Pleasant Township, Clark County

How Pleasant Township, Clark County began

Pleasant Township, in the northeast corner of Clark County on the Champaign County line, was first settled in May 1803 when Joseph Coffey built a cabin on a hill beside a spring and an Indian camp, helped by two or three Native men. Archibald McConkey, Isaac Agmond, Henry Dawson and others followed, and by about 1805 the township had its first death, birth and marriage. It was surveyed and its limits set in 1818 and organized soon after. Catawba, laid out in 1835-36 (Wikipedia says 1838) and named for the Catawba people of the Carolinas, is its only village; its post office was first called Buck Creek, about 1833. Asbury (1824) and Mount Vernon (1825) churches and the grist-mills on Buck Creek anchored the farms. The township had 1,488 residents in 1880 and 3,143 in 2020.

Settled May 1803, platted 1835-36 (Catawba, per the 1881 county history); 1838 (per Wikipedia), incorporated Limits set 1818; organized soon after, by Joseph Coffey, first settler; Cass and Marsh laid out Catawba.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted explains why the township itself is named Pleasant; Ohio has fifteen Pleasant Townships statewide, reflecting a common, generic naming choice rather than a connection to any specific local person or event. The township's one village, Catawba, was named for the Catawba people of the Carolina Piedmont.

Before the town

The 1881 county history says Joseph Coffey halted in May 1803 'near an Indian camp' on a hill overlooking a valley and spring in the township, and that two or three Indians helped him raise his cabin, the first built by a white settler in the township. Isaac Agmond's cabin of autumn 1803 stood at another Indian camp, and the two camps were connected by an Indian trail. The first roads of the township were 'nothing more than Indian trails' cleared of logs and saplings, the road to Springfield among them, and settlers got food from Indian hunters and traded vegetables for venison; the Urbana and London road is said to follow, or lie near, the route General McArthur took in 1812 from Chillicothe to Urbana. The source names no nation for these people. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville ceded the land. Elsewhere in Clark County stood the Shawnee town of Peckuwe (Piqua), site of the battle of 1780. The village of Catawba takes its name from the Catawba people, whose historic homeland lay in the Carolina Piedmont, far from Ohio; no source ties actual Catawba presence to this township, and the name appears to be a borrowing.

Nations recorded here: Shawnee, Wyandot.

• Indian camp at the Coffey cabin site (camp) — Hill overlooking a valley and spring, later the home of William Coffey, western Pleasant Township, 1803 (archive.org)
• Indian camp at the Agmond cabin site and trail between the two camps (trail) — Farm later of Mart Mahar, Pleasant Township, 1803 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1803 — In the autumn Isaac Agmond and his family build a cabin at another Indian camp, joined to Coffey's by a trail.
2. 1803-05 — Joseph Coffey, from Pennsylvania via the Ohio River near Cincinnati, reaches the hill above a spring and an Indian camp, builds the township's first cabin with the help of Thomas and Jesse Pierce and two or three Indians, and gets his first corn ground at Simon Kenton's mill on the site of Lagonda.
3. 1804 — Archibald McConkey and family come from Kentucky, and Samuel Lafferty, Henry Dawson, William Hendricks and George Metsker settle the same year (the printed text reads 1801, an evident misprint).
4. 1805-06-26 — Constantine Dawson, wife of Henry, dies, the first death among the pioneers; the next day John Coffey, third son of Joseph, is born, the first white child born in the township.
5. 1807-02-01 — William Hunter and Blanche Hendricks are married; John Gillmore's marriage to Ellen Dawson, about 1805, was the first in the township.
6. 1810 — Jesse Reese teaches the first school, in a cabin on the north bank of Buck Creek, but dies of the 'cold plague' before the term ends.
7. 1812 — General McArthur's march from Chillicothe to Urbana is said by tradition to have followed the route of the Urbana and London road across the township.
8. 1818 — The township is surveyed and its present limits fixed; its organization follows soon afterward.
9. 1819 — William Hunter builds the first grist-mill on Buck Creek; Nathaniel Cartmell adds a mill about 1822, later a woolen mill and distillery.
10. 1824 — The Asbury church is built and named for Bishop Asbury; the Mount Vernon church follows in 1825, and the first Sabbath school is organized at Asbury.
11. 1833 — A post office is established about this year through the influence of Congressman Joseph Vance; Herriman Chamberlain is postmaster, and it is named Buck Creek because a Newburg office already exists.
12. 1835-36 — Catawba is laid out by Cass and Marsh on land that belonged to Israel Marsh and George Dawson; Henry Neer builds the first house.
13. 1838 — Catawba, the township's only village, is laid out.
14. 1839 — A post office called Catawba begins operating; it has run continuously since.
15. 1870 — The census records 318 residents in Catawba, showing the village already established as a small community.
16. 1880 — The census counts 1,488 people in Pleasant Township and the township votes 315 Republican, 72 Democrat and 7 Prohibition in the presidential election; it has nine brick school districts built by Thomas Wingate for $18,700 and no saloon.
17. 2020 — The census counts 3,143 people in Pleasant Township and 245 in Catawba.

Stories

A Carolina Name on an Ohio Crossroads

When Catawba was laid out in 1838, its founders reached for the name of the Catawba people, a nation whose towns lined the Catawba River in what is now South Carolina — a homeland hundreds of miles from Clark County and a people not documented as living in this part of Ohio. It was a common nineteenth-century habit: settlers borrowed Native names and nations they found evocative for new towns regardless of any direct historical link, the same way other Ohio places took names like Miami, Seneca, or Wyandot without necessarily sitting where those specific nations lived. Catawba's post office has run under that name since 1839, longer than almost anything else recorded about the township.

A tent in the snow beside an Indian camp

Joseph Coffey left Pennsylvania in 1802 and spent the first year near Cincinnati, but fevers drove him north in an ox cart with his sons Tatorn and Joseph, looking for healthier ground near the headwaters of the Little Miami. In early May 1803 he stopped on a hill above a rich valley and a cool spring, near an Indian camp. The next morning several inches of snow lay on the ground, and the family spent its first months in a rough tent while he made arrangements for a cabin, which he raised with the help of two white neighbors from Champaign County and two or three Indians. Leaving the family alone in the tent, he walked to a neighbor's cabin in German Township for a little frost-damaged corn and carried it to Simon Kenton's mill, on the site of present Lagonda, to be ground into meal. The cabin was sixteen feet by fourteen, with a stone fireplace, a stick-and-clay chimney, wooden hinges, a puncheon floor and oiled paper for a window, and its hearthstones can still be seen, the 1881 history says. His son William, who lived there in 1881, supplied most of the account.

Buck Creek post office and a 56-mile mail route

The post office that became Catawba's was first asked for under the name Newburg, but Ohio already had a Newburg, so about 1833 it opened as Buck Creek, through the influence of the congressman Joseph Vance, with the storekeeper Herriman Chamberlain as postmaster. The first mail carriers, John Neer and Joseph Pearson, rode some routes on horseback for fifty-six miles in a day. Letter postage then was twenty-five cents, payable at the receiving office, if the letter had come four hundred miles; shorter distances cost proportionately less. Henry Runyan bought Chamberlain's store, succeeded him as postmaster and in 1838 opened the village's first tavern, in the southwest corner of Champaign and Pleasant streets.

Photographs

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• South Vienna Village41% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Mechanicsburg Village37% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Brookside Village MHP21% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Catawba Village1% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

High-hazard dams (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 2 of 2 passed.

Ballot issues

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-05-12

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