Jasper Township, Fayette County

How Jasper Township, Fayette County began

Jasper Township, in western Fayette County, was created in 1845 from the southern point of Jefferson Township and part of Concord, and is the only Jasper Township in Ohio. Its first settlers, Jacob and Joseph Coile of Pendleton County, Virginia, arrived in 1809 on a military claim of their father's, and Virginians and Kentuckians such as the Bushes, Burnetts and Stephen Mitchell Irvin, who left Kentucky to raise his family in a free state, followed. Its villages grew around roads, mills and railroads: Plymouth (1845), Jasper Mills around the Bryan brothers' 1854 grist mill, Milledgeville (1855) and Allentown, later Octa (1876). It remains farmland drained by Sugar and Rattlesnake creeks, with about 700 residents in 2020.

Settled 1809, incorporated 1845 (township organized), by Jacob and Joseph Coile (first settlers); petition of William Rankin (township).

Where the name comes from

No township-specific naming account is recorded; Jasper Township, Fayette County is noted as the only township of that name statewide, distinguishing it from the unincorporated place called Jasper in Pike County.

Before the town

No named Native village is recorded inside Jasper Township, but the 1872 pioneer record notes traces of earlier people. Among the township's streams it lists an 'Indian Camp Run,' a name that points to a camp site the record does not describe. Robert Burnett, who settled in the area in 1810, told the compiler of an old Indian camp on the bank of Sugar Creek where parties traveling between Fort Clark and Old Town stopped to rest on their annual hunts, and said most of them had by then moved north to Logan County; the camp was near land Burnett leased from 1813 to 1821, which the 1881 history places in Union Township, so it may lie just outside Jasper. The same record reports 'ancient grave yards' on the farms of Esquire Marks and Amos Cole from which unusually large skeletons were dug; the builders and date are unknown, and the Marks land may be the Concord Township tract near Jasper Mills. The land lay in the country the Shawnee and neighboring nations hunted before the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Miami.

Timeline

1. 1809 — In the spring Jacob and Joseph Coile of Pendleton County, Virginia, settle on a military claim belonging to their father Gabriel, a Revolutionary soldier; both families move to Indiana in 1814.
2. 1810 — Robert Burnett arrives from Pendleton County, Virginia; he later becomes a militia captain, surveyor of many county roads and township clerk and trustee.
3. 1811 — In March Leonard Bush builds a round-log cabin, without a floor until June, and clears fifteen acres for corn; he also works as a wheelwright for seventeen years.
4. 1812 — Jones Brooks, a Methodist preacher from Virginia, organizes a Methodist society in the Coile-Bush neighborhood, meeting in homes until a log church is built in 1843.
5. 1813 — Stephen Mitchell Irvin of Bourbon County, Kentucky, builds a cabin on land that straddles Fayette, Clinton and Greene counties; his traveling companion Griffith Foos goes on to lay out Springfield.
6. 1816 — The township's first schoolhouse, a round-log building with puncheon seats and greased-paper windows, is built on Richard Ayres' land; Thomas Powell teaches.
7. 1845 — On March 5 William Rankin petitions for a new township from Jefferson and Concord; on December 2, on the petition of Joseph J. Parrott, Jasper is reduced to its present limits.
8. 1845 — Plymouth, the township's oldest village, is laid out by Robert Hague on the Palmer turnpike; Garland Johnson builds the first building and opens the first store.
9. 1852 — A post office called South Plymouth opens August 26 with E. L. Ford as postmaster; it is renamed Milledgeville in 1877.
10. 1854 — After the railroad is finished, Samuel, Joseph and John Bryan buy five acres from Jacob Bush and build a three-story frame grist mill, the start of the settlement of Jasper Mills.
11. 1855 — Milledgeville, in the north of the township, was laid out and a mill built on the town site the same year.
12. 1858 — The mill settlement, first called Jasper, takes the name Jasper Mills from the brand of flour shipped from its mill.
13. 1864 — The Methodist society builds Mount Carmel church, a frame building costing $1,200, a mile west of Jasper Mills on the Washington and Wilmington turnpike.
14. 1876 — Elijah Allen lays out Allendale (later Allentown, then Octa) at the junction of two railroads.
15. 1877 — A post office was established at Milledgeville.
16. 1880 — F. C. Trebein of Xenia builds a large frame grain elevator with corn-grinding burrs at Allentown.
17. 1882 — A post office named Octa opened in the township's northwest, at a settlement earlier known as Allentown after founder Elijah Allen.
18. 1910 — Milledgeville has 187 people and Allentown (Octa) 91.

Stories

Leaving Kentucky for a free state

Stephen Mitchell Irvin was eight when his family moved from Virginia to Kentucky in 1788, riding in a cart pulled by a single horse. In 1812 or 1813 he, Captain William Palmer, Burwell B. Mills and Griffith Foos left Bourbon County to look for land in Ohio, where slavery was barred by law; the 1881 county history says Irvin 'shuddered at the thought' of raising a family where slavery existed. Irvin, Palmer and Mills settled in the heavy walnut, oak and sugar-maple forest of what became southwestern Jasper Township, on a tract so near the county corner that Irvin paid taxes in Fayette, Clinton and Greene counties. Foos, who disliked so much timber, went on to Clark County, opened a tavern he called Travelers' Home and laid out the town of Springfield. Irvin built his cabin in 1813, beat corn into hominy in a hollowed block for want of mills, traded thirty miles away at Hillsboro, and in later life preached nearly every Sunday until his death in 1852.

A town named for its flour

Jasper Mills was never legally laid out as a town. In 1854, shortly after the railroad reached the township, the brothers Samuel, Joseph and John Bryan bought five acres from Jacob Bush and built a three-story frame grist mill. Cottages clustered around it, and the settlement was at first simply called Jasper. In 1858 it took the name Jasper Mills from the brand of flour the mill shipped, which also kept its post office from sharing the township's name. The Bryans added a sash saw in 1859, a store opened that year in a building they had put up in 1855 and burned out in 1862, and by 1881 the mill and a grain-shipping business were in other hands. The 1914 county history observed that better roads and more railroads had 'almost erased' such small villages from the map.

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

Groundwater wells (6 wells) The water here

• Washington Court House66% of residentsPaint Creek (Washington C.H. Reservoirs) + wells
• Sabina Village31% of residentsGroundwater wells (6 wells)
• Jeffersonville Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (6 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc1% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Bowersville Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Fayette County - culpepper Subdivision0% of residentsPaint Creek (Washington C.H. Reservoirs) + wells

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked. The county's results on file run through 2021-11-02; later elections are not loaded yet.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-06-30
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-07-25

Statewide question: State Issue 3: Voter ID

Local questions for Jasper Township, Fayette County, Fayette County and its school district:

• Fayette County: Renews a 1.9-mill property tax levy for the ambulance & EMS of Fayette County for 3 years, beginning in 2027.

Races, candidates and every question for an address: your ballot. County offices and judges are on your county board's sample ballot.

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