Midway

How Midway began

Midway sits in Range Township in southern Madison County, on ground owned by William Morris, Frank Thompson and Lockhart Biggs where a great east-west stock road crossed the county; travelers reckoned the spot as the halfway point on a long cattle-driving route between Chicago and Philadelphia, giving the village its name. The plat was recorded June 13, 1833, though two cabins already stood on the site before the survey. For decades Midway thrived on the hotel and store trade of drovers moving cattle east on foot, at times seeing as many as two thousand head pass through in a single day; the village supported multiple hotels, a Masonic lodge organized in 1875, and both Methodist Episcopal and Presbyterian congregations. When railroads replaced the overland cattle drive, Midway's hotel trade declined and the village settled into life as a farm-service community, a role it still fills today; some sources also refer to it as Sedalia.

Platted 1833-06-13, by William Morris, Frank Thompson and Lockhart Biggs, landowners; surveyed and recorded at London.

Where the name comes from

Midway took its name because the great east-west thoroughfare through Range Township, on which the village sits, was reckoned as the halfway point on a long-distance cattle-driving route between Chicago and Philadelphia.

Before the town

No mound, village or named camp specific to the Midway site itself turned up in the sources searched; the surrounding Range Township native record is likewise thin, and no township-specific site is documented in the 1883 county history beyond the general statement that Madison County's prairies, including those around Range Township, were burned over annually by Native hunters to keep them open for the chase before white settlement.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga).

Timeline

1. 1800-01 — William M. Linton settled on land just south of the future village site, the first settler in the immediate area.
2. 1812-14 — A Methodist Episcopal class, believed to be Range Township's first organized church, formed at William M. Linton's house near the future village, with nine charter members including David Dye, Joseph Pancake and their wives.
3. 1833-06-13 — The village of Midway was surveyed, laid out and its plat recorded at London.
4. 1835 — William Holt erected a steam saw-mill at Midway on the Armstrong lot, probably one of the first steam-powered mills in Madison County; it later moved to Newport.
5. 1863 — The Presbyterian church at Midway was built under the ministry of Rev. James McIntire.
6. 1866-03 — Lightning struck the Presbyterian church's seventy-foot steeple, badly damaging the building and throwing two cornerstones from beneath it; the steeple was rebuilt in its present form during repairs.
7. 1875-10-26 — Leanore Lodge No. 512, Free and Accepted Masons, was declared in working order at Midway under dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Ohio.
8. 1875 — The village held two churches, three dry-goods stores, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, a wagon shop and a shoe shop, with about 250 residents.

Stories

Twenty-four landlords and two thousand head of cattle a day

Before railroads, the road through Midway carried an almost continuous stream of cattle bound from the western prairies to Eastern markets, and the 1883 county history recalls that it was "no uncommon thing to see as many as two thousand cattle pass over that road in a day." The demand for lodging was so heavy that the village's main hotel changed hands twenty-four times over the years, passing from John McElhaney through a long line of keepers including Mrs. Elizabeth Watkins, James Blizzard and Isaac N. Fisher, the last keeper recorded in 1883. Eastern buyers and Western sellers met at Midway to strike their deals, leaving, in the historian's words, "hundreds of dollars with the landlords of the hotels for their accommodations." When steam railroads made the long overland drive unnecessary, the village's "palmy days" as a drovers' stop ended and its business turned toward serving the surrounding farms instead.

A church built, struck by lightning, and rebuilt

Midway's Presbyterian congregation, organized by Rev. C. W. Finley with just five founding members -- Scott Robinson and his wife, Margaret Robinson, Mrs. Charlotte Withrow and Mrs. Sarah Corbitt -- worshipped for years in borrowed space at the Methodist church and in the local schoolhouse before finally building its own church in 1863 under Rev. James McIntire, complete with a steeple seventy feet high. In March 1866 lightning struck the tall spire, and the strike did enough damage to throw two of the building's corner-stones out from under the structure and scatter them some distance away. The congregation rebuilt, giving the steeple the form it held into the 1880s, and the church went on to serve under a succession of pastors including Rev. David Kerr, Rev. George Brown and Rev. S. S. Garmo.

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

Groundwater wells (1 wells) The water here

• Spring Valley MHP100% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked. The county's results on file run through 2021-11-02; later elections are not loaded yet.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-09-09

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Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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