Burbank

How Burbank began

Burbank is a small village on Killbuck Creek in Canaan Township in northwestern Wayne County. It was called Bridgeport until it was incorporated in 1868 and renamed Burbank, though the post office had carried the name Burbank since 1838. Ben Douglass's 1878 county history found three churches there (Methodist Episcopal, United Brethren and Evangelical) and a new academy in 1873; by 1909 it had a three-grade high school. The population has run between about 200 and 400 since 1870, peaking at 393 in 1950, and was 296 in 2020.

Settled Canaan Township's first cabin was built in 1812 by William Ewing Sr.; the date of the first house at Bridgeport (Burbank) is not recorded in the sources checked, incorporated 1868.

Where the name comes from

Douglass (1878) says only that Burbank was incorporated in 1868, 'when the name was changed from Bridgeport.' Neither name is explained. The U.S. post office, however, appears under the name Burbank from 1838 in Jim Forte's postal history listing, so the name Burbank is older than the 1868 renaming of the village; why a post office at Bridgeport was called Burbank is not recorded in the sources checked.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or treaty event specific to Burbank is recorded in the sources checked. The village lies on the Killbuck, which rises in Wayne and Canaan townships. A 1910 county history, describing the earthworks around Wooster, says the Killbuck was in the builders' day 'a boating highway from the Muskingum up to the portage between Burbank and Lodi on the Black river' (the author's inference, not a documented trail). Douglass records that when Phillip Fritz settled in neighbouring Milton Township in 1814 the Delaware (Lenape), Shawnee and Wyandot were still hunting in the district, and the 1910 history notes a camp of 30 or 40 Native people near the Harrisville swamp, just across the line in Medina County, in the early settlement years.

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

• Killbuck-to-Black River portage between Burbank and Lodi (as described in 1910) (trail) — between Burbank on the Killbuck and Lodi on the Black River, on the divide a few miles north of the village, undated; asserted by the 1910 author for the time of the area's earthwork builders (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1812 — William Ewing Sr. builds the first cabin in Canaan Township, the township in which Burbank grew up.
2. 1819 — On May 5 the county commissioners organize Canaan Township, named by Dr. Isaac Barnes; the first election is held that fall in an ashery near the later village of Windsor.
3. 1838 — A post office named Burbank is established, the first postal record for the place (it is listed as open from 1838 to the present).
4. 1860 — About this year the Evangelical congregation is organized, the third church in the village; the Methodist Episcopal and United Brethren congregations date from the village's beginning.
5. 1868 — The village, until then called Bridgeport, is incorporated under the name Burbank.
6. 1869 — Burbank elects its first village officers: John Reed as mayor, G. W. Holloway as clerk, David Ecker as treasurer and J. A. McBride as marshal.
7. 1873 — Burbank Academy is organized, with Professor Rosseter as its principal in 1878.
8. 1878 — Douglass lists Burbank as one of five villages in Canaan Township, with Golden Corners, Windsor (Canaan Center), Jackson and Pike.
9. 1880 — The census counts 293 residents, up from 258 in 1870.
10. 1908 — The Burbank Methodist Episcopal church has 144 members on the conference minutes; in 1909 the village school has a three-grade high school.
11. 1910 — The census counts 351 residents, a figure not exceeded until 1950.
12. 1950 — Village population peaks at 393.
13. 2010 — Population falls to a low of 207.
14. 2020 — Population recovers to 296, a 43 percent increase over 2010.

Stories

Bridgeport becomes Burbank

Ben Douglass's 1878 county history records in a sentence that Burbank was incorporated in 1868, when its name was changed from Bridgeport. It adds that the village then had three churches, the Methodist Episcopal and United Brethren dating from its beginning and the Evangelical from about 1860, and that a Burbank Academy was organized in 1873. The first council met in 1869 under Mayor John Reed, and David Ecker, the treasurer that year, became mayor in 1871. The history does not say who picked the new name or why, and a postal listing complicates the story: a post office named Burbank was already open in 1838, thirty years before the incorporation. The simplest reading is that the name had been in use by the post office long before the village adopted it, but the surviving sources do not say.

The pigeon roost north of Burbank

The 1910 county history quotes Professor G. F. Wright of Oberlin on the 'Harrisville swamp,' then the great celery farm north of Burbank, which he said had furnished 'one of the most famous pigeon roosts in the country, or, indeed, in the world.' Old residents told him that when the passenger pigeons settled at dusk or rose at dawn the sky darkened and the noise of their wings was like wind in a pine forest. After dark, he was told, a man needed only to startle the sleeping birds from the edge of the brush and throw a stick into the air to kill them in numbers, and a company was formed in New York to net them for the city market. The county historian added that the birds could not be described to later generations because the passenger pigeon was gone, a loss he marked by noting that the papers were offering three hundred dollars for a single pair.

Local history sources: archive.org · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · postalhistory.com

No water-system data is linked to Burbank's ZIP codes yet.

Nursing homes (1)

Auditor of State record

• Fiscal emergency: declared 2000-09-28, released 2006-11-09. source
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-09-09

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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