Rose Township, Carroll County

How Rose Township, Carroll County began

Rose Township was organized in 1818 out of Sandy Township, Stark County, fourteen years before Carroll County itself was created, and was named simply for the wild roses that grew across it. It sits in the western part of the county at the meeting point of Carroll, Stark and Tuscarawas counties, where a 1786 government survey marker — the Seven Ranges Terminus — still stands. The unincorporated hamlet of Morges, platted in 1831, grew around one of the area's earliest Catholic congregations. Today it is a farming township of decoratively painted barns and about 1,168 people outside its small crossroads communities.

Incorporated 1818, by Carved from Sandy Township, Stark County, by county commissioners.

Where the name comes from

Rose Township was named for the many wild roses growing in the area; it is the only Rose Township in Ohio.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail or mound is recorded as sitting inside Rose Township's own boundaries in the sources checked. The township's land was part of the roughly two-thirds of Ohio that the Delaware (Lenape) and Wyandot ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in January 1785, decades before any township lines were drawn here; American settlement of Carroll County followed the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and continued Delaware removal westward. The Great Trail, an Algonquian and Iroquoian trade path linking the forks of the Ohio to Lake Erie, crossed Carroll County through Brown Township and Malvern, and elderly Delaware and Mingo families were still remembered locally around that route into the early 1800s. Nothing more specific to Rose Township itself was found.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga), Wyandot.

Timeline

1. 1786 — The Geographer's Line survey of the Seven Ranges was completed at a point on Rose Township's north boundary, near the junction of Carroll, Stark and Tuscarawas counties — the first rectangular land survey in the United States.
2. 1818 — Rose Township was set off from Sandy Township, Stark County.
3. 1823 — Mathias Little built a cabin in the Morges area that hosted the first Catholic Mass said in the vicinity.
4. 1831 — Samuel Oswalt and John Waggoner platted the village of Morges.
5. 1851 — The present St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception church at Morges was built of brick burned on the premises.
6. 1976 — The Seven Ranges Terminus marker was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
7. 1977 — St. Mary's of Morges was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Stories

The corner where the surveying ended

In 1785 Congress ordered the land northwest of the Ohio River divided into a grid of six-mile-square townships before any of it could be sold, and surveyors under Thomas Hutchins started the job at the point where the Ohio River crosses the Pennsylvania line. A year of chain-and-compass work later, on August 10, 1786, the survey of the first seven ranges of townships was finished at a spot that is now the north boundary of Rose Township, where Carroll, Stark and Tuscarawas counties meet. A small granite post, six inches square with an X cut in its top and only about a foot showing above ground, still marks the corner of four townships and three counties. It looks like nothing from the road, but it marks the west end of the first line run under the rectangular survey plan later used for nearly all western lands.

A frontier parish built of its own brick

Catholic settlers were gathering in the Morges neighborhood by 1823, when Mathias Little's log cabin hosted the first Mass said in the area. The village of Morges itself was platted in 1831 by Samuel Oswalt and John Waggoner, and by 1851 the congregation was substantial enough to build a permanent brick church — bricks burned right on the property rather than hauled in. St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception still stands at 8012 Bachelor Road, one of the older continuously used Catholic church buildings in this part of eastern Ohio, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Stark County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Magnolia Village45% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Fohl Village MHP28% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Waynesburg Village23% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• East Sparta Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Bolivar Village2% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Shale and injection wells (5)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

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