Hopewell Township, Seneca County

How Hopewell Township, Seneca County began

Hopewell Township was organized in 1824, the same year Seneca County itself was formally organized, and covers 34.5 square miles in the western-central part of the county. Its main settlement is Bascom, platted in 1837 and named for Scott & Bascom, publishers of The Ohio State Journal, which got its own post office in 1850 and later grew up around the crossing of State Routes 18 and 635; a strip of the county seat, Tiffin, also extends into the township's eastern edge. Otherwise the township has stayed agricultural, its history bound up with Bascom's small-town commerce and, more recently, with the shared Hopewell-Loudon school district it built with its western neighbor.

Incorporated 1824 (organized), by organized by Seneca County.

Where the name comes from

One of five townships named Hopewell in Ohio; the specific reasoning behind this township's naming was not found in the sources checked (Ohio's many Hopewell townships commonly took the name as a generic aspirational or personal-name choice rather than for any single documented person or place).

Before the town

No Native American village, mound, trail, or treaty site specific to Hopewell Township is documented in the sources checked, but Lang's 1880 county history records a direct encounter on the Ogle family farm on Wolf Creek: in the fall of 1826, a Native man named Thomas Brandt and a companion came to settler Joseph Ogle's cabin asking for bread; Brandt, who was drunk, drew a tomahawk against Mrs. Ogle before the other man stopped him. The township's name is coincidentally identical to the Hopewell archaeological culture (the Middle Woodland mound-building tradition, about 100 BC to AD 500), but no source checked connects the township's naming to that culture, and no Hopewell-culture site in the township itself was found. The county's historic-era Native history includes the Seneca reservation and its 1831 removal.

Timeline

1. 1813 — A road is laid out along the terrace on the west bank of the Sandusky River by order of General Harrison and under General Bell; James Meeker and men from Wooster underbrush it, following an Indian trail that looked as if traveled for centuries.
2. 1820 — The township is surveyed into sections and quarter sections in 1820; the first settlers arrive in 1822.
3. 1824-06-15 — Joseph Ogle, whose family becomes the third to land in Tiffin after the county's organization, arrives and soon buys the southwest quarter of section twenty-three on Wolf Creek, later known as the Ogle farm; he builds a cabin and moves onto the land in April 1826.
4. 1824-12-07 — Hopewell Township is organized; Lang's county history dates it precisely to December 7, 1824, with the first election held that Christmas Day at the house of Joseph Fool, electing Joseph Rosenberger, John Stover and Nathan Cadwallader trustees, James Gordon clerk and John Stoner treasurer.
5. 1826-04 — Joseph Ogle moves into the cabin he built on Wolf Creek; he and his son rode two days to the plains for corn and two more to a mill near Lower Sandusky to have it ground.
6. 1836 — James Durbin platts a village named Hopewell for Samuel Waggoner on section 16; the village of Bascom later flanks it, and Hopewell no longer exists.
7. 1837-02-01 — John Miller lays out the town of Bascom on section seventeen, with George W. Gist as surveyor; the settlement later becomes a station on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
8. 1850 — A post office opens at Bascom.
9. 1852 — Steinersville is platted on section 25 by G. H. Heming for Henry H. Steiner; it too vanishes.
10. 1880 — The township's population reaches 1,635, up from 549 in 1830, 918 in 1840, and 1,477 in 1870.
11. 1885 — The township's population, including Bascom, is estimated at about 1,800, and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad crosses it from northwest to southeast on its way into Tiffin.
12. 2020 — The 2020 census counts 2,672 residents in Hopewell Township.

Stories

The bear on the Fostoria road

John Dawalt, who came to Hopewell Township in 1833, was walking the road from Tiffin to Fostoria about half a mile from Bascom when he met a bear that turned and came at him. Carrying neither a gun nor an axe, he had only a hickory walking cane, and with no room to run he fought the animal off with the cane, beating it until it went down, then killed it; his wife ran up during the fight, but he told her to stay back until the danger had passed. Around the same years, neighbors George and Peter Slosser had their own run-ins with the township's wildlife: in March 1834 a wolf attacked George's dog and then turned on him, and Slosser felled it with a stick of firewood, and that August a deer that had wandered into his wheat field became tangled in a brush pile after jumping a rail fence and was killed there.

The county's first schoolhouse in Hopewell

Joseph Ogle helped build the first schoolhouse in Hopewell Township, put up on the southeast quarter of the school section about two and a half miles from his own farm. Settlers Sprague and Charles Chaney split the puncheons for the floor, Mr. Chenowith and John Chaney built the stick chimney, and Abraham Miller and Ogle himself built the desks and benches by boring two-inch auger holes into the log walls, driving in sticks about two feet long, and laying loose clapboards across them; the seats were plain puncheon benches. Mr. Chenowith served as the township's first schoolmaster there, teaching reading, writing and spelling, the whole of the course offered. Ogle's own son Thomas, still a boy at the time, was credited with cutting the first tree cleared on the family's land.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Aqua Ohio - Tiffin100% of residentsSandusky River

Community health centers (1)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (2)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-07-29

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