Clinton Township, Seneca County

How Clinton Township, Seneca County began

Clinton Township, one of seven Ohio townships of the same name, was organized in 1820, the year Seneca County itself was created, and named for DeWitt Clinton, the New York governor famous for the Erie Canal whose completion in 1825 helped draw the wave of New York and New England settlers who filled out the county through the 1830s. At 31.1 square miles it wraps around part of Tiffin, the county seat, on the county's central ground, and today it is the most populated township in Seneca County largely because of that shared border. Like most of the county's townships it remains agricultural outside the edge of Tiffin, with its own history mostly folded into the story of the city next door.

Incorporated 1820 (organized), by organized by Seneca County at the county's own creation.

Where the name comes from

The 1886 county history says the name was suggested by the Bowes, Butlers, Vances and other settlers in honor of DeWitt Clinton, then governor of New York; Wikipedia also ties it to Clinton and the Erie Canal. One of seven Clinton townships in Ohio.

Before the town

Clinton Township borders Tiffin and lies within the area that was, before 1817, Wyandot and Seneca territory in the Sandusky River valley. The township's clearest tie to that history is personal rather than a village or mound site: Henry C. Brish, the federal sub-agent to the Seneca of Sandusky, was given a quarter section (160 acres) of the reservation by the Seneca chiefs' own request, written into section 11 of the February 28, 1831 Treaty of Washington, out of gratitude for his help and for escorting a chief to Washington and back. Brish sold that grant and instead bought and settled the southwest half of section eighteen in Clinton Township itself, naming his home Rosewood; the Seneca continued to visit him there after removal whenever they came up the river. No Native village, mound, trail, or treaty-cession boundary specific to Clinton Township is otherwise documented in the sources checked.

Nations recorded here: Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga).

• Rosewood (Henry C. Brish home) (other) — southwest half of section eighteen, Clinton Township, 1831-1866 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1812 — Surveyor Meeker and laborers open a road from Upper to Lower Sandusky along a route planned by Gen. Bell; a stockade and a few log houses rise on the site of the camp of Col. James V. Ball's Pennsylvania regiment, called Camp Ball before Fort Ball was built in 1813.
2. 1817-11-18 — Erastus Bowe, from Delaware County, Ohio (originally a Vermonter), builds a log house just north of the Washington Street bridge and is described as the first white American to settle in what is now Seneca County; in June 1818 he brings his family.
3. 1820-06 — The commissioners of Sandusky County establish Clinton Township, to which the Bowes, Butlers, Vances and other settlers give the name for Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York.
4. 1821 — John Anway enters the west half of the southwest quarter of section 23 and is the first person to patent United States land in the county.
5. 1824 — Reuben Williams enters the Coe farm and builds a saw mill, still recorded as running in 1880; Daniel Dildine also arrives this year and plants an apple orchard, still standing near the new cemetery when Lang's history was written.
6. 1824-12 — The commissioners of Seneca County re-establish Clinton Township within original surveyed Township 2 North, Range 15 East; for years the sections east of the river are governed variously by Hopewell and Clinton.
7. 1828-07-06 — Henry C. Brish, later the Seneca sub-agent, and his wife Eleanor arrive in Seneca County from Frederick County, Maryland, on a Sunday afternoon, driving the whole distance in a small covered carriage; they move into a cabin built by Agreen Ingraham.
8. 1829 — Lewis Baltzell settles in July, and Col. Jacob Bowser, a Marylander, buys the farm where he spends the rest of his life; he brings his wife Anna from Maryland in 1830.
9. 1830 — Robert Burns, an early settler near Fort Ball, drowns attempting to cross the Sandusky River to Tiffin.
10. 1831-02-28 — At the Treaty of Washington ceding the Seneca reservation, the Seneca chiefs have a clause written in granting Henry C. Brish a quarter section of the reservation in gratitude for his service as their sub-agent; he later settles instead on land he buys in Clinton Township, naming it Rosewood.
11. 1832 — Benjamin Crockett is hired in October 1832 to teach the Tiffin district school.
12. 1850 — Rev. R. R. Bement becomes first superintendent of the Tiffin Union School.
13. 1866-02 — Henry C. Brish dies at Rosewood, his home in Clinton Township.

Stories

The stolen orchard and Uncle Johnny Keller

John Keller, an early Clinton Township settler born in 1785 in York County, Pennsylvania, bought land along the river at the 1821 Delaware land sales and moved onto it in 1828, eventually building a mill there that made him known to nearly every farmer in Seneca County as "Uncle Johnny Keller." In 1824, ahead of moving to the property, he paid to have four acres cleared, then drove up with a team and a load of apple trees that fall and planted what was probably the first orchard in the county. When he returned the following spring, every tree was gone, stolen in his absence. Keller went on to serve several years as a county commissioner and was remembered for his industry, his mechanical skill, and his readiness to talk farming with anyone who asked. He died in Clinton Township on October 9, 1859, two years after his wife Elizabeth.

The Maryland Ball

Eleanor Brish, wife of Seneca sub-agent Henry C. Brish, recalled in her own words how the young Marylanders who had settled around Fort Ball threw a dance they called the "Maryland Ball" not long after the couple arrived in 1828. The Sandusky River ran high that week, and the young women from the Tiffin side of the river could not cross to reach the party on the first day, arriving instead on the second; in all, some sixty young people came from Lower Sandusky and from up the river, and the dancing ran two days and three nights with David Smith on the fiddle. Mrs. Brish also remembered that she had brought the first piano and the first china into the Tiffin-area cabins, laid over a carpet she spread across her cabin's puncheon floor, and that two local doctors once stole roasting ears from a cornfield where Fort Ball's public square now stands and brought them to her house to cook into a feast.

Erastus Bowe, first American at Tiffin

On November 18, 1817, Erastus Bowe came to the Sandusky River at the old site of Camp Ball and built a log house just north of where the Washington Street bridge stands. Two other wanderers came with him: William Murphy of Oxford Township, Delaware County, who wandered west and died of hardship, and Lyman Main of Troy Township, a great hunter. The county history, written in 1886, calls Bowe the first white American to settle in what is now Seneca County. He had been entered as a Vermont emigrant and voter in Delaware County in 1809, and in June 1818 he brought his family from Delaware, Ohio, making the first permanent settlement. His son Erastus G. Bowe was still living in Tiffin in 1886, 'linking the present with the very beginnings of the township and city.' The Spencers, Butlers, Abner Pike and others followed.

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

Every historic place in Seneca County on the full map

Mostly Sandusky River water, supplemented by 5 wells (both listed in EPA SDWIS); the production split between them is not given. The water here

• Aqua Ohio - Tiffin100% of residentsSandusky River
• Republic Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (2)

Public schools (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Shale and injection wells (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Ballot issues

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-11-07

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