Mill Creek Township, Union County

How Mill Creek Township, Union County began

Mill Creek Township is one of Union County's original townships, formed when the county itself was organized on January 10, 1820, and named for the creek that runs through it and through Marysville to the west. It lost ground twice as later townships were carved from it, giving up territory that became Dover Township in 1838 and having its boundaries redrawn again in 1821 alongside Union, Darby, Jerome and Paris townships. Its one settlement, Watkins, was platted in 1838 along what is now Watkins Road and named for government surveyor Joseph S. Watkins; a post office ran there from 1840 to 1908. It is today the only township in Ohio still carrying the name Millcreek, the Hamilton County township of that name having been abolished.

Platted 1838 (Watkins), incorporated 1820-01-10, by Joseph S. Watkins (village namesake).

Where the name comes from

The township is named for Mill Creek, the stream (a tributary that runs into the Scioto system) that crosses it and continues west through Marysville. Its village, Watkins, was named for Joseph S. Watkins, a government surveyor.

Before the town

No mound, village or trail specific to Mill Creek Township has turned up in the sources checked; the township was already organized by 1820, before detailed local settlement records begin, so its earliest chapters are thin on this point. The broader county lay within territory used by the Wyandot, Shawnee, Miami and Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga) into the early 1800s; the Greenville Treaty Line of 1795 crosses Union County, and Jonathan Alder, held captive as a boy by the Mingo and Shawnee, later settled in Jerome Township in the same county.

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

Timeline

1. 1797-06-03 — Nathaniel Massie, deputy surveyor, surveys more than seven thousand acres of the future township in a single day, June 3, 1797, in eight surveys for absentee Virginia military claimants such as Robert Dandridge, Isaac Jeffries and William Croghan.
2. 1814 — Ephraim Burroughs, a New Jersey native who had gone to Kentucky in 1795 and Clark County, Ohio in 1804, settles near Mill Creek a little east of the later village of Watkins; the 1883 county history calls him the township's first white settler (about 1814-15).
3. 1816 — Daniel Bell, John Price, James Thompson and others settle on Mill Creek about 1816; James Bell follows in 1818 and is elected a justice of the peace after the county is organized.
4. 1818 — Rev. Henderson Crabb holds a meeting about 1818 at William Conklin's house and organizes a Methodist class that becomes the nucleus of the Watkins Methodist Episcopal Church; Daniel Long's Christian Church of Elder Long's Settlement is organized in May 1832 with thirty-five members.
5. 1820 — Mill Creek Township was formed on January 10 upon the creation of Union County itself.
6. 1820-10-10 — The first election for county and state officers in the township is held, with twenty-four votes cast (Ethan Allen Brown 20 for governor); William Badley, John Jolly and Launcelot Maze serve as judges.
7. 1821-03-12 — Union County's commissioners divide the county into five townships; Mill Creek is the fifth, to embrace all east of Paris Township to the county's east line.
8. 1825-10-15 — The Christian Church at Watkins is organized at the house of John Price by Elder Long, to take Scripture as its only rule of faith; its frame church is dedicated November 11, 1861.
9. 1838-07-12 — Deputy surveyor Joseph S. Watkins lays out Watkins for the proprietors Thomas P. Watkins and William Conklin on Dandridge's Survey No. 1,307: twenty-eight lots, four streets and two alleys, recorded July 13, 1838.
10. 1840 — The Watkins post office was established on March 18.
11. 1840 — James Thompson is appointed first postmaster of Watkins (the office opens in 1840-41) and keeps it until about 1860; the first store is opened about 1840 in one room of a house.
12. 1849 — The Watkins Methodists, who had met in private houses for sixteen years, build a frame church, replaced by a brick church costing about $3,000 and dedicated November 6, 1870.
13. 1882 — The township has nine schoolhouses and nine teachers (1881-82), with $3,772 in school receipts.
14. 1908 — The Watkins post office was discontinued on July 31.
15. 1969 — Ralph Scott, Timothy McNamara and Gerald Solt founded the Del-Co Water Company to bring a dependable rural water supply to southern Delaware County and neighboring townships, financed through the USDA Farmers Home Administration and built around a one-million-gallon-per-day treatment plant and 200 miles of pipe.

Stories

A surveyor's crossroads that outlived its post office

Watkins, the one named place inside Mill Creek Township, was laid out in 1838 along a road about five miles east of Marysville and took the name of Joseph S. Watkins, the government surveyor who had run the lines through this part of the county. A post office opened there in 1840, giving the crossroads a formal identity for the next sixty-eight years, before it closed in 1908 as rural free delivery out of Marysville made small township post offices unnecessary across Union County. Watkins never incorporated and has no government of its own; it survives today as a place-name on the map, a cemetery, and a stretch of road between U.S. Routes 33 and 42 rather than a functioning village center.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · delcowater.org · remarkableohio.org · uccogs.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Olentangy River intake at Del-Co's plant on Olentangy River Rd, Liberty Twp, south of the city of Delaware The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.57% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Marysville City43% of residentsMill Creek via Marysville Reservoir (Raymond Rd) + wells
• Milford Center Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

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Superfund sites (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

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