Deer Creek Township, Pickaway County

• Deer Creek LakeBuilt 1968 · 1,277 acres

How Deer Creek Township, Pickaway County began

Deer Creek Township was already organized as a civil township, part of Ross County, before Pickaway County itself was created in 1810, though no surviving record fixes the exact date. Its first families arrived at the very end of the 1790s: Edward Rector's household reached the mouth of Deer Creek in 1799, and Michael Alkire and George Ater settled within a year or two on either side of him. A century and a half earlier, in 1772-73, the missionary David Jones had visited two Shawnee towns, Blue Jacket's Town and Pickaweekee, facing each other across the same creek at the site that became the township's only real village, Williamsport, platted in 1818. Despite carrying the same name as Deer Creek Lake and its state park, the modern reservoir and park actually sit mostly in neighboring Monroe and Perry townships; Deer Creek Township's own claim to the water is the working creek itself, its Yellow Bud tributary, and Bazore Mill, the one structure from its milling past still standing and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Settled 1798-99, by organized as a township while still part of Ross County, before Pickaway County's creation in 1810; exact date not recorded.

Where the name comes from

The township is named for Deer Creek, the stream that crosses it from northwest to south; no source consulted records a more specific origin for the creek's own name.

Before the town

Deer Creek itself was the site of one of the county's better-documented pre-settlement Native landmarks: an Ohio Historical Marker at Williamsport, inside this township, records that the missionary David Jones visited two Shawnee towns facing each other across the creek in 1772-73, Blue Jacket's Town (about twelve cabins on the east bank) and Pickaweekee (a Shawnee town on the west bank), several years before Lord Dunmore's War and more than two decades before the 1795 Treaty of Greenville opened the land to permanent settlement. No source consulted gives either town a more precise location than 'on Deer Creek' or documents an excavation of either site. Beyond this, no source names a specific mound, trail, or later encounter within the rest of the township's boundaries; the county as a whole is named for the Pekowi (Pickaway) division of the Shawnee, whose principal town lay well to the east on the Pickaway Plains.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee.

• Blue Jacket's Town (village) — east bank of Deer Creek, near Williamsport, Deer Creek Township, documented 1772-73 (commons.wikimedia.org)
• Pickaweekee (village) — west bank of Deer Creek, near Williamsport, Deer Creek Township, documented 1772-73 (commons.wikimedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1772-73 — Missionary David Jones visits Blue Jacket's Town and Pickaweekee, two Shawnee towns facing each other across Deer Creek at the site later called Williamsport.
2. 1795 — The Treaty of Greenville cedes the land to the United States.
3. 1798 — Edward Rector, then twelve years old, walks with a led horse from Wheeling to Chillicothe while the rest of his widowed mother's family travels by flatboat; the following spring the family settles near the mouth of Deer Creek.
4. c. 1798-1800 — Michael Alkire, from near Moorefield, Virginia, by way of Kentucky, purchases a farm in the township that stays in his family for generations.
5. 1799 — George Ater, a disabled Revolutionary War veteran, settles in the township on the farm later owned by the Rector family.
6. 1810 — Pickaway County is organized; Deer Creek, already an established township under Ross County, becomes one of the new county's original nine townships.
7. 1816 — The earliest surviving township election record dates to the first Monday in April, held at the house of Jesse Fitzgerald.
8. 1818 — Williamsport, the township's only village, is platted on February 27.
9. 1830s — Two gristmills and two sawmills operate on Deer Creek within the township.
10. 1978 — Bazore Mill, south of Williamsport on State Route 138 at Deer Creek, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, December 19.

Stories

A Twelve-Year-Old's Walk to Chillicothe

When Edward Rector's father died in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1794, he left a widow and five children, Edward the eldest at eight. Four years later the family moved to the Northwest Territory: the mother and her four youngest children made the trip from Wheeling to Portsmouth by flatboat, while twelve-year-old Edward followed an overland trail on horseback, leading a second horse, all the way to Chillicothe, where the family crowded into one of just three cabins then standing in the future capital. The next spring, 1799, they moved on again to a farm near the mouth of Deer Creek, and Edward Rector spent the rest of a long life in the township, dying there in 1876 at nearly ninety. His descendants were still farming Deer Creek Township land when the county history was written in 1880.

A Township Named for a Lake It Doesn't Quite Touch

Deer Creek Township shares its name with Deer Creek Lake and Deer Creek State Park, and it would be reasonable to assume the two are the same place. They are not, quite. The dam the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed on Deer Creek in 1968 backs water up mainly into neighboring Perry and Monroe townships, and the park built around it, opened by the state in 1974, is described in its own sources as sitting in Fayette and Pickaway counties, south of Mount Sterling, a good distance northwest of Deer Creek Township itself. The township's own geography, as described in current sources, borders Jackson, Wayne, Deerfield (Ross County), Perry, and Monroe townships, with no mention of the lake at all. Deer Creek Township's real claim on the waterway is upstream and older: the creek itself, the mills that once lined it, and the Shawnee towns recorded on its banks in the 1770s.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Pickaway County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Williamsport Village69% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Clarksburg Village13% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Darbyville Village9% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc9% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2023: 0 of 1 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

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

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