Granville Township, Licking County

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How Granville Township, Licking County began

Two immigrant communities founded Granville Township within a few years of each other. Welsh families led by Theophilus Rees and Thomas Phillips, who had already crossed the Atlantic in 1795 and moved twice within Pennsylvania, bought 2,000 acres in the township's northeast corner and began settling the hilly ground still called the Welsh Hills in 1801 and 1802, the county's first organized settlement outside the Licking valley bottoms. Three years later, in the fall of 1805, a company of colonists from Granville, Massachusetts, organized under articles signed in 1804, arrived to found the village of Granville in the township's center, and the township itself was formally organized in 1807 out of the western half of Licking Township. The Fort Ancient culture had left its own mark centuries earlier on the same landscape, most visibly in the Alligator Mound, an effigy earthwork radiocarbon-dated to around AD 950 that still stands on a hilltop near the estate later called Bryn Du, and in the large hilltop earthwork on the same ground once known as Fort Hill. Today the township holds Granville South and the rural land surrounding Granville village, and continues to carry both the Welsh and New England imprint of its first white settlers.

Settled 1801 (John Jones, on Raccoon Creek; the Welsh Hills settled 1801-1802 by David Lewis, David Thomas, Theophilus Rees, Simon James and "Jimmy" Johnson), incorporated 1807, organized out of the west half of Licking Township.

Where the name comes from

The township, like the village at its center, takes its name from Granville, Massachusetts, home to most of the colonists who organized the Licking Land Company there on April 23, 1804, and arrived to settle the area in the fall of 1805.

Before the town

Granville Township holds a number of ancient earthworks. The Alligator Mound (also called Alligator Effigy Mound), an effigy shaped like an alligator or, by more recent interpretation, an underwater panther, stretches roughly 200 feet from head to tail on a hilltop about six miles west of Newark, near Granville; Squier and Davis surveyed it for the Smithsonian in 1848, and radiocarbon dating conducted in 1999 by Brad Lepper and Tod Frolking dated its construction to around AD 950. Close by, on the same ridge later known as the McCune farm, an extensive earthwork called Fort Hill enclosed about fifty acres with an outer defensive wall and two smaller circular refuges on the hilltop; a large mansion, built in 1865 and known first as McCune's Villa and later renamed Bryn Du, now stands on part of that same ground. Nearby stood the Crescent, a curious gravel mound shaped like a half-moon, and a large circular earthwork of seventy-five to eighty acres that had entirely disappeared under cultivation by the time the 1881 county history was written. An Indian trail branched off the main Raccoon valley route and ran north to a Wyandot village near Johnstown, and the 1881 history notes that the Raccoon valley was extensively used as a hunting ground, though "unfortunately no Indian history has been preserved in connection with this township" regarding permanent historic-era camps. The Welsh Hills settlers, arriving in 1801-1802, recorded peaceful visits from a Native leader remembered as "Big Joe" and a few followers, frequent guests at the cabin of settler David Lewis who frightened but never harmed the family.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Fort Ancient culture.

• Alligator Mound (Alligator Effigy Mound) (mound) — hilltop near Bryn Du Drive, eastern side of Granville, Fort Ancient culture, radiocarbon-dated to about AD 950 (en.wikipedia.org)
• Fort Hill (McCune farm) earthwork (earthwork) — on the McCune farm, lots 5 and 6 of the Granville purchase, near the Alligator Mound, Mound Builder era (unspecified) (archive.org)
• The Crescent (other) — on the bottom land near the Alligator Mound, lot 8 of the Granville purchase, Mound Builder era (unspecified) (archive.org)
• Wyandot village near Johnstown (trail connection) (trail) — Indian trail branching from the Raccoon valley route toward Johnstown, historic era, pre-1807 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. c. AD 950 — The Fort Ancient culture builds the Alligator Mound, according to 1999 radiocarbon dating by Brad Lepper and Tod Frolking.
2. 1800 — In late November, John Jones, Phineas Ford, Frederick Ford and Benoni Benjamin camp on Ramp Creek while scouting land, and Jones meets fellow Pennsylvania schoolmate Isaac Stadden by chance at their campfire.
3. 1801 — John Jones builds the first white settler's cabin in the township on Raccoon Creek in spring; Theophilus Rees and Thomas Phillips purchase 2,000 acres in the township's northeast corner (the future Welsh Hills) from Philadelphia land dealer Sampson Davis.
4. 1801-1802 — David Lewis and David Thomas leave Bulah, Pennsylvania, and build the first cabins on the Welsh Hills; Theophilus Rees, Simon James and frontiersman "Jimmy" Johnson establish themselves there in 1802.
5. 1802 — On October 1, Mrs. Jones gives birth to the first white child born in the township; she dies of puerperal fever on October 22 and is buried in Newark, the township's first white death.
6. 1804 — On April 23, thirty-five subscribers sign articles of association in East Granville, Massachusetts, founding the Licking Land Company to purchase and settle Ohio land.
7. 1805 — The Granville colony arrives from Massachusetts and Connecticut in the fall and purchases the company's surveyed lots, founding the village of Granville.
8. 1806 — General Augustine Munson builds the first sawmill in the township, with a capacity of four thousand feet of lumber a day.
9. 1807 — Granville Township is organized out of the west half of Licking Township, Fairfield County.
10. 1848 — Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis survey and measure the Alligator Mound for the Smithsonian Institution, publishing it in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.
11. 1865 — Henry D. Wright builds an Italianate villa of local sandstone on the Fort Hill earthwork site; Jonas McCune buys it within a year, and it becomes known as McCune's Villa.
12. 1905 — Coal and railroad magnate John Sutphin Jones buys McCune's Villa, commissions architect Frank Packard for a five-year Georgian-Federal remodel, and renames the estate Bryn Du, Welsh for "Black Hill."
13. 1971 — The Alligator Mound is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
14. 1999 — Archaeologists Brad Lepper and Tod Frolking recover charcoal samples from the Alligator Mound and radiocarbon-date its construction to about AD 950.

Stories

The Alligator on the Hill

On a hilltop east of Granville stands one of only two surviving animal-shaped earthworks in Ohio: a low effigy mound about two hundred feet long, its body twenty feet wide, its four legs twenty-five feet each, that early surveyors took for an alligator or American crocodile. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis measured it for the Smithsonian in 1848 and speculated it had been an object of worship on one of the ancient people's "chief high places." More than a century later, in 1999, archaeologists Brad Lepper and Tod Frolking recovered charcoal from the mound and used radiocarbon dating to place its construction at roughly AD 950, the work of the Fort Ancient culture. Modern archaeologists have also reconsidered what animal it depicts, some now favoring an underwater panther of Native tradition over an alligator few Fort Ancient people would ever have seen alive. Whatever its builders intended it to represent, the mound has survived the plow, the road, and the modern subdivision built up around it, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971 and marked with a state historical marker since 1998.

Two Colonies, Four Years Apart

The first Europeans to settle permanently in Granville Township were not the Massachusetts colonists the village is named for, but Welsh families who had already been on the move for years. Theophilus Rees and Thomas Phillips, neighbors in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, sailed for America in 1795, lived for a time near Philadelphia, moved to a Welsh settlement in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and only then, in 1801, bought 2,000 acres in what became the northeast quarter of Granville Township, sight unseen, on the word of scouts they sent ahead. David Lewis and David Thomas broke ground on the Welsh Hills in 1802, followed within the year by Rees's own family and by a hired frontiersman recruited in Wheeling, "Jimmy" Johnson, paid in land for his services. Only in the fall of 1805, three or four years later, did the second colony arrive: New Englanders from Granville, Massachusetts, and Granby, Connecticut, who had organized their land company in 1804 and now purchased and settled the surveyed village lots at the township's center. The Welsh cleared and farmed the hills to the northeast while the Yankees built their village in the valley, two transplanted communities settling the same township within half a decade of each other, each keeping its own church, its own language for a time, and its own account of how it came to be there.

From McCune's Villa to Bryn Du

The hilltop earthwork the 1881 county history calls Fort Hill, a fifty-acre enclosure with an outer defensive wall and two small circular refuges near its southern end, sits on ground that later carried one of the township's grandest houses. Businessman Henry D. Wright built an Italianate villa there in 1865 using sandstone quarried on the property; within a year Jonas McCune owned it, and it became known simply as McCune's Villa. In 1905, John Sutphin Jones, who had built a fortune in coal and railroads, bought the estate and hired Columbus architect Frank Packard for a five-year transformation into a fifty-two room Georgian-Federal mansion, widening the house from 100 to 140 feet and adding a grand Federal portico. Jones renamed it Bryn Du, Welsh for "Black Hill," a nod to both his own heritage and the coal country that had made him rich, in a township whose oldest white community was, fittingly, Welsh. The Village of Granville has owned and maintained the estate since 2002.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Licking County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Granville, Village Of73% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Licking Regional Water District26% of residentsRaccoon Creek Valley aquifer (local wells)
• Alexandria Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Nursing homes (1)

Public schools (1)

Public EV charging (1)

Superfund sites (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (7)

Money issues on the ballot since 2021: 2 of 2 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.
• OP&F Examination, 2023, released 2025-04-22
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-10-17

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