Liberty Township, Ross County

How Liberty Township, Ross County began

Liberty Township, in the southeastern part of Ross County, was set off from Jefferson Township in 1832. Its earliest settlers arrived by 1800, drawn to Highbank prairie and the bottomlands along Salt Creek before the federal land sales opened. The township's one real village, Londonderry, was laid out in 1831 by Adam Stewart and Nathan Cox and grew into a small trading and rail town near its now-vanished rival, Vigo. Today the township is mostly farmland with Londonderry, population about 2,600 across the township as a whole, its only center.

Settled by 1800 (William Schooley, Amos Taylor and others on Highbank prairie), platted 1832 (township organized, set off from Jefferson Township), by organized as a township; no single founder recorded.

Where the name comes from

The township was very likely named, like many Ohio townships, for the abstract virtue "Liberty" rather than for a person or place; no source found gives a specific naming account for the township itself. The one platted village inside it, Londonderry, was named for Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the birthplace of one of its founders' forebears; its post office was originally called Gillespieville, for first postmaster James Gillespie, because another Ohio post office already used the name Londonderry, and it did not take the name Londonderry until 1929.

Before the town

No source found documents a specific named Shawnee town, camp, or trail sited within Liberty Township itself, and none should be assumed: the Shawnee town name "Chillicothe" (also called "Old Chillicothe") was used at several different village sites in Ohio at different times as the Shawnee relocated, and the presence of that name near the county seat does not place a Shawnee town in this township. What is documented locally is prehistoric, not historic-period Shawnee: nineteenth-century accounts of Liberty Township describe ancient earthworks on several farms, including octagonal and circular fortifications, one enclosing about fifteen acres, and a mound on the Ed Harness farm roughly 100 feet long that was opened and found to contain human skeletons of notably small stature, which the writers took for a burial place of women and children. These are unattributed to a specific culture in the source and are consistent with the Adena or Hopewell mound-building traditions general to the Scioto Valley. For the county-level Shawnee, Wyandot, and treaty history.

Nations recorded here: Adena culture, Hopewell culture.

• Earthworks on Liberty Township farms (unnamed) (earthwork) — Several farms in Liberty Township, Ross County (exact locations not given in source), Prehistoric, culture not specified in source (genealogytrails.com)
• Mound on the Ed Harness farm (burial) — Ed Harness farm, Liberty Township, Ross County, Prehistoric, culture not specified in source (genealogytrails.com)

Timeline

1. 1800 — William Schooley settles in what becomes Liberty Township, on section eighteen, land his wife inherited from her father Thomas Bowens, who settled on the adjoining tract.
2. 1800-1804 — Amos Taylor settles on Highbank prairie, later relocating to the east side of Walnut Creek, where he died.
3. 1802 — Joseph Cox settles on section fourteen in the township and remains there the rest of his life.
4. 1831 — Adam Stewart and Nathan Cox lay out the village of Londonderry; Cox later sells his interest and leaves the county.
5. 1832 — Liberty Township is organized, set off from Jefferson Township.
6. 1833 — A post office opens at Londonderry under the name Gillespieville, after first postmaster James Gillespie.
7. 1929 — The Gillespieville post office is renamed Londonderry.
8. 1924 — Harley Warrick, later the best-known Mail Pouch Tobacco barn sign painter in the country, is born in Londonderry to a dairy-farming family.
9. 2020 — The U.S. Census records 2,623 residents of Liberty Township.

Stories

Two villages, half a mile apart

When the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton and the Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern railroads crossed Liberty Township on their way southeast, a second settlement called Vigo grew up on the township line to work the rail trade, barely half a mile south of the older village of Londonderry. For decades the two traded business back and forth: Vigo had the depot and the freight sheds, Londonderry had the post office and the older stores, and William Day ran a gunsmith shop in Londonderry for about thirty years through it all. Vigo eventually faded as rail traffic declined through the twentieth century, and Londonderry, still on U.S. Route 50 at its junction with State Route 327, is the township's one place name that shows up on a modern map. The rivalry between the two is remembered mainly in the county histories that were written while both were still going concerns.

The last Mail Pouch man

Harley Warrick was born in 1924 on his family's dairy farm at Londonderry. He came home from World War II in 1946 needing work, and a Mail Pouch Tobacco crew happened through looking for painters; Warrick, trained by veteran painter Maurice Zimmerman, spent the next fifty-five years painting the company's black-and-yellow barn advertisements across thirteen states, working freehand with no stencils or templates, by eye alone, at a pace of roughly two barns a day with a partner. He was known to slip in a deliberate misspelling now and then just to see if anyone noticed. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 killed most roadside barn advertising, but Mail Pouch barns won a historic exemption, and when Warrick retired in 1991 he was the last man still painting them for the company; the Smithsonian later exhibited his work, and he kept making miniature painted barns after he moved to Belmont, Ohio, until his death in 2000.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · genealogytrails.com · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Ross County on the full map

Eight wells in the buried Teays River Aquifer, in the Scioto valley north of Chillicothe The water here

• Ross County Water Co. Inc72% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Chillicothe City28% of residentsScioto Buried Valley Aquifer (Teays Valley system) wells
• Kingston Village0% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (3)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-07-28
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-08-08

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