Jefferson Township, Montgomery County

How Jefferson Township, Montgomery County began

Jefferson Township was organized June 10, 1805, cut from the older German Township in central Montgomery County. By 1833 it was a working farm township with three gristmills, three sawmills and eight distilleries turning its grain and timber into flour, lumber and whiskey. It never incorporated a county-seat-style village of its own; its population lives today in the unincorporated places Drexel and New Chicago and in the portions of Moraine and West Carrollton that lie within its borders; it borders Trotwood to the north and Dayton to the northeast. The township remains, in effect, Dayton's near southwest edge: suburbanized, cut through by rail and highway, with little of its farm-township fabric left standing above ground.

Settled c. 1800 (John Gripe, on Big Bear Creek near what became Liberty), incorporated 1805-06-10, by organized from German Township.

Where the name comes from

The 1882 History of Montgomery County states the naming plainly: 'The appellation was given it in honor of Thomas Jefferson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States.' This resolves the gap left by Wikipedia, which gave only the general pattern of Ohio townships named for presidents and Founders without confirming it for this specific township.

Before the town

No site-specific Native American history — a named village, trail, mound, or documented encounter located within Jefferson Township itself — is found in the sources searched. The broader Great Miami valley in which the township sits was Miami and Shawnee country through the mid-to-late 1700s; nearby Miamisburg (immediately south of the township) held one of the largest Adena mounds in Ohio, and the Treaty of Greenville (August 3, 1795), concluded at Fort Greenville roughly 30 miles northwest, ceded most of the future state of Ohio, including this ground, to the United States, ending organized Native occupation of the area ahead of the wave of settlement that produced Jefferson Township in 1805. This paragraph is deliberately general; a township-specific claim was not found and none is asserted here.

Nations recorded here: Miami, Shawnee.

Timeline

1. 1805-06-10 — Jefferson Township is organized out of German Township in Montgomery County.
2. c. 1800 — John Gripe, the earliest settler the 1882 county history could identify, built his cabin along Big Bear Creek near the future site of Liberty; about the same time Virginians named Miller and Gingerick, brothers-in-law, also settled along the creek.
3. 1802 — Jacob Mullendore, a Virginian, settled in the township and during the War of 1812 hauled flour to the soldiers at Greenville; Michael Myers settled within the township's present limits the following year.
4. 1804 — Michael Moyer settled in Section 27 and, per the 1804 tax duplicate, was taxed that year on 614 acres of land there; Michael Weaver, of Pennsylvania, settled the same year on Little Bear Creek, where his son Peter later built, at age nineteen, what the 1882 county history calls the first windmill ever put up in Ohio.
5. 1807-1808 — Henry Weaver built the township's first saw and grist mills on Big Bear Creek in Section 18; the grist-mill's water-wheel was built by Martin Saylor, and the mills were later rebuilt by 'Uncle Abe' Weaver, who ran them for years afterward.
6. 1808-1810 — The township's first schoolhouse was built near the future village of Gettersburg, at the intersection of the Farmersville and Germantown pikes, and taught by a Mr. Brown.
7. 1812 — Lutheran and German Reformed settlers jointly built the township's first meeting-house, a hewed-log union church known as Salem Church, in the eastern part of Section 28; it stood until replaced by a brick church on the same ground in 1860.
8. 1815 — The town of Liberty was platted in December on land owned by Peter [surname illegible in the 1882 county history], in originally seventy-two lots, though several cabins had already clustered at the site for years beforehand; William Brown, a bachelor, had already opened the township's first store there around 1809.
9. 1833 — The township contains three gristmills, three sawmills and eight distilleries, according to the source cited by Wikipedia's article on the township.
10. c. 1855 — The village of Gettersburg, on Big Bear Creek, took its name from Jacob Getter, who owned the site and began selling lots there; John Snepp, Sr. later made an addition to the village, and its post office was not established until October 1879, with George Winder as postmaster.
11. 1872 — St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church was organized and its house built; members had previously worshiped at Providence Church in neighboring Perry Township before the distance for the township's own congregation prompted a separate church.

Stories

A table built around a tree stump

Henry Hepner, a blacksmith who came to the area from Virginia in 1806, first built a rude cabin just over the line in Jackson Township before purchasing land of his own in Jefferson and building again. The 1882 county history preserves one detail of his first cabin: a huge oak stood on the chosen building site, and rather than clear it away entirely, Hepner felled the tree but left the stump at a carefully judged height, dressed it, and raised his cabin around it so that the stump itself became his family's table. 'It was the table of that home for years,' the historian writes, and though it lacked the polish of 'the covered tables of to-day,' it wore, in his words, 'an air of solidity that was charming' -- an old frontier proof, he adds, that necessity is the mother of invention. Hepner made his own knives and forks by hand and served the surrounding settlements as their blacksmith for years; he died at seventy-three, his wife living to ninety-seven.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · hmdb.org · hmdb.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org

Mad River Well Field wells along the Mad River east of Dayton, refilled by river water let into recharge lagoons The water here

• Dayton Public Water System58% of residentsGreat Miami Buried Valley Aquifer wells (recharged by Great Miami & Mad Rivers)
• Montgomery County Water Services 228% of residentsGreat Miami Buried Valley Aquifer wells (recharged by Great Miami & Mad Rivers)
• New Lebanon Village6% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Germantown City4% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Trotwood City3% of residentsGreat Miami Buried Valley Aquifer wells (recharged by Great Miami & Mad Rivers)
• Voyager Village MHP1% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Farmersville Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Jefferson Regional Water Authority0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Southwest Regional Water District0% of residentsGreat Miami Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)

Fire and EMS stations (3)

Public schools (2)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Police stations (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (5)

Money issues on the ballot since 2025: 0 of 4 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 0 of 1.

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, 2024, released 2026-07-07
• Financial Audit, 2023, released 2025-06-26
• Financial Audit, 2022, released 2024-12-05

Cite this page