Leesburg Township, Union County

How Leesburg Township, Union County began

Leesburg Township, the seventh township organized in Union County, was settled by squatters before 1820 and by permanent families that year, and takes its name from an offhand joke at pioneer Cyprian Lee's cabin-raising. Its best-known place is Magnetic Springs, which grew almost overnight after a mineral spring was discovered on J. E. Newhouse's land in 1879 and turned the crossroads into a resort town of hotels and bathhouses. The township's other village, Pharisburg, developed as an ordinary farm-trade center after Allen Pharis platted it in 1847. The National Register's Reed Covered Bridge and Gilcrist House, both tagged to the shared 43040 ZIP code, are not in Leesburg Township: the bridge stood in Darby Township until it collapsed in 1993, and the house is listed at Marysville.

Settled before 1820 (squatters); 1820 (permanent settlers), incorporated 1825, by organized as the seventh township in Union County.

Where the name comes from

The name comes from the informal 'christening' of settler Cyprian Lee's cabin by neighbor John L. Swartz sometime between 1820 and 1825; one telling of the story has a German-accented neighbor declaring at the cabin-raising, 'Vell, ve calls it Leesburg.'

Before the town

No Native village, mound or trail within Leesburg Township is recorded in the sources checked. The county history says that when Culwell Williamson of Virginia first visited his thousand-acre survey in 1811 no white settlers were near but the forests were full of Indians, and it contrasts the Native way of gathering wild honey, climbing the tree and cutting out the comb, with the settlers' bee-hunting by compass and bee line. The township's earliest 'squatters' came for deer and honey long before permanent settlers arrived in 1820. The region's wider record includes Wyandot, Shawnee and Mingo history and the Greenville treaty line, and the county history describes the neighbouring hunting grounds in its account of Claibourne Township.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Shawnee, Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga), Miami.

Timeline

1. 1809 — The original land survey is made; William Semple's survey 803, of 1,000 acres, is run on November 17 in the central western part of the township.
2. 1811 — Culwell Williamson of Lynchburg, Virginia, rides horseback to see his 1,000-acre survey 3,694 and finds no settlers near but forests full of Indians.
3. 1820 — Permanent settlement began in Leesburg Township after earlier squatters; Simon Gates Jr. is among the earliest recorded settlers.
4. 1824 — Williamson moves out from Virginia with his sister and her children after eight weeks on the road; neighbours from the Scioto raise his cabin, one mile up Boke's Creek from the later Magnetic Springs, in a single day. John Newhouse also settles just north of the future spring site this year.
5. 1825 — Leesburg is organized as the seventh township in Union County, originally including Jackson and Claibourne; ten men vote at the first election on October 11.
6. 1827 — Richard Hoskins, born at Franklin, Ohio in 1804, settles on a hundred-acre tract bought from Williamson's lands and clears a farm in the forest, where he raises ten children; Henry Gandy, 'the Yankee from New Jersey,' settles two miles from Pharisburg the same year.
7. 1830 — The township's tax duplicate shows 33 horses and 115 cattle with a total valuation of $2,240; about nine settlers, including Abraham Elifritz, Thomas Foreman and John Price, have started farms.
8. 1832 — Nathan Meek builds a 'corn-cracker' mill on Boke's Creek a mile below Pharisburg, grinding forty bushels a day with twenty-inch stones that were still in use in the early 1880s.
9. 1835 — Robert Pharis buys survey 3,693, of 1,000 acres, near the center of the township, on which Pharisburg is later laid out.
10. 1847 — William B. Irwin surveys Pharisburg on July 21 for Allen Pharis, administrator of Robert Pharis, on about ten acres at the center of the township, where the crossroads had been called Scott's Corners.
11. 1879 — A mineral spring was discovered on J. E. Newhouse's property; by the next year about a dozen houses had been built.
12. 1880 — The post office at the new Magnetic Springs is established on May 17 as Kokosing and renamed Magnetic Springs on January 31, 1881.
13. 1882 — Magnetic Springs' seasonal population ranged from 300 to 500, supporting two hotels, a bathhouse, two grocery stores and a jeweler, blacksmith, livery and photo gallery among other businesses.
14. 1903 — A trolley line is running between Delaware and Magnetic Springs by this year; it was later extended to Richwood.
15. 1907 — A fire destroys the heart of Magnetic Springs, ending its first boom.
16. 1914 — The township has a population of 1,245; Pharisburg, once a stores-and-shops hamlet, is a small trading point of about 125 people.
17. 2020 — The census counts 1,487 people in the township, 267 of them in Magnetic Springs.

Stories

A mineral spring turns a farm into a resort

In 1879, mineral water was found on the property of J. E. Newhouse in what would become Magnetic Springs. Newhouse opened a bathhouse to let visitors sample the water, which was promoted for supposed curative, magnetic properties. Word spread fast: within a year a dozen houses stood on the site, and by 1882 the town's population swelled seasonally to 300-500 people, enough to support two hotels, two grocery stores, a hardware store, a jeweler, a billiard parlor, a meat market, a livery stable, a blacksmith shop and a photo gallery. By 1903 a trolley line ran between Delaware and Magnetic Springs, later extended to Richwood. The resort's decline followed the rise of modern medicine, including the polio vaccine, which undercut the appeal of mineral-water cures; by the early 1980s its hotels had all been torn down.

Bee hunters on Blue's Creek

The first people to work the woods of Leesburg Township were squatters who came for deer and honey, and the county history says nobody can now say who they were or when, since the records are lost. Bee-hunting was a trade of its own. The hunter carried a pocket compass, burnt honeycomb between two heated stones to draw the bees, set out honey mixed with anise seed, and watched the course of a fed bee as it flew straight home; taking the line of two bees from two places, he found the tree where the lines crossed and cut his initials in the bark, which by universal consent made the tree his. The Indian method, the history notes, was to climb a tree and cut out the honey. One early settler found twenty-five bee trees in three weeks and took ten gallons of honey from two hives in a single tree. Deliverance Brown, another hunter on Boke's Creek, killed seventy-five to a hundred deer a year until the game was too thin to hunt and he left for the West.

A cabin raised in a day

Culwell Williamson of Lynchburg, Virginia, bought a thousand acres on Boke's Creek early in the 1800s, set aside two hundred acres for two Virginia local preachers, Munson and Denton, and rode up on horseback in 1811 to look at it, finding forest full of Indians and no white neighbours. He did not move until 1824, when he came with a four-horse wagon, his widowed sister Jane Martin and her three children, and a nephew and niece, eight weeks on the road. At his land he got help from the Scioto settlements: the men arrived before seven in the morning and worked till late at night, and in one day the cabin was raised, clapboarded, roofed, a doorway sawed out and a door hung. That night, for the first time since leaving Virginia, it rained, and the family listened to it on the new roof. Williamson, an old bachelor and house carpenter, surveyed his land into small tracts and sold them to incoming settlers before his death in 1828.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · uccogs.org · magneticspringsoh.gov · en.wikipedia.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Marysville City86% of residentsMill Creek via Marysville Reservoir (Raymond Rd) + wells
• Richwood Village13% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Del-co Water Company, Inc.0% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Milford Center Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Superfund sites (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

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 2025-08-21

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