Liberty Township, Mercer County

How Liberty Township, Mercer County began

Liberty Township, on the Indiana line in western Mercer County, was organized on March 1, 1841, and held its first election that June at the house of Philip Bolton. Daniel Freeman, John and Philip Bolton, Timothy Hankins and Isaac Trace had cabins there before 1840, when the Deitsch and Bollenbacher families arrived; German Lutherans became the majority, and St. Paul's Lutheran congregation dates from 1841. Big Beaver Creek joins the Wabash River in the southwest of the township, and the Wabash flows on into Indiana. Its one settlement, Chattanooga on the northern line, was the center of an oil boom that lasted until about 1910.

Settled 1830s (Daniel Freeman, John and Philip Bolton, Timothy Hankins, Isaac Trace), incorporated 1841-03-01 (township organized), by Mercer County commissioners.

Where the name comes from

One of twenty-five Liberty Townships in Ohio; the name is a generic patriotic choice rather than a personal or local commemoration.

Before the town

No Native village, trail or earthwork in Liberty Township is recorded in the county histories opened. Scranton's 1907 history describes a trace, already there when Timothy Hankins built his cabin in 1837, running from Fort Recovery to Willshire along the section line one mile east of the Indiana line, crossed by an east-west trace at Skeel's Cross Roads, but it does not say who made them.

Timeline

1. 1833 — David Smith makes a land entry of 160 acres in section 8, the earliest definite record of a claim in the township.
2. 1837 — Rev. Timothy Hankins from Coshocton County settles on section 7 and builds the third cabin in the township; John Bolton and William Watkins settle beside him.
3. 1840 — Jacob and Philip Deitsch and Adam Bollenbacher and their families arrive and find four cabins already standing.
4. 1841 — Liberty Township is organized.
5. 1841 — Rev. Frederick Knabe organizes St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran congregation.
6. 1851-11-30 — St. Paul's congregation dedicates its first church building, erected under Rev. J. D. Gackenheimer.
7. 1860 — Zion's Lutheran congregation, an offshoot of St. Paul's, is organized at Chattanooga and builds a church.
8. 1872 — Mary Arabella Secaur is murdered on her way home from Sunday school in the township on June 23; on July 8 a mob takes the two confessed killers from the jail at Celina and hangs them in Liberty Township.
9. 1880 — The township has 1,196 residents.
10. 1882 — A post office called Chattanooga is established; it operates until 1905.
11. 1889 — Jacob Baker is killed at his sawmill in Chattanooga, the first person carried in the village's new horse-drawn hearse.
12. 1894-1895 — A diphtheria epidemic centered in Liberty Township is stopped after Dr. I. J. Ransbottom of Wabash treats scores of patients with the new diphtheria antitoxin.
13. 1900 — The township has 1,733 residents.
14. 1907 — The township has ten schoolhouses, four Lutheran churches, a Friends church and a Church of God; Chattanooga has about 100 inhabitants.

Stories

The Chattanooga oil boom

In the last years of the 1800s oil was struck around Chattanooga, a settlement of about 60 people on the township's northern line, and the boom lasted until about 1910. Workers arrived faster than the place could house them, and they slept in barns and the livery stable. The one-room Wildcat School swelled to 90 pupils for one teacher, many of them 18 and 19 years old, and a two-room school and a second teacher were added. The Mercer County Historical Society's 1959 history records that the boom brought fighting and gambling with it, and that a widow named Emerick, on whose farm oil had been struck, was found dead in her well with her house ransacked; no one was ever charged. When the pools were pumped dry the wells were plugged, the workers left, and the second teacher was no longer needed.

The Secaur lynching of 1872

On Sunday, June 23, 1872, Mary Arabella Secaur, a girl from a Liberty Township family, was walking home alone from Sunday school at Liberty church when she was seized, assaulted and killed about a mile from home; her body was found the next afternoon. Suspicion fell on two tinware peddlers who had been at the church and then left the area, and Sheriff Thornton Spriggs and his deputies arrested them on the road to Fort Wayne. They confessed on July 5. On July 8 about two hundred horsemen rode into Celina, battered in the jail door, overpowered the officers and took the prisoners; a crowd that grew to several thousand followed them to Liberty Township, where the two were hanged from a gallows built near the scene of the crime. No one was ever prosecuted for the lynching.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Celina, City Of75% of residentsGrand Lake St. Marys (surface water intake)
• Rockford Village22% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Grand Lake Estates3% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-06-23

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