Hartford Township, Licking County

How Hartford Township, Licking County began

Hartford Township, in Licking County's northwestern corner, sits on some of the highest ground between Cleveland and Columbus and was surveyed as school and military land before Daniel Poppleton became its first settler in April 1812. It was carved out as its own township in September 1819, its name chosen by Strong Clark, one of the men who handled the paperwork. The township's defining episode came in 1837, when a mob of pro-slavery settlers, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, twice dragged visiting abolitionist speakers through the streets of Hartford village and beat township residents who declared themselves abolitionists, a riot the county history later called an "unenviable notoriety." Three tornadoes are recorded crossing the township on nearly parallel tracks over the decades, one of them the same 1825 storm remembered elsewhere as the Burlington storm. Away from the village, the record is thin: a scatter of arrowheads and flint tools is the only trace left of the people who hunted here before the township's Congregational and Methodist settlers arrived.

Settled April 1812 (Daniel Poppleton, the township's first settler, on land later surveyed into hundred-acre lots), incorporated September 1819, separated from Bennington Township, by the paperwork and naming were handled by Strong Clark.

Where the name comes from

No source found states directly why Strong Clark, who "did the business and named the township" when it was set off from Bennington in September 1819, chose the name Hartford. The village at the township's center, platted five years later in 1824, is confirmed by Wikipedia to be "named after Hartford, Connecticut, the native home of a share of the early settlers," and since Clark's township and the later village share a name and many of the same New England-descended families, the same origin probably applies to the township, though no source makes that link explicit.

Before the town

The 1881 county history is blunt about this township's Native American record: "There is little or no Indian history connected with the township; but evidences of their occupation are not wanting. Numerous flint arrow points, stone hatchets, and other relics are found." No named village, camp or trail is recorded, and only a single, slight mound-like elevation, on the land of C. L. Graves near the center of the northeast quarter, is noted as a possible Mound Builder work. The Licking County history covers the wider regional and treaty record; the statewide pattern of Wyandot, Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) presence and eventual removal applies to this area only in that general sense, not through any site-specific record.

• Slight elevation, C. L. Graves farm (other) — center of the northeast quarter of the township, unspecified, possibly Mound Builder era (archive.org)

Timeline

1. April 1812 — Daniel Poppleton becomes the township's first settler.
2. 1813 — C. L. Graves and Clark Cooley, having made earlier improvements without settling, move their families in.
3. September 1819 — Hartford is set off as its own township from Bennington; the first election is held at a log school-house on the town plat, with forty-eight votes cast.
4. August 8, 1818 — The township's pioneer church, the Congregational society of Hartford, is organized; Rev. James N. Wright performs the township's first baptism the same day.
5. May 18, 1825 — The second of three tornadoes to cross the township, the storm remembered elsewhere as the Burlington storm, passes about two miles south of the site of Hartford village.
6. March 1837 — A mob drags the visiting Rev. Mr. R. Robinson from the pulpit of the Congregational church and, separately, rides Samuel White, and beats resident William Spencer, for their anti-slavery views, in what the county history calls Hartford's "unenviable notoriety."
7. c. 1850 — Halcyon Academy is incorporated by local stockholders, giving the township a private secondary school; George L. Mills, a Yale graduate, is its first regular teacher.

Stories

The Riot of 1837

In March 1837, word went out that the Rev. Mr. R. Robinson, a well-known abolitionist, would lecture in Hartford's Congregational church. A crowd of township men, many of them settlers from Maryland and Virginia in the township's western half, gathered on the appointed day, seized Robinson from the pulpit, and dragged him through the village streets. The same month, the Hon. Samuel White, announcing a lecture of his own, was hunted down at the farm where he was hiding, marched into the village, forced to straddle a wooden horse hoisted on men's shoulders, and paraded up and down the street; only White's flat warning that he would not be blacked with a waiting dish of lampblack and oil while he was alive turned the mob aside. The same day resident William Spencer was beaten bloody by half a dozen men while shouting, again and again, "I am an abolitionist," and two other men were roughly handled alongside him. For months afterward, bands of six to a dozen men rode past abolitionists' houses at night firing guns through the gates and howling. A. B. Clark, writing in 1880 as a Republican candidate for Congress and a former Hartford resident, recorded the episode in detail but named none of the participants, noting that most had long since come to regret their part in it, and that within a generation Hartford had become known instead for its literary culture and its schools.

Three Storms on Parallel Tracks

Hartford Township lay across the path of three separate tornadoes, all running roughly west to east within the space of less than two miles of one another. The earliest, so old that no one by 1880 could say when it struck, left a belt of unusually young second-growth timber running straight through the site of the future village, remembered by a Welsh pioneer from Granville Township who had known the tract as a thicket decades before any of this was written down. The second was the great storm of May 18, 1825, remembered county-wide as the Burlington storm for the damage it did there, which passed through Hartford about two miles south of the first storm's track. The third, in June 1835, ran between the other two and was destructive but, the county history notes, "not so severe as the others." Three parallel scars, cut by storms decades apart, are as close as the township's early settlers came to a natural landmark of their own.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.100% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells

Facilities reporting toxic releases (6)

Spills reported since 2021 (5)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 4 of 6 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 3 of 5.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

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

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