Peru Township, Morrow County

How Peru Township, Morrow County began

Peru Township was organized in 1817 while still part of Delaware County, and became part of newly formed Morrow County in 1848. It was named for Peru, New York, home of many of its early settlers, and was first settled in 1809 by Cyrus Benedict. Quaker families, including the Benedicts, made the township an active stop on the Underground Railroad. Today it is a rural township of 23.4 square miles with no incorporated village of its own.

Settled 1809, incorporated 1817 (organized as a township), by Cyrus Benedict and family, first settlers on Alum Creek; township organized 1817 under Delaware County.

Where the name comes from

Named after Peru, New York, the home town of a number of the township's early settlers.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail, or earthwork specific to Peru Township is recorded in the sources checked (the township's own Wikipedia article and the 1911 county history's Peru Township chapter are silent on the subject). The 1911 History of Morrow County describes Indian presence generally across the county's land before settlement (hunting grounds, resistance to farming) and records a specific Indian village on the Whetstone River in neighboring Cardington Township and mounds in Canaan and near Chesterville, but names nothing sited in Peru Township itself. Peru Township lies within the area ceded by the Wyandot, Delaware (Lenape), Shawnee and allied nations at the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, opening it to Ohio Company and government survey and settlement.

Timeline

1. 1809 — Cyrus Benedict settles in what becomes Peru Township.
2. 1812 — Several more Benedict families migrate from New York and establish the first Quaker settlement in the future Morrow County along Alum Creek, among them Reuben Benedict and his wife Anna and their twelve children.
3. 1817 — Peru Township is formally organized, still under Delaware County, and named for Peru, New York.
4. 1828 — Reuben Benedict, the township's first recorded miller, builds the house on Alum Creek that later becomes known as the Reuben Benedict House.
5. 1843 — Mount Hesper Seminary, a Quaker school founded by Jesse and Cynthia Harkness, opens across the road from the Alum Creek Friends Church and goes on to teach hundreds of students.
6. 1848 — Morrow County is organized from parts of Delaware, Marion, Knox and Richland counties; Peru Township, formerly in Delaware County, becomes part of Morrow County.
7. 1848 — Richard Dillingham, a Quaker schoolteacher from Peru Township, is arrested in Nashville, Tennessee on December 5 while helping three enslaved people attempt to escape.
8. 1849 — Dillingham is tried on April 12, convicted, and sentenced to three years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary; he dies there of cholera before completing the sentence.
9. 2000 — The Reuben Benedict House, a documented Underground Railroad station, is added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 8.

Stories

A Quaker schoolteacher's fatal errand south

Richard Dillingham grew up among the Quaker farms of Peru Township, where the Alum Creek Friends had been sheltering freedom seekers since before he was born. In December 1848 he traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to help three enslaved people escape north. He was caught, tried the following April, and sentenced to three years at hard labor in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He never served out the term: cholera killed him in prison. Word of his death reached Ohio and beyond, and abolitionist writers made him a symbol of the antislavery cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe and fellow Quaker Levi Coffin invoked his memory, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem, 'The Cross,' in his honor. The story ties a single rural Morrow County township directly to the national fight over slavery.

The Benedict family and the Alum Creek Friends

Cyrus Benedict settled in the township in 1809, and by 1812 a wave of Benedict relatives had followed from New York, founding the first Quaker settlement in what would become Morrow County. Reuben Benedict, patriarch of one branch and father of twelve children, ran the township's first mill and built a farmhouse on Alum Creek around 1828 that doubled, family and local accounts agree, as an Underground Railroad station. The house still stands west of Marengo and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, one of the few tangible markers of the antislavery network that ran through this stretch of the county.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · webdev-stark.cs.kent.edu · ohiohistory.org · archive.org · morrowcountysentinel.com

Every historic place in Morrow County on the full map

Del-Co's East Knox wellfield at Bryant and Lucerne Rds, Wayne Twp, about 5 miles WSW of Fredericktown The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.91% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Ashley Village9% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells

Bridges rated poor (3)

Shale and injection wells (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Who holds office

Roster as of 2026-01-01: county board of elections.

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.
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2025-03-06

Cite this page