Dallas Township, Crawford County

How Dallas Township, Crawford County began

Dallas Township, in the southwestern corner of Crawford County, was assembled in 1845 from pieces of Scott and Grand Prairie townships (Marion County) and the former Wyandot Reservation, a boundary change made partly to head off pressure to move the county seat from Bucyrus. It was named for George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania, recently inaugurated as Vice President under James K. Polk, a choice the 1881 county history's own contributor found puzzling given the township's strongly Whig politics. Its earliest known permanent settler was George Walton, who arrived from Pickaway County in 1820 and hosted the township's first Methodist meetings; decades earlier, in the 1760s, a Wyandot-Ottawa 'ring hunt' witnessed by white captive Col. James Smith accidentally set the vast Sandusky Plains prairie on fire across fifty miles, an event still cited in 1881 to explain the recent age of the township's scattered jack-oak groves.

Settled 1820 (George Walton, considered the first permanent settler), incorporated 1845, by Assembled from parts of Scott Township and Grand Prairie Township (both Marion County) and the former Wyandot Reservation; named for Vice President George M. Dallas.

Where the name comes from

Named in 1845 for George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania, recently inaugurated as Vice President of the United States under James K. Polk; the 1881 county history's own local contributor noted the irony that a township with a strong Whig majority chose the namesake of an opposing-party Democratic vice president, speculating it was decided by county officials in Bucyrus rather than local residents.

Before the town

No village, mound or treaty line specific to Dallas Township's own boundaries is documented, but the township sits within the Sandusky Plains, a vast prairie the Wyandots and allied peoples used for communal hunting. Col. James Smith, held captive by the Wyandots as early as 1760, left a first-hand account of joining a Wyandot-Ottawa 'ring hunt' on these plains: hunters set a large ring of fire in the tall prairie grass and shot deer as they fled the flames toward the center, killing about ten animals per hunter in a few hours, but the fire escaped control when expected rain did not come, burning across the prairie's full fifty-mile length and twenty-mile width in one season. The Sandusky River, which crosses the township's northwest corner, took its name from a Wyandot word the 1881 county history renders as 'Sahunduskie,' said to mean 'clear water' and also used, in a joking double meaning recorded by early settlers, for whiskey.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Ottawa.

Timeline

1. 1818 — Occasional squatters live along the Whetstone and Scioto, raising small crops and living nearly as their Native neighbors do; in the 1880s Abraham Monnett recalled more than fifty abandoned squatter cabins from the turnpike west to the Wyandot County line.
2. 1819 — The township's land is surveyed by Deputy Surveyor Gen. Sylvanus Bourse, assisted by Samuel Holmes, later namesake of Holmes Township.
3. 1820 — George Walton, arriving from Pickaway County, moves into an existing squatter cabin and becomes the township's earliest known permanent settler; his home hosts the township's first Methodist meetings.
4. 1820 — Matthew Mitchell comes from Richland County and enters the old Welsh farm, and G. H. Busby, a house joiner from Fairfield County, buys land in section 7; Busby is elected Clerk of Marion County in 1830.
5. 1821 — The Van Horne family comes from Pickaway County and never farms more than two eighty-acre lots; the Mason family of English ditchers arrives in 1825.
6. 1823 — A stage line runs on the road across the township, and Mr. Ramey keeps a tavern with a feed stable for exchanging stage horses from the fall of 1824; the line is broken up in 1840.
7. 1824 — Jacob Shaffer moves from Pennsylvania and enters twenty acres on what became the Isaiah Monnett farm, one of the first recorded real-estate owners in the township's present territory.
8. 1824-07-05 — Zach Welsh is commissioned the first Justice of the Peace of Grand Prairie Township, which included the western half of what became Dallas; in Scott Township Alsan Packard was sworn in January 27, 1825.
9. 1826 — David Bibler moves to the spring that bears his name and keeps tavern at his cabin on the Wyandot and Bucyrus road, one of the 'stops twenty minutes for dinner' on the stage line; he also runs a still-house, a sawmill and, from 1827, a mill on the Sandusky.
10. 1828 — The first recorded land tax payments on Dallas Township land appear in Marion County's records, land then valued at $1.25 per acre.
11. 1830-11-25 — Charles Wesley White marries Hannah Hoover, daughter of Christian Hoover, in one of the first weddings in Dallas; White had worked at the Indian Mill at Upper Sandusky in 1822 for $15 a month.
12. 1835 — Christian Hoover, a leading wheat grower, buys a thresher that carries straw, chaff and wheat together from the cylinder to the ground, a great improvement over flailing.
13. 1845 — Dallas Township is formally organized from parts of Scott and Grand Prairie townships (Marion County) and the former Wyandot Reservation, and named for Vice President George M. Dallas.
14. 1845-04-07 — After the township is reorganized, Andrew Kerr is installed as its first Esquire; William Hoover follows on April 7, 1847.
15. c. 1870s — The unincorporated community of Monnett is established within the township as a livestock loading stop on the Toledo and Ohio Central Railway, named for the prominent local Monnett family of stock breeders.
16. 1873 — John Monnett, an annual buyer at Kentucky stock sales who imported Durham thoroughbreds and was the heaviest exhibitor at the county fair, moves to Iroquois County, Illinois; the Monnett family's cattle made the township's reputation.
17. 2020 — The census counts 459 people in Dallas Township.

Stories

The fire that burned fifty miles of prairie

Long before Dallas Township existed, Col. James Smith, a white man held captive by the Wyandots from about 1760, recorded joining a hunting method local Wyandot and Ottawa hunters called a 'ring hunt' on the vast prairie later known as the Sandusky Plains. The hunters waited for rain clouds to gather, expecting the coming rain would extinguish their work, then set a great ring of fire in the tall grass; as the flames closed inward, deer that had lain hidden in the grass fled toward the center, where hunters posted around the shrinking circle shot them down, each man ending the day with about ten deer. But the expected rain never came. As wind rose that night, the fire that was meant to stay contained spread across the entire prairie, by Smith's account roughly fifty miles long and twenty miles wide, ending the season's hunting and doing the hunters more harm than the deer had been worth. The 1881 county history cites this account directly to explain why the jack-oak groves scattered through southern Dallas Township, standing on slightly higher 'islands' the fires usually spared, were all of comparatively recent growth even a century later.

A Vice President for a Whig township

When Dallas Township was assembled and named in 1845, the choice of George M. Dallas, the Democratic vice president just inaugurated alongside James K. Polk, struck at least one contributor to the 1881 county history as an odd fit: the township's population held a strong Whig majority, the opposing party to Dallas's own. The contributor could offer no local explanation for why residents would choose to honor a political opponent, and guessed instead that the decision had been made not by settlers on the ground but by county officials in Bucyrus, who had recently redrawn the township's boundaries partly to head off a separate push to move the county seat away from that same town.

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

Sandusky River (via Outhwaite & Riley up-ground reservoirs) The water here

• Bucyrus City84% of residentsSandusky River (via Outhwaite & Riley up-ground reservoirs)
• Del-co Water Company, Inc.9% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Nevada Village5% of residentsSandusky River (via Outhwaite & Riley up-ground reservoirs)
• Aqua Ohio - Marion3% of residentsScioto River and Little Scioto River intakes, blended with local groundwater wells

Fire and EMS stations (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.
• Basic Audit, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-08-18
• Basic Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-08-27

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