Manchester Township, Adams County

How Manchester Township, Adams County began

Manchester Township holds the site of the first permanent settlement in the Virginia Military District: in December 1790 Nathaniel Massie and a band of frontiersmen began a stockade at the Three Islands on the Ohio, opposite the lower island, and from it Massie's surveying parties explored and entered the best lands of the district. A territorial Manchester Township was created when Adams County was organized in September 1797, but it was subdivided and the name dropped in 1806; the present township was formed in 1858 from Sprigg Township and includes the incorporated village of Manchester and the Manchester Special School District. Settlers cleared Manchester Island of about a hundred acres for grain from 1791, the county's first post office opened here in 1801, and the village grew steadily after its 1850 incorporation.

Settled December 1790, by Nathaniel Massie and his company of frontiersmen.

Where the name comes from

Named, like the village within it, for Manchester, England, the ancestral home of founder Nathaniel Massie.

Before the town

Evans and Stivers's 1900 county history says Massie's stockade was built and held, without federal help, at a time when the Native peoples of the region were waging the fiercest warfare against the Virginia and Kentucky border settlements, and that hostilities ended only with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795; no settlement was made outside the stockade at the Three Islands until the autumn of 1795. Massie's parties surveyed in groups of 28 men with hunters ahead and a spy behind to guard against Indian ambush. The history names no Native village at the township.

Timeline

1. 1790 — Nathaniel Massie founded Massie's Station on the Ohio River, the fourth permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory and the first in the Virginia Military District.
2. 1790 — In December Massie and his company begin to build a picket stockade of rude cabins on the Ohio bank opposite the lower of the Three Islands; Evans and Stivers calls it the pioneer corps of the Virginia Military Reservation and the third permanent white settlement in Ohio.
3. c. 1791 — The settlement was renamed Manchester after Massie's ancestral home in England.
4. 1791 — Residents inside the stockade clear Manchester Island, about a hundred acres, in the spring and for the next years raise grain there; in 1795 and 1796 families from cabins four or five miles inland come to hoe corn on the island, among them Michael Roush's family from the 'Dutch Settlement' in Sprigg Township.
5. 1795 — The Treaty of Greenville ends the Indian war; no settlements had been made outside the stockade before that autumn, and by early 1796 settlers pour in through Manchester and the mouth of the Scioto as the main gateways.
6. 1797 — Manchester is one of the territorial townships formed in September when Adams County is organized, covering parts of what are now Tiffin, Oliver and Scott and all of Winchester, Wayne, Liberty and most of Sprigg; George Sample, visiting that year, finds fifteen to twenty cabins and a tavern kept by John McGate.
7. 1799 — Andrew Boyd opens the first store in Manchester.
8. 1801 — The first post office in Adams County opens at Manchester, with Israel Donalson as postmaster for twelve years; the county's mail came by Zane's Trace to Limestone before that.
9. 1806 — The county commissioners reorganize the townships, subdividing the old territorial Manchester Township into new ones and dropping the name from the record.
10. 1856 — The house later known as The Ridge, at 503 E. 8th Street in Manchester, was built; it remained in one family, with its original furnishings, for four generations.
11. 1858 — A new township named Manchester is formed from Sprigg Township, including the town of Manchester, and has been little changed since.
12. 1889 — About this year Michael O'Neil of Manchester, after years of effort, has a frame Catholic church built, the only Catholic church ever organized in Adams County and without a resident priest.
13. 1992 — The Ridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

Massie's surveyors and the spoon-fashion bed

From the stockade at the Three Islands, Nathaniel Massie sent out his surveyors across the Virginia Military District in the Indian war years. Evans and Stivers quotes McDonald's Sketches on his method: each of up to four surveyors, himself included, took six men, so that the whole party was twenty-eight, and every man had a prescribed duty. In front went a hunter, who kept two or three hundred yards ahead and watched for Indians; then came the surveyor, two chainmen, a marker and the pack-horse man, and last, two or three hundred yards behind, a spy who watched the back trail in case the party was pursued. They carried no bread, only a little salt, and lived on game. At night each mess of seven built a fire and spent the evening singing and telling stories, then at Massie's signal they left the fires and walked in silence a few hundred yards away, scraped away the snow and lay down together, spread on half their blankets and covered with the other half skewered together, three heads one way and four the other, rifles in their arms. When one turned, the whole mess turned. At first light Massie sent two trusted men on a circuit round the fires to check for an ambush before the party returned.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · sciotohistorical.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Groundwater wells (2 wells) The water here

• Manchester Village87% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Adams County Regional Wd13% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 1 of 1 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• Fiscal emergency: declared 2002-09-20, released 2020-11-12. source
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-10-14

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