Fayette

• The Toledo WarThe 1835-36 Ohio-Michigan boundary dispute over the Toledo Strip: a bad map, a 3 a.m. court, one stabbing, no deaths, and the Upper Peninsula trade.

How Fayette began

Fayette incorporated as a village in 1872, when the railroad was extended to the site in central Gorham Township, and a post office opened the following year. A real-photo postcard mailed on October 1, 1907 is the earliest surviving image of the village found. Fayette's population has held roughly steady around 1,300 residents from the 2020 census onward.

Settled 1845, incorporated 1872, by Rensselaer S. Humphrey (first to clear the site).

Where the name comes from

The origin of the name Fayette is not documented.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or trail specific to Fayette is recorded. The village sits in Gorham Township, inside the tract ceded at the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.

Timeline

1. 1807-11-17 — The Treaty of Detroit cedes the tract of northwest Ohio that includes the future village's land.
2. 1845 — Rensselaer S. Humphrey clears land on the site, builds the first log cabin within the village limits and cuts the brush for what became Main Street; Daniel Keifer follows in 1846 and Henry Gamber and Dr. Amos Kendall about 1848.
3. 1851 — Dr. Joseph O. Allen arrives and joins Humphrey in business; Humphrey had already set up a store and blacksmith shop on his farm that drew other settlers.
4. 1852 — The place is known as Fayette by this date, though Captain Charles L. Allen later calls it Gorham Center; the first post office, in Erastus Cottrell's home near Fayette, had been called Gorham.
5. 1856 — Humphrey and Dr. Allen put the first sawmill in the township into operation on Humphrey's farm, and in 1856 or 1857 build the first steam gristmill, whose flouring mill is still running in 1920.
6. 1866-07-04 — William Hardenburg opens the Hardenburg Hotel, a 40-by-80-foot two-story tavern with a 40-by-40-foot ballroom, with cannon salutes from midnight to sunrise and a crowd that taxed Morenci to feed.
7. 1872 — Fayette incorporates as a village when the railroad is extended to the site.
8. 1872-07-04 — The Chicago and Canada Southern Railway completes its line to Fayette and runs the first train on this date, the year the village incorporates.
9. 1873 — A post office opens under the name Fayette.
10. 1887 — Fayette has three general stores, two grocers, two clothing stores, two drug stores, a hardware store, the Bank of Fayette, flour and saw mills, three blacksmith and wagon shops, a newspaper, a higher-grade school and several churches.
11. 1906 — The Fayette United Methodist Church, later photographed at 305 E. Main Street, is built.
12. 1907-10-01 — A real-photo postcard of Fayette is mailed, the earliest dated image of the village located.
13. 1908 — The Fayette Review describes the village as having three churches, an opera house, three banks, two hotels, a flouring mill, two sawmills, a stave mill, a canning factory, a creamery, an elevator, a handle factory and two orchestras.
14. 1913 — The old Bank of Fayette goes into liquidation in September, after twenty-seven years; the Farmers State Bank and the Fayette State Savings Bank had been founded in recent years.
15. 1918-04-13 — Fayette is the first Fulton County town to win an honor flag in the fourth and fifth Liberty loan campaigns; at the flag-raising that night, German textbooks gathered from the public schools are burned on the public square.
16. 2020 — The census counts 1,305 people in Fayette, up from 1,283 in 2010.

Stories

The Fayette Normal and the Fourth of July tavern

Fayette's first big day came on July 4, 1866, when William Hardenburg, an operative Mason from Providence, Rhode Island, opened the Hardenburg Hotel, a 40-by-80-foot, two-story building with a 40-by-40-foot ballroom upstairs that held a hundred dancers. Cannon fired from midnight to sunrise, people came from miles around for the biggest crowd the village had seen, and neighboring Morenci was called on to help feed them while the bar was kept supplied by steady work at a nearby pump. As the village grew, its schools filled, and E. P. Ewers and John Ogden solicited funds for a large building with boarding-house rooms, the Fayette Normal, Music and Business College. After several years the management moved its interests to Wauseon, the building was vacated, and it was finally sold for junk. Charles L. Allen wrote that this roused the villagers, who built the Fayette High School, which under the Dodd brothers became one of the best of its class.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Fayette Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (2)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Money issues on the ballot since 2016: 5 of 6 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 4 of 4.

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.
• Financial Audit, 2024, released 2025-11-18
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-09-26

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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