Clinton Township, Knox County

How Clinton Township, Knox County began

Clinton Township was one of the four original townships laid out when Knox County was organized in 1808, and it has held the county seat, Mount Vernon, ever since. The land along Owl Creek (now called the Kokosing River) drew Pennsylvania settlers from about 1803 onward, who cleared timber and planted grain along the bottomlands. A rival settlement called Clinton, just north of Mount Vernon, briefly hosted the county's first newspaper before Mount Vernon eclipsed it. Today the township is a 15.8-square-mile ring of farmland and suburb around Mount Vernon, home to roughly 2,900 people outside the city itself.

Settled 1803-1804 (seven related families from Pennsylvania), incorporated 1808 (organized as one of Knox County's four original townships).

Where the name comes from

The reason for the name Clinton is not recorded; the name is commonly associated in Ohio township-naming with DeWitt Clinton or George Clinton.

Before the town

Pioneers of the early 1800s called the river through this township Owl Creek, recorded as the name Native people used for it before it was renamed the Kokosing. The township's most specific documented Native site is the McLaughlin Mound at Mound View Cemetery, where a 1894 burial with a shell necklace, copper bracelets and an iron tomahawk-pipe was uncovered. Hill's 1881 history adds a mound about fifteen feet high and twenty-five yards across half a mile north of the Stilley farm, opened by Aaron Loveridge with nothing of importance found, and says that when Benjamin Butler camped here in September 1801 a chief and his people were holding a pow-wow at the Little Indian Fields nearby; Andrew Craig, a Virginia frontiersman who lived beside Owl Creek and adopted Indian ways, moved to Greentown in 1809.

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

• McLaughlin Mound at Mound View Cemetery (mound) — Mound View Cemetery, Clinton Township, prehistoric (en.wikipedia.org)
• Stilley farm mound (mound) — half a mile north of the Stilley residence, Clinton Township, prehistoric; about 15 feet high (archive.org)
• Little Indian Fields (camp) — near the future Mount Vernon, on the Kokosing, 1801 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1803-1804 — Seven related families from Pennsylvania, among them the Leonards, Millses, Haineses, Knights, Harrods and Baxters, settle together in Clinton Township near the future site of Mount Vernon.
2. 1801-09 — Benjamin and John Butler explore up the Kokosing and camp a half mile east of the future Mount Vernon, where they find Andrew Craig living in a log hut; no other white family lives in the whole country watered by the Kokosing and Mohican, and a chief and his people are camped at the Little Indian Fields nearby.
3. 1803-04 — Seven related families from Pennsylvania, those of William Leonard, John Mills, Henry Haines, William Knight, Levi Harrod, James Harrod and Peter Baxter, settle together in Clinton Township, the Haines or Ten Mile settlement.
4. 1804 — Ebenezer and Abner Brown build the first grist mill in Knox County in the Haines settlement, a ten-foot-square log mill on Delano's Run with stones hooped with slippery-elm bark.
5. 1805 — Isaac Bonnett locates north of the old Delaware road and builds the first brick house in the township.
6. 1808 — Knox County is organized and divided into four large original townships — Wayne, Clinton, Morgan, and Union — with Mount Vernon, in Clinton Township, named the county seat.
7. 1808-05-02 — The county commissioners lay off Clinton as one of Knox County's four original townships, taking in Bloomfield, Liberty, Monroe, Pike and parts of Pleasant and Morris; Henry Haines is the first county treasurer, serving to 1815.
8. 1809 — Andrew Craig, who had come to live almost as one of the Indians, leaves for Greentown.
9. 1813 — The Ohio Register, the area's first newspaper, begins publishing in July in the town of Clinton, just north of Mount Vernon, before later moving into Mount Vernon.
10. 1813 — Richland County, formerly part of Knox County, is fully separated, a period during which 'trouble with Indians was a constant concern' along the frontier north of Clinton Township.
11. 1815 — A man named Wolgamott owns a small saw mill on Delano's Run.
12. 1825-03-09 — The commissioners reduce Clinton to the sixth township of the thirteenth range, about twenty-five square miles.
13. 1894 — Cemetery workers at Mound View Cemetery on the McLaughlin Mound uncover a Native burial with a shell necklace, copper bracelets, and an iron tomahawk-pipe, later speculated by local historians (without confirmation) to be the Delaware leader Sac-A-Manc.
14. 2020 — The U.S. Census records 2,886 residents in Clinton Township outside Mount Vernon's city limits.

Stories

The mound at the edge of the cemetery

On the north side of Mount Vernon, inside what is now Mound View Cemetery, stands an earthwork built by people of the Adena culture roughly two thousand years ago: a sandstone-lined tomb holding a single burial, evidence of a person of some status in the community that raised the mound. The mound gave the cemetery its name long before anyone dug into it. In 1894, workers preparing ground near its base found a different, later burial nearby — a skeleton wearing a shell necklace and copper bracelets, buried with an iron tomahawk-pipe, a tool style that only existed after European trade reached the Ohio country. Local historians of the time linked the find to Sac-A-Manc, a Delaware leader whose name pioneer families along Owl Creek remembered with dread, and who was said to have died in 1812. Whether he is the man buried there is not known.

The town that lost out to Mount Vernon

When Knox County organized in 1808, it was divided into four original townships, and Mount Vernon, the county seat, lay in Clinton Township. A smaller settlement called Clinton, just north of Mount Vernon, had the area's first weekly newspaper: the Ohio Register began at the town of Clinton in July 1813 (the county historical society's timeline says 1812) and relocated to Mount Vernon a few years later.

Henry Haines and the tin horn

Henry Haines, a Pennsylvanian of education and some property, came to the Ten Mile settlement in Clinton Township about 1803 and became Knox County's first treasurer in 1808, holding the office until 1815 and making household articles on a turning lathe. A leading member of the New Light Christians, he became deranged on the subject of religion, took a tin horn and rode around the town and county day and night warning that the world was coming to an end, a doctrine the county historian compared with that of the later Millerites. He was confined and treated by Dr. R. D. Moore, and when he recovered he said that if he ever went mad again he would kill the doctor; later, in a new spell, he made his way to Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to do so, but arrived in his right mind, confessed, and was taken in and cared for by Moore, who sent him home. In the summer of 1817 the horn was silent for several days, and the whole village of Mount Vernon turned out on a Sunday to search the woods for him.

Photographs

Local history sources: archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · knoxhistory.org · knoxhistory.org · knoxpages.com · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org

Wells drawing groundwater from the buried-valley aquifer along the Kokosing River near Mount Vernon The water here

• Mount Vernon City99% of residentsBuried Valley Aquifer (Kokosing River valley wells)
• Colonial Terrace Mhc Llc0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Westgate Mobile Home Community0% of residentsBuried Valley Aquifer (Kokosing River valley wells)
• Knox County Water and Wastewater0% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Grandview MHP A0% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)

Nursing homes (2)

Public schools (1)

Private schools (1)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2023: 2 of 2 passed.

Ballot issues

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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-12-30

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