Chester Township, Meigs County

How Chester Township, Meigs County began

Chester Township grew up around the unincorporated village of Chester, platted about 1822 to serve as Meigs County's seat of government; the county's oldest surviving courthouse and an 1839 academy still stand there as a museum. Its land was set off from Athens County in 1821 as part of Bedford Township, and it holds the county's best-preserved prehistoric monument, the Adena-era Mound Cemetery Mound. It lost the county seat to Pomeroy in 1841 after only about twenty years, and settled into life as a farming township along the East Branch of the Shade River -- the same stream valley where writer Ambrose Bierce was born in a log cabin in 1842. Today it is rural and sparsely populated, with about 2,500 residents in 2020.

Settled 1798-1808 (general Meigs County pioneer era), platted c. 1822 (village of Chester), incorporated 1821 (set off from Athens County as part of Bedford Township).

Where the name comes from

No source we found explains why Chester Township or the village of Chester carries that name. It is one of five townships named Chester statewide in Ohio, a common name pattern among townships settled by New Englanders, but no document we found states a specific namesake (person or New England place) for this one.

Before the town

The strongest documented Native American presence in the township is prehistoric: the Mound Cemetery Mound, a conical earthen burial mound on Sumner Road just north of Chester, has never been excavated and is attributed to the Adena culture (roughly 800 BC to AD 100) on the basis of its form, its location near the Middle Branch of the Shade River, and the presence of other similar mounds that once stood nearby. No specific historic-era (1600s-1800s) Shawnee, Wyandot, or other named village, trail, or camp has been documented at a site within Chester Township. Southeastern Ohio's river counties, including Meigs, lay within land the United States treated as ceded by the Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785) and the Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789), agreements the Shawnee and Miami refused to sign and never accepted as valid; the dispute over this ground was not settled to the Americans' satisfaction until the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. See the Meigs County history for the fuller treaty and settlement record.

Nations recorded here: Adena culture, Shawnee, Wyandot.

• Mound Cemetery Mound (mound) — Sumner Road, north of the village of Chester, Chester Township, Adena culture, c. 800 BC - AD 100 (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1819 — Meigs County is formed from parts of Gallia, Athens and Washington counties, effective April 1.
2. 1822 — The village of Chester is platted and named the seat of the new Meigs County; construction starts on a county courthouse that October.
3. 1823 — The Meigs County courthouse at Chester is completed in the Federal style; it is still standing today as Ohio's oldest extant building constructed as a courthouse. A Chester post office opens the same year.
4. 1821 — The land of Chester Township is set off from Athens County territory as part of Bedford Township.
5. 1834 — A cholera outbreak strikes Chester, whose two hundred residents suffer greatly.
6. 1839-1840 — The Chester Academy is built next to the courthouse, first known as the Meigs High School and Teachers Institute, to train the surrounding area's teachers and serve as a K-12 school.
7. 1842 — Writer and satirist Ambrose Bierce, the tenth of thirteen children, is born on June 24 in a log cabin on Horse Cave Creek in Chester Township, in the Shade River valley near Chester.
8. 1841 — The Meigs County seat is moved from Chester to Pomeroy, ending Chester's twenty-year run as the county's government center.
9. 1974 — The Mound Cemetery Mound is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (reference 74001575), recognizing the undisturbed Adena burial mound north of Chester.
10. 1975 — The Old Meigs County Courthouse and the adjacent Chester Academy are together listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

A Federal brick courthouse, and the town that lost it

When Meigs County was created in 1819, the new village of Chester -- platted in about 1822 on the East Branch of the Shade River -- was picked as the county seat, and construction on a Federal-style brick courthouse began in October 1822. It is, today, Ohio's oldest extant building constructed as a courthouse. But Chester's turn as a seat of government was short. The county's population and its commerce were shifting toward the Ohio River, and in 1841, after barely twenty years, the county government packed up and moved to the river town of Pomeroy, whose own courthouse would famously be built directly into a hillside. Chester kept its academy, built in 1839 to train the county's teachers, and both buildings survive today as a museum -- a courthouse and academy that outlasted the government they were built to house.

The writer born on Horse Cave Creek

Ambrose Bierce, later famous as a Civil War veteran, journalist and author of 'The Devil's Dictionary' and 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' was born June 24, 1842, in a log cabin on Horse Cave Creek in Chester Township -- the tenth of thirteen children in a family where, as a private joke of his father's, every child's name began with the letter A. County tax records from the following year show the Bierce household paying levies on two horses and three cows, an ordinary pioneer-farm accounting that gives no hint of the writer the infant would become. Bierce's family left Ohio for Indiana while he was still young, but his birthplace in the Shade River valley remains one of Chester Township's best-remembered claims.

Photographs

Local history sources: archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · donswaim.com · meigs.ohgenweb.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Meigs County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Pomeroy Village52% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Leading Creek Conservancy District38% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Racine Village7% of residentsGroundwater wells (5 wells)
• Syracuse Village3% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Middleport Village1% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Tuppers Plains/chester Water District0% of residentsLocal groundwater wells near Long Bottom (Ohio River valley area)

Nursing homes (1)

Fire and EMS stations (2)

Public schools (2)

Public libraries (1)

Shale and injection wells (2)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 3 of 3 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 2 of 2.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

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