Crane Township, Paulding County

How Crane Township, Paulding County began

Crane Township, in the northeast of Paulding County along the Maumee River, was established in 1825 and named for Oliver Crane, who settled there around 1823 and became the postmaster of the township's first post office at the now-vanished river settlement of Cranesville. The township held Paulding County's first seat of government, New Rochester, from 1839 to 1840, and later hosted Paulding Furnace, an 1860s iron-smelting works fed by the Wabash and Erie Canal that closed when Paulding County residents dynamited the nearby reservoir in 1887. Cecil, founded in 1871 as a railroad junction, is the township's only surviving incorporated village; Cranesville, Henpeck, and Knoxdale have all disappeared.

Settled c. 1823, by Oliver Crane and others, incorporated 1825, by named for and settled by Oliver Crane.

Where the name comes from

Named for Oliver Crane, born in Goshen, New York in 1791, who arrived in the township around 1823 and became postmaster of Cranesville, its first post office, in 1829; Crane later moved on to Indiana in 1831, where he named the town of Goshen after his own New York birthplace.

Before the town

No Native American village, mound, or treaty site specific to Crane Township is documented in the sources checked, though the township's early settlement corridor along the Maumee River was historically Ottawa (Odawa) territory. The county's wider Native history includes the Ottawa Oquanoxa Reserve in neighboring Brown Township.

Nations recorded here: Odawa (Ottawa).

Timeline

1. 1823 — Oliver Crane, born in Goshen, New York in 1791, arrives in the area that becomes Crane Township.
2. 1825 — Crane Township is established and named for Oliver Crane.
3. 1829 — Cranesville, a riverside trading post on the Maumee, gets the township's first post office, with Oliver Crane as postmaster.
4. 1835 — New Rochester is laid out on the Maumee's south bank, becoming a stagecoach stop between Toledo and Fort Wayne.
5. 1839 — New Rochester becomes Paulding County's first seat of government.
6. 1864 — Evans, Rodgers & Co. establish Paulding Furnace on the north side of the Wabash and Erie Canal, smelting Lake Superior iron ore shipped in by canal and rail and fired with charcoal from local beehive kilns.
7. 1871 — Cecil is founded as a railroad hub where the Wabash Railroad and the Cincinnati Northern Railroad converge.
8. 1887-04-25 — Paulding County residents dynamite and dig apart the nearby Six Mile Reservoir, ending the canal traffic that supplied Paulding Furnace; the furnace closes.
9. 2025 — A historical marker honoring New Rochester's bicentennial-era history is installed at the former townsite, now New Rochester Park.

Stories

The Furnace the Reservoir War Put Out

Paulding Furnace never had anything to do with the Reservoir War directly, but the two were bound together by the same stretch of water. When Evans, Rodgers & Co. built the furnace in 1864 on the north bank of the Wabash and Erie Canal, they chose the spot because the canal, paired with the newly arrived Wabash Railroad, could bring in the two things an iron furnace needed most: fuel and ore. Central Ohio's old-growth forest supplied the wood for the beehive kilns that turned it into charcoal, and the canal and rail lines together hauled in iron ore shipped from the Lake Superior mines by way of Toledo. For more than two decades the furnace ran on that arrangement, one of the canal's last working industrial customers in a county where most people wanted the waterway gone. Then, on the night of April 25, 1887, a few hundred Paulding County farmers dynamited the locks and cut apart the dikes of the Six Mile Reservoir east of Antwerp, and the canal that supplied Paulding Furnace stopped functioning as a transportation route for good. The furnace did not survive the loss; it closed not long after, one more casualty, alongside the canal itself, of a fight that was never really about industry at all -- it was about mosquitoes and malaria.

Local history sources: cranetwppcohio.gov · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · thevwindependent.com · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Antwerp Village65% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Paulding Village30% of residentsPaulding Reservoir, fed by Flat Rock Creek
• Brentwood Community MHP Llc5% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Power plants (1)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (7)

Who holds office

Roster as of 2026-09-18: county board of elections.

Money issues on the ballot since 2018: 4 of 4 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 1.

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 2025-11-18

Cite this page