Highland Township, Muskingum County

How Highland Township, Muskingum County began

Highland Township, named for the high ground within its borders, was organized in 1814 and reduced to its present size on July 2, 1819. Settlement began in 1808 when Mathias Trace arrived from Pennsylvania, and the township's chief village, Bloomfield, was surveyed into lots in 1853 on land owned by David Rankin, four miles north of New Concord. New Concord itself, laid out in 1827 along the National Road and home to Muskingum University (founded 1837) and astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn, straddles Highland and neighboring Union townships and served as Bloomfield's nearest shipping and banking point. Today Highland is a rural township of farms and small settlements built around the mills, churches, and one-room schools of the 1800s.

Settled 1808 (Mathias Trace), incorporated 1814, reduced to present area July 2, 1819, by Mathias Trace, first settler, from Pennsylvania.

Where the name comes from

The township was named Highland for the elevated character of its land.

Before the town

No source consulted documents a named Native American village, mound, trail, or treaty boundary specifically inside Highland Township. The John Glenn Boyhood Home and other National Register buildings in the area sit in the village of New Concord as listed on the National Register, and New Concord itself straddles both Union and Highland townships, so we cannot confidently claim those buildings' immediate surroundings as Highland Township ground rather than Union Township's. More generally, this part of Muskingum County lay within Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Mingo territory before the Treaty of Greenville (1795); no site-specific record for Highland Township itself was found. The county-wide Native record includes documented Adena and Hopewell mound-building activity and a recorded 1791 Wyandot-Delaware raid near Stockport, well outside this township.

Timeline

1. 1808 — Mathias Trace, from Pennsylvania, becomes the township's first settler.
2. 1814 — Highland Township is organized.
3. 1815 — Noah Decker builds the township's first mill.
4. July 2, 1819 — The township is reduced to its present-day boundaries.
5. 1827 — New Concord, whose village lies partly in this township, is laid out where the National Road was extended.
6. 1837 — Muskingum University is founded in New Concord; its first class graduates in 1839.
7. 1853 — The town site of Bloomfield, on David Rankin's land four miles north of New Concord, is formally surveyed into lots.
8. 1862 — M.C. Corkle College begins in the township as a small ministerial training school; it is chartered with full university powers in 1873.
9. 1921 — John Glenn, later a Marine Corps aviator, the first American to orbit Earth, and a U.S. Senator from Ohio, is born in Cambridge and raised in New Concord, whose village lies partly in this township.

Stories

A university town built on the National Road

New Concord owes its existence to the National Road, the federal highway that reached it in 1828 and gave the new village a reason to exist: travelers and freight moving through on their way west. Only nine years later, in 1837, local Presbyterians founded Muskingum University, and the two grew up together, the village supplying the college and the college giving the village its lasting identity. The National Road's importance faded after Interstate 70 bypassed the area in the 1960s and 1970s, but the university remained, and New Concord's best-known son, astronaut and Senator John Glenn, grew up walking its streets in the years before either of them left town.

Bloomfield, a village built on paper

Bloomfield, the principal settlement fully inside Highland Township, did not grow up around a mill or a road crossing so much as around a plan. David Rankin owned the land four miles north of New Concord, and in 1853 he had it formally surveyed into town lots, a common way for a landowner to try to start a village from scratch in 19th-century Ohio. It reached roughly 100 residents and relied on New Concord, its much larger neighbor, as the nearest place to ship goods and bank money.

Local history sources: newconcord-oh.gov · usgenwebsites.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · newconcord-oh.gov · en.wikipedia.org

Every historic place in Muskingum County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• New Concord75% of residentsFox Creek via New Concord reservoirs (Upper & main reservoir)
• Muskingum County Water - Se17% of residentsMuskingum River buried valley aquifer (wells near Duncan Falls)
• Western Guernsey Regional Water District8% of residentsWills Creek via Cambridge Reservoir + Wills Creek direct intake

Public schools (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2017: 1 of 1 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.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-03-04

Cite this page