Polk Township, Crawford County

How Polk Township, Crawford County began

Polk Township, a strip seven miles by three in the southeast corner of Crawford County, was made on March 6, 1845 by the Crawford commissioners from the south side of the old Sandusky Township of Richland County and a one-mile strip of Marion County, after the creation of Wyandot County on February 3, 1845 reshaped Crawford. It is named for President James K. Polk in whose term it was created, after the first choice, Jackson, proved taken. The county histories say the land was the home of the Delaware war chief Wingenund and the place where Col. William Crawford was captured in 1782, and that Delaware and Wyandot people were still camping there when the Leveridge family built the first cabins in 1817 on the ground where Galion now stands. The township sits on the divide between the Lake Erie and Ohio River watersheds and had 1,974 residents in 2020; the Hosford House is on the National Register.

Settled 1817 (Benjamin Leveridge and his sons James and Nathaniel, on the site of Galion), incorporated March 6, 1845 (organized by the Crawford County commissioners under the act of February 3, 1845), by Crawford County commissioners; named for President James K. Polk.

Where the name comes from

Daniel Hoover's first choice for the new township's name was 'Jackson,' but it was discovered that a township to the north had already claimed that name; since James K. Polk was President of the United States at the time of the 1845 organization, his name was proposed instead and accepted.

Before the town

Both county histories say that Polk Township's land, then part of Sandusky Township, was 'the home of Wingenund' (Wigenund), the Delaware war chief, and that Col. William Crawford was captured here in 1782 (the claim is the histories'; we have not checked it against a modern account), and that the Delaware and Wyandot 'yet lingered in their ancient haunts' until about 1817 as it was one of their favorite hunting and fishing grounds. In 1812 soldiers cut a road north of the Olentangy near the site of Galion, and Pennsylvania militia another in the south. The Wyandot tapped the maple groves for sugar, carried sugar and cranberries by pony to Mansfield to sell until about 1835, and walked in single file, speaking English only when needed. One of them, Solomon Johnny Cake, with his wife Sally, camped in bark wigwams near the settlers; he had gone on an exploring trip beyond the Mississippi in 1823 and he and his wife went west with the Wyandot when they left their reservation in 1843. There was an Indian burying-ground on the north bank of the Olentangy west of Union Street in Galion, used until the Wyandot left; young men opened the graves hoping for treasure, and the field was later plowed level and built on. About 1820 a child of John Dunmeyer, four years old, vanished from her mother's sugar camp; searchers dragged the creek and she was never found, and the settlers suspected that strange Indians who had earlier tried to buy a settler's daughter had taken her.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware).

• Home of Wingenund (reported) (village) — Polk Township (then Sandusky Township), exact place not given, to 1782 or after, as reported in the county histories (archive.org)
• Indian burying-ground at Galion (burial) — north bank of the Olentangy River, just west of Union Street, Galion, used until the Wyandot departed (1840s); graves plowed level (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1782 — The county histories say the land that became Polk Township was the home of the Delaware chief Wingenund and the place where Col. William Crawford was captured.
2. 1807 — Sandusky Township, then western Richland County, is surveyed by Maxfield Ludlow.
3. 1812 — Soldiers cut a military road through the area north of the Olentangy near the future site of Galion; Pennsylvania militia cut another in the south.
4. 1817 — Benjamin Leveridge and his sons James and Nathaniel build the first cabins on ground that becomes downtown Galion; Disberry Johnson, a Virginian born in 1764, arrives with a wife and seventeen children and lives to be 104.
5. February 12, 1818 — Sandusky Township is organized, twelve miles long and six wide, including the future Vernon, Jackson and Polk (the 1912 history gives July 12).
6. 1818 — John Leveridge of Richland County (not the Crawford County township of the same name) is killed by a falling log at a cabin-raising for John Williamson; the Maine families of Nehemiah Story and John Kitteridge finish the roofless cabin and winter in it.
7. September 19, 1819 — Asa Hosford arrives on foot and stays with the Leveridge family; he later builds a mill on the Whetstone southwest of Galion, still called Hosford's mill in 1912.
8. about 1820 — A four-year-old child of John Dunmeyer vanishes from a sugar camp near Galion and is never found.
9. 1824-1825 — Nathan Merriman erects the township's first distillery near the springs by the Leveridge homesteads, known as 'the still.'
10. 1836 — Two Pennsylvania men, John Hammer and his brother-in-law Bender, are attacked on the road west of Galion; Bender is shot dead and Hammer beaten, but the robbers flee when an ox-driver shouts.
11. February 3, 1845 — The General Assembly creates Wyandot County, taking four tiers of sections from Sandusky Township and adding strips from Richland and Marion counties to Crawford.
12. March 6, 1845 — The Crawford commissioners organize Polk Township; the first election, April 7, elects Asa Hosford, Samuel P. Lee and Bartholomew Reed Jr. trustees.
13. April 26, 1845 — The new trustees sell the care of James Sutton, a town pauper, to Jacob Steinbaugh for $100 a year plus clothing and doctor's bills.
14. 1845 — Residents of the former Richland County strip send Asa Hosford to Columbus to win relief from Crawford County's building taxes; the legislature relieves the Richland part but not the Marion strip.
15. May 16, 1866 — The trustees advertise the public sale of one year's care of two paupers, Mary Houk and Delia Hengst.
16. April 30, 1976 — The Hosford House, 6288 Hosford Road southwest of Galion, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
17. 2020 — The census counts 1,974 residents in the township.

Stories

The sale of the paupers

Before Crawford County built a county poorhouse, townships handled the care of residents who could not support themselves by putting their upkeep out to the lowest bidder. A handbill preserved among Polk Township's records advertised the sale of Mary Houk and Delia Hengst, 'paupers of Polk Township,' for one year's care, with half the payment due six months after the sale and the rest at year's end; a similar sale in 1845 saw a town pauper named James Sutton taken on by Jacob Steinbaugh for $100 plus clothing and doctor's bills. The practice, jarring by later standards, was simply how Polk Township and its neighbors managed the absence of any institutional safety net in the decades before poor farms and county homes became standard, and it is preserved today only because a handbill happened to survive among old township papers.

A tax revolt that mostly failed

When Crawford County's boundaries were redrawn in 1845 to help form Wyandot County, the strips of Richland and Marion county land folded into the new Polk Township came with an unwelcome surprise: their residents would now share the debt of building Crawford County's yet-unpaid-for public buildings, a burden their wealthier former counties, especially Richland, had largely already retired. Furious at what felt like being taxed to enrich a poorer neighbor just as their own fortunes were improving, residents sent Asa Hosford to lobby the legislature in Columbus. Hosford won relief for the Richland-origin portion of the new township, whose representative successfully argued for release from the county building taxes, but when he asked the same favor be extended to the Marion-origin strip to the south, that area's own representative declined the request, saying his constituents had not asked for it — leaving Polk Township's tax burden split unevenly along the old county lines that had supposedly been erased.

Johnny Cake and Sally

Among the Wyandot who lingered near Galion was a hunter the settlers called Solomon Johnny Cake, a fine-looking, good-natured man of superb build, renowned in his people's councils for courage, who in 1823 had joined an exploring party to the far side of the Mississippi. His wife Sally was three-fourths white: her mother, a Castleman, had been captured in eastern Ohio after the Revolution and adopted into a family on the Sandusky, and married the part-Native Abraham Williams. Johnny Cake and Sally, with their children, hunted the woods in a neat bark wigwam, swapped venison for side pork, and drew visitors curious to see Sally, who was thought a model housekeeper and copied the settlers' ways. In 1843, when the Wyandot left their reservation for the West, the couple went with them, and three of their grandsons later served in the Union army, enlisting at Wyandot, Kansas.

The Hammer and Bender murder

In 1836 John Hammer and his brother-in-law Bender walked from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, across the Alleghenies and on to Wooster, hoping to look over Western land; Hammer carried $200 to buy a farm. At the Wooster bank two strangers saw them have their money examined and followed them to Galion, where the two joined them in a grocery and offered to go west together. Near the western edge of Polk Township one robber put a pistol to the back of Bender's head, while the other struck Hammer with a stout green stick, which splintered and spared his life. The robbers rifled Bender's pockets but fled when a worker getting out logs for a mill shouted to his oxen. Hammer ran to a plowing farmer named Goodale, who saw he was hurt, though they shared no language, and a coroner's inquest was held; Bender was buried in the Campbell graveyard. Hammer recovered, bought a farm near Bucyrus with his $200, and years later an executed murderer confessed to having killed Bender.

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

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