Newcastle Township, Coshocton County

How Newcastle Township, Coshocton County began

Newcastle Township, in the far western part of Coshocton County, was one of the townships organized before the county itself in 1811 and is understood to be named for New Castle, Delaware. The Walhonding River is formed here by the junction of the Mohican River and Owl Creek, and the township holds a conical mound fifteen feet high above the village of Walhonding, the site of Owl's Town on Hutchins's map of Bouquet's 1764 expedition, and possibly Tullihas, where Colonel James Smith was adopted in 1755. New Castle was laid out in 1808 by Robert Giffen, probably the second town in the county; Walhonding was platted in 1841 beside the canal. A block house stood on the Giffen section in 1812 beside an apple nursery said to be Johnny Appleseed's. Mohawk Dam, finished in 1937, now controls the river, and the township had 442 residents in 2020.

Platted 1808, incorporated 1811.

Where the name comes from

Named after New Castle, Delaware; historically also spelled New Castle.

Before the town

Hill's 1881 county history gives this township an unusually full Native record. A conspicuous conical mound, perhaps fifteen feet high and 100 feet across with large trees on it, stands in the meadow near the road just above the village of Walhonding, near the forks; Peter Neff dug a transverse trench into it and found the remains of several skeletons. Hutchins's map of Bouquet's 1764 expedition (printed in Hildreth) places an Indian village called Owl's Town in the forks of the Walhonding, close to their junction, probably named for the chief Owl, for whom Owl Creek is also named. Colonel James Smith, captured near Bedford, Pennsylvania in 1755, was taken to Tullihas, on the White Woman about twenty miles above the forks, 'inhabited by Delawares and Mohicans', where he was adopted; if the distance is right, the historian says, the village stood in this township. The 'White Woman' of the river's name is Mary Harris, taken as a child at Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704 and raised among the Mohawks according to the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum page; Hill, following Christopher Gist (1751), says only that she was the wife of an Indian chief on the river. Hill puts the Walhonding-Killbuck junction in Bethlehem Township; Newcastle holds the junction of the Mohican and Owl Creek. Hill also records that Indians camped in the township, on friendly terms with the settlers, until the War of 1812, and a tradition of a fight under an elm on Owl Creek in which settlers pursuing horse thieves killed all but one of about six Indians.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Mohican (Mahican).

• White Woman's Town (village) — junction of the Walhonding and Killbuck rivers, about 7 miles northwest of the forks of the Muskingum, c. 1750-1770s (jhmuseum.org)
• Conical mound above Walhonding (mound) — meadow near the road just above the village of Walhonding, near the forks of the Walhonding, prehistoric; undated (archive.org)
• Owl's Town (village) — in the forks of the Walhonding, close to their junction, per Hutchins's map of Bouquet's expedition, 1764 (archive.org)
• Tullihas (possible) (village) — on the White Woman (Walhonding) about twenty miles above the forks of the Muskingum; may lie in this township if Smith's distance is accurate, 1755 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. c. 1750 — Mary Harris, a woman taken captive as a child at Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704 and raised among the Mohawks, is living in a village on the river, later called the Walhonding, that becomes known as White Woman's Town.
2. 1755 — Colonel James Smith of Pennsylvania, taken prisoner near Bedford, is brought to Tullihas, a Delaware and Mohican town on the White Woman River, and adopted into the tribe.
3. 1764 — Bouquet's expedition to the Coshocton towns is mapped by Thomas Hutchins, showing an Indian village called Owl's Town in the forks of the Walhonding.
4. c. 1806 — Thomas Butler, a Virginian, takes up a farm in the extreme eastern part of the township just south of the river, probably the first settler in the township; Robert Giffen comes four or five years later.
5. 1808 — Newcastle is laid out.
6. 1811 — Newcastle Township is organized and named for New Castle, Delaware.
7. 1811 — Robert Giffen's log cabin is built at New Castle, and the land of the village is soon sold to John Ely, who keeps a tavern.
8. 1812 — A twenty-four-foot square log block house with overhanging upper walls and portholes is built on the Giffen section during the War of 1812; it is never attacked and is later made a cabin.
9. c. 1815 — Samuel Farquhar builds a sawmill, followed by Joshua Clark; the township has little water power.
10. 1816 — Elijah Dillon lays out Mount Airy in the southwest corner of the township; a school opens by 1820 and the village has some twenty houses but later disappears.
11. 1830 — John Clark lays out West Liberty next to the old plat of New Castle; George McDaniel later buys it, adds to it and restores the name New Castle.
12. 1833 — A post office called New Castle opens.
13. 1841 — Walhonding is platted by William K. Johnson, G. W. Sullivan and T. S. Humrickhouse beside the Walhonding canal; James Gamble is first postmaster.
14. 1844 — Joseph S. McVey and Edwin Lewis buy the canal-powered flour mill at Walhonding, which McVey enlarges to five stories with four run of buhrs.
15. c. 1847 — A bill in the Ohio legislature to create a new county from parts of Coshocton, Knox, Holmes, Muskingum and Licking, with Walhonding at its center, fails by a single vote.
16. 1880 — New Castle village has about 250 people, three stores, two hotels, a pottery and a two-story brick school; Walhonding has about eighty.
17. 1929 — The New Castle post office closes.
18. 1937 — Mohawk Dam, an Army Corps of Engineers dry dam for flood control on the Walhonding River, is completed in September after construction that began in April 1935.
19. 2020 — Newcastle Township has 442 residents.

Stories

The White Woman of the Walhonding

In 1704, at age ten, Mary Harris was carried off in the raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts and grew up among the Mohawks. By about 1750 she was living with her Mohawk family in a village on the river now called the Walhonding, in what is now Coshocton County. French and English mapmakers of the day marked the place and the river itself as White Woman's Town and White Woman's River, and the name survives locally today in White Woman Street in the city of Coshocton.

Taming the Walhonding: Mohawk Dam

After catastrophic flooding on the Muskingum watershed in the 1910s and 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers built fourteen dry dams across the watershed for flood control, among them Mohawk Dam on the Walhonding River just south of Newcastle Township. Construction ran from April 1935 to September 1937; the finished earthen dam stands 111 feet high and 2,330 feet long and can hold back 285,000 acre-feet of floodwater, part of the wider Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District system that still protects river towns like Coshocton, Warsaw, and Newcastle itself.

A county that missed by one vote

Walhonding was platted in the summer of 1841 by three proprietors, on rough ground beside the new Walhonding canal, and its population never passed about eighty. In its youth, though, it had visions of a glorious future. About 1847 a bill came before the Ohio legislature to carve a new county from parts of Coshocton, Knox, Holmes, Muskingum and Licking counties, and Walhonding would have stood at the center of it. The bill failed to pass by a single vote. The village instead kept a mill, powered by the canal, that shipped flour widely, three stores and a small foundry. The county historian of 1881, who tells the story, adds that the mill had been enlarged until it stood five stories high with a capacity of seventy-five or eighty barrels a day.

Johnny Appleseed's nursery

On the Giffen section, within a couple of rods of the block house built during the War of 1812 and of a spring that had been an Indian camping place, lay a patch of ground about seventy-five feet square planted at a very early day as an apple nursery, which Hill's 1881 history calls 'of Johnny Appleseed's own raising'. Early settlers took trees from it, and David John transplanted a number to his farm, later Joshua Clark's. By 1881 one tree of that orchard survived, ten feet two inches around, in the last stages of decay after a storm took two large limbs; it had been a prolific bearer of fine natural fruit, and in one year Clark picked eighty-four bushels from part of it and estimated the whole crop at 140 bushels. The tree's shade once covered a circle forty-four feet across. The attribution to Johnny Appleseed is the county historian's.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · jhmuseum.org · accessgenealogy.com · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Warsaw100% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Private schools (1)

Elections for office

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

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