabin he had built the year before.
8. 1819 — Part of the township was removed to help form a portion of the newly created Morgan County.
9. 1819 — Jacob Larrick settled about this year and later ran an early horse-powered grist mill and a sawmill.
10. 1820 — A Methodist class was formed, meeting in houses and schoolhouses, with Abraham Rich as its first class leader.
11. 1830 — The Guernsey County tax duplicate listed 11,791 acres in the full 36-section township, valued at $19,146, with a total tax of $192.93.
12. 1832 — A revival added many members to the Methodist churches of the area and produced a large number of local preachers in Buffalo and Seneca townships.
13. 1844 — The Methodists built a brick meeting-house in the eastern part of the township, still in use in 1887.
14. 1851 — Noble County was organized on March 11, and Buffalo Township was divided, leaving part in Guernsey County and the remainder as Buffalo Township, Noble County, erected May 1 with twenty-four sections.
15. 1851-07-26 — John Stevens qualified as the first justice of the peace of the new township.
16. 1880 — The census counted 804 people in Buffalo Township.
17. 1925 — On September 3, the Navy rigid airship USS Shenandoah broke apart in severe squalls; its control car, with commander Zachary Lansdowne and six other crewmen still aboard, fell in Section 33 of Buffalo Township onto the Gamary farm, killing all seven.
18. 1989 — The Shenandoah crash sites in Buffalo, Noble and Sharon Townships were together listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 25.

Stories

Where the control car came down

Of the three sections the USS Shenandoah broke into over Noble County on the morning of September 3, 1925, the deadliest was the control car, which separated from the bow and fell to earth on the Gamary family farm in Section 33 of Buffalo Township. Commander Zachary Lansdowne and six other crewmen were still aboard; none survived. The site, along with the stern section that drifted nearly a mile southwest into neighboring Noble Township, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 as the Shenandoah Crash Sites, one of the rare National Register listings commemorating an aviation disaster rather than a building.

America's first helium airship

The Ohio History Connection's marker for the crash, which stands near Ava, says the Shenandoah was America's first rigid dirigible, launched in 1923, and the first rigid airship in the world to be filled with nonflammable helium instead of hydrogen. It was 680 feet long and had begun a six-day publicity tour of the Midwest when late-summer storms tore it in two and ripped the control car from the keel. Fourteen crewmen died, most of them, including the captain, Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne of Greenville, Ohio, in the fall of the control car. The Ohio National Guard was called out to control the crowds who came to see the wreckage.

Potatoes, blazed trees and horses that went home

The first white residents of the present township were probably Abraham Rich, Abraham Miley and John Miley, who came in the spring of 1810, built a camp, cleared a small patch and raised potatoes, and lived through the winter mostly on them. Expecting friends from Pennsylvania, they blazed trees toward Washington in Guernsey County and toward Barnesville so the newcomers could find the camp. John Rich, who joined them, soon lost two horses; after searching everywhere he heard that horses had swum the Ohio at Moundsville, went back to his old home in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and found them there. They had made their own way home through the wilderness.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · nps.gov · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · remarkableohio.org

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