Perry Township, Pickaway County

• Deer Creek LakeBuilt 1968 · 1,277 acres

How Perry Township, Pickaway County began

Perry Township, in the southwest corner of Pickaway County along Deer Creek, was settled by Virginia families beginning about 1799 and was originally not a separate township at all but part of Deer Creek Township, detached and organized on its own at some point the county's earliest records no longer pin down. It is quiet farm country, its main population centers the villages of New Holland and Atlanta, both of which sit only partly within its borders; New Holland itself began in 1818 as a plat called Flemingsburgh, recorded while the ground was still counted as Deer Creek Township, and was not incorporated as a town within Perry Township until 1835. The township's earliest institution of record is a Methodist class that met in settlers' cabins before building the log Cedar Grove church in 1814. Beyond the settlers, their churches, their one school, and their farms, the surviving record of the township's early history is thin.

Settled about 1799 (James Wilson, briefly, on the farm later owned by Elias Ater), with permanent Virginia families following through the early 1800s, incorporated originally part of Deer Creek Township; the 1880 county history places its detachment as a separate township "between the years 1818 and 1828" but could not find an exact date in either township or county records, while the 1906 county history guesses only "early in the [18]30's".

Where the name comes from

No source consulted states directly why this township carries the name Perry. The 1880 "History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties" does explain, elsewhere in the same volume, that a different township of the same name, Perry Township in Franklin County, was named in 1820 for Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry; that passage was checked against this township's own boundary description (it names the Scioto and Olentangy rivers and Sharon Township) and confirmed to belong to Franklin County, not Pickaway, so it is not used here. Most Ohio townships named Perry honor Commodore Perry, hero of the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, but no source found makes that connection explicit for this specific township.

Before the town

None of the sources consulted records a named Native village, camp, trail, or mound specifically within Perry Township's own borders. The county's general Mound Builder-era earthworks are catalogued by other townships (Muhlenberg, Walnut, Salt Creek) in the 1880 county history's survey of ancient works, but Perry Township is not among them. Historic Shawnee towns stood along the Scioto to the east.

Timeline

1. 1799 — James Wilson, from Kentucky, becomes the township's first known settler, locating on the farm later owned by Elias Ater; he stays only briefly before moving further west.
2. 1804 — Peter Mouser, who had farmed in Ross County since about 1800, settles in the northern part of the township; he eventually owns more than 2,000 acres by his death in 1872.
3. 1814 — A Methodist class meeting in settlers' homes builds a small log meeting house, the origin of the Cedar Grove Methodist Episcopal Church.
4. 1818 — A term of school, among the earliest recorded in this part of the county, is taught at or near Locust Grove church by Andrew Bascom, in a log building on land later owned by Joseph Porter.
5. September 2, 1818 — The plat of the future village of New Holland, then named Flemingsburgh and described as lying "in Deer Creek township," is acknowledged before a justice of the peace and recorded in the county's plat book.
6. May 1818 — Isaac Gray, Josiah Lewis, and Barzillai Costin Atkins, all of Worcester County, Maryland, arrive and settle in the township; Gray's farm later passes to his son Jesse.
7. between 1818 and 1828 — The 1880 county history reports that the township is detached from Deer Creek township and organized on its own sometime in this decade, though it could not pin down an exact date in either the township's or the county's surviving records.
8. early 1830s — The 1906 county history instead places Perry Township's separation from Deer Creek township "early in the [18]30's," without resolving the 1880 history's earlier estimate.
9. March 9, 1835 — New Holland, by then renamed from Flemingsburgh, is incorporated by act of the state legislature, which describes the new town as carved out of "the township of Perry, in the county of Pickaway" -- confirming Perry Township's existence under that name by this date.
10. 1849 — Cedar Grove Church dedicates a new frame building on January 8, on or near the site of its original 1814 log meeting house.
11. 1854-1855 — New Holland's school board builds the village's third schoolhouse on record, at a cost of $1,500, replacing an 1835 building and a second one put up around 1848.

Stories

Two Thousand Acres from Deer Creek

Peter Mouser was among the first settlers in the northern part of what became Perry Township, arriving about 1804 after several years farming along Deer Creek in Ross County. Over the following decades he acquired an extensive estate in the township's Deer Creek bottoms, some of the richest corn ground in this part of the county. By the time he died in 1872, he owned more than two thousand acres, and his descendants continued farming parts of it for another generation. His career was typical of the pattern that shaped the township as a whole: a scattering of early Virginia and Kentucky families along Deer Creek, several of whom, like Mouser, built modest early holdings into large farms held by a small number of families for much of the nineteenth century.

A Church Before a Township Had a Name

Cedar Grove's Methodist congregation was meeting in the cabins of settlers such as John Cook years before Perry Township existed as a distinct unit of local government, at a time when this ground was still administered as part of Deer Creek Township. Its founding members, among them John Bennett, Isaac Jones, John and Peter Cook, William Bailey, William Loveland, George Graham, and Jonathan Motter, along with their wives, built a small log meeting house around 1814, replaced by a frame church dedicated January 8, 1849. By the time the 1880 county history was compiled, the congregation numbered seventy-nine members with an average Sunday school attendance of sixty children, one of the township's oldest continuously running institutions.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• New Holland Village79% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Williamsport Village14% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Clarksburg Village3% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc2% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)
• Darbyville Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Power plants (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (6)

Money issues on the ballot since 2024: 0 of 2 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 0 of 2.

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, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-01-06

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