Ridge Township, Van Wert County

How Ridge Township, Van Wert County began

Ridge Township was organized June 5, 1837, the same day and the same commissioners' meeting that created Pleasant Township, and was settled beginning in 1835. It holds the western half of the city of Van Wert as well as some of the county's best-documented traces of the Wyandot people who still lived in and traveled through the area in the township's first decades -- graves, camp sites and, in family memory passed down to the county's 1906 historian, direct encounters between Wyandot visitors and the earliest settler families. It borders Hoaglin Township to the north.

Settled 1835, incorporated organized as a civil township June 5, 1837, by Van Wert County commissioners, on petition of William Priddy and other settlers.

Where the name comes from

The origin of the name Ridge Township is not recorded. The county's 1906 history describes a Sugar Ridge, higher than the surrounding country, that passes entirely across Van Wert County.

Before the town

The 1906 county history, drawing on the recollections of the Gilliland family (early settlers) and neighbors, records: a grave near Dog Creek where two young Wyandot men, after killing each other in a dispute over a woman, were buried side by side under a pole-covered mound that the Wyandot revisited and re-stained with pokeberry dye every year until their removal; visits from named Wyandot individuals including 'Half John,' John Lake and Spike Buck (the latter's family later found buried at the Wyandot Mission Church cemetery in Upper Sandusky) who stayed overnight at settler cabins and spoke freely among family but not strangers; an 1839 encounter in which a drunken Wyandot man remembered as Snakehead frightened a rural schoolroom before being disarmed and given shelter by a settler family; and the 1897 discovery, while digging for sand to build the county infirmary, of a skeleton originally believed to be a Native burial (physicians later judged it a white man's remains because the jaw showed a healed socket where a molar had been pulled), alongside two separate later discoveries of Indian skeletons elsewhere in the township, one pair traditionally said to have died in a duel fought with wrists lashed together over a woman -- a grave later robbed of its remains by an unknown party. A Wyandot man remembered as Tawohesackwaugh (rendered 'Solomons' by settlers) was tried for murder at Van Wert in 1840, a case the family history connects to this same community of Wyandot visitors. None of this is dated precisely to a single year; it spans the period between the 1817-1818 treaties and the Wyandot removal of 1843.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot.

• Wyandot grave, Dog Creek (burial) — Ridge Township, east of the former Van Wert County Infirmary, on the former William Martin farm, pre-1843 (before Wyandot removal) (archive.org)
• Indian skeletal remains (three separate finds) (burial) — on the former William Martin farm and along the Ridge-Washington township line, Ridge Township, found in the decades after settlement, reported 1897 and later (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1835 — Ridge Township's first settlement begins.
2. 1835-05 — Smith Hill and John Mark settle in Ridge Township in May, and James Gordon Gilliland in July; Hill and his wife live in a pole camp roofed with linn bark, open in front before a fire, when the Gillilands arrive.
3. 1835-10 — Thomas, Adam, Robert and Hugh Gilliland and Peter Mills settle in Ridge Township.
4. 1836 — William Priddy and his sons Foster, Archelaus, Thomas D., John and William, and William and John Hill, settle in the spring.
5. 1837-06-05 — The county commissioners organize Ridge Township (townships 1 and 2, ranges 3 and 4) on the petition of William Priddy and others, ordering an election at Priddy's house for the fourth Saturday in June.
6. 1837 — Alexander and David W. McCoy and Daniel Beard settle in the south part of the township.
7. 1839 — Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) visits the newly arrived Alexander McCoy family in Ridge Township asking for ground to plant apple seed, one of his documented stops in the county.
8. 1839 — A drunken Wyandot man remembered as Snakehead frightens a school taught by Sarah Gilliland in the McCoy and Beard neighborhood before being disarmed and sheltered overnight by a settler family.
9. 1840 — A Wyandot man the county's history calls Solomons (Tawohesackwaugh) is tried for murder at Van Wert.
10. 1840 — The first Sunday school in Ridge Township is organised at the home of Daniel Beard by Rev. B. W. Chidlow.
11. 1857 — The Gilliland Methodist Episcopal congregation, long meeting in the schoolhouse on the Thomas Gilliland farm, builds a frame church on Hugh Gilliland's farm; the brick church of 1880 is rebuilt in 1902 and has about 60 members.
12. 1897-11 — Laborers digging sand for the new Van Wert County Infirmary in Ridge Township uncover a decayed human skull and two arrowheads; physicians conclude the remains are those of a white man rather than a Native burial.
13. 2020 — The census counts 3,309 residents in Ridge Township, including part of the city of Van Wert.

Stories

A grave the Wyandot kept red

About the time of the county's first settlement, a party of Wyandot were camped on the bank of Dog Creek, east of the site later chosen for the county infirmary, when two young men sprang up from around the campfire and, in a dispute the settlers understood to be over a woman, plunged their knives into each other's hearts at the same moment, both falling dead together. Their companions buried the two side by side in a single grave, built a small pen of poles over it, and cut a notch in two of the poles directly above where their hearts lay. As long as the Wyandot remained in the area -- which is to say, for roughly another two decades, until their 1843 removal from Ohio -- they returned to the grave every year and stained the notch red with pokeberry juice. William Martin, who came to own the farm the grave sat on, respected the site and refused to let it be plowed over; after his time, the county's 1906 historian recorded, every trace of the grave was lost. It survives now only as a story, written down by people who were told it by people who had seen it kept.

An Indian Sherlock Holmes

Davis Johnson, out hunting in the township's early years, met a Native man who told him a deer Johnson had killed and hung up had been stolen by a white man -- and then, asked how he knew, laid out his reasoning like a detective reading a scene. The thief was lame, the man said, because his boot-prints twisted at every step where he favored one foot. He smoked a short-stemmed pipe, because the ash marks on a nearby tree, and the scratch of a fingernail knocking them loose, sat too close to the bark to belong to a longer pipe. He carried a long gun, because the bark of another tree showed exactly where the barrel had leaned and rubbed. His dog had a short tail, because the animal's sitting print in the snow showed no drag mark. And he was an old man -- a detail the county historian, writing decades later, coyly declined to explain, leaving it 'for the old men' to work out. There was, in the end, no real mystery about whose deer it was: exactly one man in the neighborhood fit every detail.

Smith Hill's linn-bark camp

Smith Hill came to Van Wert County on May 4, 1835, when there was not a white family in the county except at Willshire. He and his wife, called Aunt Julia Ann by everyone who knew her, built a camp of poles covered with linn bark, open in front, with a fire kept burning before it for cooking and as protection from wild animals, and were living there when the Gillilands arrived. Hill was a great hunter who made his living from pelts and kept two or three coon dogs and a deerhound, and he was also the neighbourhood bee hunter, following a bee from a flower to its tree and climbing to cut the honey out. In the fall he, his brother-in-law Elihu Ireland and James G. Gilliland camped out to hunt, Hill chasing bees on clear days and the others deer, and Hill held prayers night and morning as regularly as at home.

A tree that fell at sundown

A large white ash on the M. H. McCoy farm in Ridge Township was so big that McCoy told his wife one morning she would feel the earth tremble about noon, but the tree did not fall until sundown. The stump was seven feet across; the first 12-foot log made 1,266 feet of lumber and the whole tree 6,666 feet. C. Hotchkiss sawed the lumber, and Dr. William Smith furnished the oxen and mud-boat to haul the logs over the snow. A walnut on the Gilliland farm measured 25 feet around two feet above ground, and when the man cutting it could not haul it to the sawmill he split it into quarters with powder.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Van Wert City95% of residentsTown Creek via two impounding reservoirs
• Middle Point Village5% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Hospitals (1)

Public schools (2)

Superfund sites (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

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, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-09-26

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