Harrison Township, Muskingum County

How Harrison Township, Muskingum County began

Harrison Township was organized December 20, 1839 out of parts of Blue Rock, Brush Creek, and Salt Creek townships, and named by early settler John Hammond for General William Henry Harrison. A family named Bean, living in a sycamore hut near Black Run, is remembered as the township's first residents in 1798, decades before the township itself existed. James Taylor platted the village of Taylorsville (later renamed Philo) in 1833 and built mills and a dam at Duncan Falls, and Asa Gay laid out Gaysport in 1880. The township ran on salt production from local saltwells before the Muskingum River became better known for the coal-fired power plant built at Philo in 1924.

Settled 1798 (Bean family), incorporated December 20, 1839, by named by John Hammond for General William Henry Harrison.

Where the name comes from

John Hammond named the new township for General William Henry Harrison, at the time a War of 1812 hero rather than the future ninth president (he was elected president the following year, in 1840).

Before the town

No source consulted documents a named Native American village, mound, trail, or treaty boundary specifically inside Harrison Township. The Helmick Mill Covered Bridge is, according to Wikipedia and the National Register, in Deerfield Township, Morgan County, not Muskingum County at all, and so is not this township's history. This stretch of the Muskingum River valley was Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Mingo territory before the Treaty of Greenville (1795); the county-wide record includes the documented 1791 Wyandot-Delaware raid on settlers near Stockport, downriver in Morgan County, and the county's Adena and Hopewell mound sites.

Timeline

1. 1798 — A family named Bean, living in a sycamore hut near Black Run, are remembered as the first residents of what became the township.
2. 1829-1830 — James Taylor builds mills and a dam at Duncan Falls.
3. 1833 — James Taylor lays out the village of Taylorsville on the Muskingum River, naming it for himself.
4. 1834 — The first documented schoolhouse in the township, a two-story frame building, is erected in Taylorsville; future U.S. President James Garfield later taught school in the township.
5. December 20, 1839 — Harrison Township is organized from parts of Blue Rock, Brush Creek, and Salt Creek townships.
6. 1851 — Taylorsville is renamed Philo, after early settler Philo Buckingham, when its first post office opens.
7. 1880 — Asa Gay lays out the village of Gaysport, naming it for himself; its post office runs from 1888 to 1926.
8. 1924 — The Philo Power Plant, a coal-fired electric generating station, is built on the Muskingum River.
9. 1957 — Unit 6 at the Philo Power Plant becomes the first commercial supercritical steam-electric generating unit in the world.

Stories

Future president Garfield's classroom

Long before he became the twentieth President of the United States, James A. Garfield taught school in Harrison Township, part of the itinerant teaching work common for young, ambitious Ohio men without capital in the mid-1800s. The township's first documented schoolhouse, a two-story frame building put up in Taylorsville in 1834, was the kind of plain, one-room-per-floor building where that teaching happened, a reminder that the road to the presidency for an Ohio farm boy sometimes ran directly through a rural Muskingum County classroom.

From Taylorsville to Philo to the power grid

The village at the northern edge of Harrison Township has worn three identities. James Taylor platted it as Taylorsville in 1833 and put up mills and a dam nearby at Duncan Falls. In 1851 a new post office renamed it Philo, for early settler Philo Buckingham, and the river town spent the next seven decades as a center of Muskingum River commerce and coal traffic. Then in 1924 a coal-fired electric plant rose on the riverbank, and by 1957 its Unit 6 was the first commercial supercritical steam-electric generator built anywhere in the world, a genuine engineering landmark for a small Ohio village. The plant closed in 1975 and a linked steel-alloy plant in 1980, and Philo has spent the decades since working through the same economic decline as many small river towns left behind by the industries that once defined them.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Philo89% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Muskingum County Water - Se11% of residentsMuskingum River buried valley aquifer (wells near Duncan Falls)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2017: 2 of 3 passed.

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, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-07-22

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