Liberty Township, Guernsey County

• Salt Fork LakeBuilt 1967 · 2,952 acres

How Liberty Township, Guernsey County began

Liberty Township was organized in 1820 in the northwestern part of Guernsey County. It was first reached in 1807 by William Gibson Sr. and his wife Nancy, who paddled down Wills Creek and built a hut on land where, by the county's own account, they were the only inhabitants; Joseph Bell settled the same year, and the Bell family followed from Virginia in 1810. Kimbolton, platted as Liberty in 1828 and incorporated in 1884, gave up its village charter in 2005 and remains the township's main community.

Settled 1807 (William Gibson Sr.; Joseph Bell), incorporated organized as a township, 1820; Kimbolton incorporated 1884, dissolved 2005, by earliest settlers William Gibson Sr. and Joseph Bell.

Where the name comes from

No source found explains why the township was named Liberty. Its main village was called Liberty until the post office was named Kimbolton, after Kimbolton in England, the birthplace of the first postmaster, Naphtali Luccock, according to Sarchet (1911).

Before the town

No Native American site or village specific to Liberty Township was found in the sources checked. The Kennedy Stone House, sometimes associated with this area through its shared 43749 ZIP code, actually stands in Jefferson Township within Salt Fork State Park, not Liberty Township, and is excluded here.

Timeline

1. 1794 — William Gibson Sr. marries and moves near Wheeling in present West Virginia; in 1800 the family lives in Belmont County, Ohio, where they remain five years before coming to Wills Creek.
2. 1807 — William Gibson Sr. and his wife Nancy canoed down Wills Creek and settled where Liberty Township now lies, the only inhabitants there at the time; they built a hut and later a more substantial home.
3. 1807 — Joseph Bell came from Virginia and settled in Liberty Township.
4. 1810 — The James Bell family arrived in Liberty Township from Virginia.
5. 1818 — Robert Forsythe, born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, marries Elizabeth Bell and settles in Liberty Township until 1832.
6. 1820 — Liberty Township was formally organized.
7. 1828-08-02 — William and John Gibson plat the village of Liberty, now Kimbolton, on section 23.
8. 1831 — Naphtali Luccock, an English-born schoolteacher and first postmaster of Kimbolton, settles in Guernsey County.
9. 1833 — James Gibson, a son of the first settlers, marries; he later runs the hotel at Liberty for thirteen years.
10. 1849 — William Gibson Sr., one of the township's first two settlers, died; his wife Nancy died in 1873.
11. 1875 to 1879 — Thomas Luccock, a landowner and store keeper in Liberty Township, represents Guernsey County in the Ohio legislature.
12. 1884 — Kimbolton, first platted as Liberty in 1828, was incorporated as a village.
13. 1903 — The first of four rural mail routes, each about twenty-five miles long, is established from the Kimbolton post office.
14. 1907 — Kimbolton builds a city hall.
15. 1909 — A fire burns Kimbolton's mill, with a loss of about $5,000, the only important fire in the village.
16. 2005 — The village of Kimbolton was dissolved on April 30, after its voters in 2004 surrendered its corporate powers to Liberty Township.
17. 2020 — The census counts 884 people in Liberty Township.

Stories

Down Wills Creek by canoe

In 1807 William Gibson Sr. and his wife Nancy came into what would become Liberty Township not by wagon over a road, since none existed yet, but by canoe, paddling down Wills Creek into a stretch of country the 1882 county history says held no other settlers at all. They built a rude hut first and, as the family grew and the land was cleared, a more substantial home followed. William died in 1849 and Nancy lived on until 1873, long enough to see the township she and her husband had entered alone develop into a settled farming community with its own villages and, eventually, the incorporated town of Kimbolton to its north.

The postmaster who named the town

Naphtali Luccock was born in 1797 in Kimbolton, England. In 1819 he sailed for Philadelphia and worked in a commission house, then in a stocking factory at Germantown, and in 1822 he married Jane Thompson. They went to Wooster, Ohio, where he taught school three years, and then to Coshocton County for four, and in 1831 settled in Guernsey County. When a post office was wanted for the village of Liberty, laid out by the Gibsons in 1828, he became its first postmaster and named the office Kimbolton after his birthplace; the village took the same name when it incorporated on November 5, 1884. His son Thomas, born in 1823, owned twelve hundred acres, kept a general store in Liberty Township, and sat in the Ohio legislature from 1875 to 1879.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com · en.wikipedia.org · bettyshinn.com · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Cambridge, City Of89% of residentsWills Creek via Cambridge Reservoir + Wills Creek direct intake
• Byesville4% of residentslocal wells (mine-pool/groundwater under influence of surface water)
• Western Guernsey Regional Water District4% of residentsWills Creek via Cambridge Reservoir + Wills Creek direct intake
• Guernsey Co. Water Dept.3% of residentsWills Creek via Cambridge Reservoir + Wills Creek direct intake

Fire and EMS stations (1)

High-hazard dams (1)

Bridges rated poor (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2023: 4 of 4 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, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-07-21

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