Paint Township, Ross County

How Paint Township, Ross County began

Paint Township sits in southwestern Ross County and takes its name from Paint Creek, which crosses it. It was carved from the county's earliest townships as settlement filled in south of Chillicothe, and it remains mostly farmland, without an incorporated village of its own inside its current boundaries. Its ZIP codes reach into three neighboring counties, so several of the National Register listings associated with those ZIPs (Barretts Mills and the Eager Inn in Highland County, the Smith House and Tannery and Travellers' Rest Inn in Greenfield, which spans Ross, Highland and Fayette counties) actually stand outside the township. The village of Greenfield itself, birthplace of the country's first Black-owned automobile manufacturer, straddles the Ross-Highland line nearby.

Where the name comes from

The township is named for Paint Creek. The 1871 Pioneer Record of Ross County says the creek 'derived its name from a Delaware chief'; it does not name the chief. It is one of six Paint Townships in Ohio.

Before the town

No mound, village or trail specific to Paint Township itself is recorded; Ross County as a whole carries the densest concentration of Hopewell earthworks in North America, and Paint Creek's valley (which gives the township its name) was a Hopewell and later Shawnee travel corridor, but the documented sites (Seip Earthworks, the T.C. Campbell Mound) sit a few miles south in neighboring Paxton Township, not in Paint Township proper.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Hopewell culture.

Timeline

1. 1799 — General Duncan McArthur founds Greenfield, a few miles southwest of the township, on land that today straddles the Ross-Highland county line.
2. early 1800s — John Taylor, a native of Pennsylvania, settles in Paint Township and farms there for the rest of his life, becoming prosperous enough to give each of his sons 100 acres of land.
3. early 1800s — The descendants of Col. Jelahiel Woodbridge (as spelled in the atlas) are the earliest settlers of the region; Christian Benner, Thomas Edminston, Zachary Taylor and J. Ogle settle in the township at an early day.
4. 1818 — Paint Township is struck off from Paxton Township on June 11; part of Buckskin Township is added to it the following year, and Paint Creek forms its west boundary.
5. 1845 — Barzillia Taylor, grandson of the pioneer John Taylor, is born on the old Taylor homestead farm in Paint Township on April 8; he goes on to farm in the township for the rest of his life.
6. 1871 — The Pioneer Record of Ross County describes the neighboring cliffs along Cliff Run, a branch of Paint Creek, rising fifty to sixty feet and in places nearly a hundred feet of almost perpendicular limestone, with caves fifteen to twenty feet deep.
7. 1875 — The county atlas describes the township as having no town or village, fine farms along the Paint valley and Buckskin Creek, and a very rolling surface with 'tremendous elevations'; Cliff Run has since become the scene of the 'noted Blackburn tragedy' and a wonder to visitors.
8. 1893 — C.R. Patterson and J.P. Lowe found C.R. Patterson & Sons in Greenfield, a carriage builder that later became the first African American-owned automobile manufacturing company in the United States.
9. 1980 — The IRS grants the Ross County Water Company, which serves the township, tax-exempt status as a member-owned mutual utility, effective that September.
10. 2020 — The census counts 1,288 people in Paint Township.

Stories

A carriage shop becomes a car company

In 1893, on the Highland County side of Greenfield just southwest of Paint Township, Charles Richard Patterson and his partner J.P. Lowe turned a horse-drawn carriage works into C.R. Patterson & Sons. Patterson had been born enslaved in Virginia before making his way to Ohio; by the 1890s he was one of Greenfield's established Black businessmen. The company kept building wagons and buggies into the automobile age, and by the 1910s and 1920s it was producing its own gasoline-engine cars, trucks and school buses, making it, by most accounts, the first automobile manufacturing company owned by an African American in the country. Greenfield's straddling of the Ross-Highland county line means the village, and this story, belong to both counties at once.

A family farm passed down whole

John Taylor left Pennsylvania as a young man and settled in Paint Township, where he built up enough land and standing that, when his sons were grown, he could give each of them 100 acres and still have property left over at his death. His son Pierce farmed part of that inheritance until 1865, when he sold it for another farm closer to the local schoolhouse. Pierce's son Barzillia Taylor was born on the original Taylor homestead in 1845 and was still farming in Paint Township, on land along the Greenfield and Rapid Forge Pike, when a county history recorded his life in 1917 - three generations on land the family never left.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohiomagazine.com · archive.org · ross.ohgenweb.org · archive.org · irs.gov

Eight wells in the buried Teays River Aquifer, in the Scioto valley north of Chillicothe The water here

• Ross County Water Co. Inc60% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Bainbridge Village23% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Greenfield Village17% of residentsGroundwater wells (8 wells)

High-hazard dams (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-06-16

Statewide question: State Issue 3: Voter ID

Races, candidates and every question for an address: your ballot. County offices and judges are on your county board's sample ballot.

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