Marion Township, Morgan County

How Marion Township, Morgan County began

Marion Township, in the southern tip of Morgan County, was settled slowly after 1800 by Ohio Company purchasers and filled out from 1814 on by Quaker families from Belmont County who traced back to North Carolina. Its village, Chesterhill, was platted in 1834 as Chesterfield and named for Chester County, Pennsylvania, home of many first settlers; it became a Quaker meeting seat and a stop on the Underground Railroad. The township was carried into Morgan County only in 1845, having earlier been part of Athens County. It remains a farming township of sawmills, gristmills and small churches, with the 1872 Barkhurst Mill Covered Bridge over Wolf Creek its best-known landmark.

Settled c. 1800, platted 1834 (Chesterhill, as Chesterfield), by Sharp and Champlin (first settlers, c. 1800); Chesterhill laid out on land of Exum Bundy and Elijah Hiatt.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted states why the township was named Marion; Chesterhill, its only village, was named for Chester County, Pennsylvania, the origin of many of its Quaker settlers.

Before the town

No Native American villages, trails, or burial sites specific to Marion Township are recorded in the sources checked; the 1886 county history notes only that 'a round hole in a limestone rock on Henman Run is supposed by some to have been used by the Indians as a mortar,' a local tradition rather than a documented site. The township lies well within the area ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and inside the Ohio Company's 1787 purchase, on land that Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware) and Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga) hunting parties had used before removal from the region; no site-specific record survives for Marion Township itself.

Timeline

1. c. 1800 — Sharp and Champlin become the first documented settlers in what would become Marion Township.
2. 1814 — Captain Thomas S. Lovell, a seafaring man from Massachusetts, arrives and settles in the township.
3. 1834 — Chesterfield (later Chesterhill) is laid out on land owned by Exum Bundy and Elijah Hiatt.
4. 1837 — The Chesterfield Monthly Meeting of Friends is organized, anchoring the township's Quaker community.
5. 1845 — Marion Township is transferred into the newly reorganized Morgan County from Athens County.
6. 1872 — Benjamin and John Pierpoint build the Barkhurst (Williams) Mill Covered Bridge near Chesterhill, a work credited to John Shrake and E.W. Kirby.
7. 1999 — The Barkhurst Mill Covered Bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

A Quaker village built on Underground Railroad courage

Chesterhill grew out of land platted in 1834 by Exum Bundy and Elijah Hiatt and quickly became a center for the Society of Friends, who organized their Chesterfield Monthly Meeting in 1837. Many of the township's Quaker families, transplants from Belmont County with roots in North Carolina, opposed slavery on religious grounds and turned that conviction into action. Escaped freedom seekers moving north through the Muskingum valley were sheltered in Henman Cave near the village and in the homes of Quaker families, among them Elias Bundy, Jesse Hiatt and Nathan Morris. The 1886 county history, written when several participants were still living, records the tradition without giving numbers or names of the people who passed through. It stands as one of the clearer local threads tying rural Morgan County to the Underground Railroad network that ran up the Muskingum toward Zanesville and beyond.

Learning to make maple sugar the hard way

Captain Thomas S. Lovell, who settled in Marion Township in 1814, left one of the township's few personal frontier accounts. New to the woods, he tried his hand at sugar-making by tapping 'hickories, buckeyes and other trees besides the sugar maple, not knowing the difference' between the trees that would yield sap worth boiling and those that would not. The story, preserved in the 1886 county history, is a small, human detail of how recently arrived settlers had to learn the land's basic facts by trial and error before farms like Lovell's could be sustained.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Morgan County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Chesterhill Village78% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Stockport Village21% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Morgan Meigsville - West Malta1% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)

Shale and injection wells (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2017: 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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-07-02

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