Scott Township, Sandusky County

How Scott Township, Sandusky County began

Scott Township was organized in 1833 on the petition of settler Lewis Jennings and named for Merritt Scott, an early pioneer settler. It contains no incorporated municipality of its own; the unincorporated community of Rollersville, founded by four proprietors and named for the oldest of them, straddles its northern boundary with Madison Township. Prairies and marshes cover more of the township than any other in the county, and the 1882 county history, describing old settlers who spoke of the township's past only in whispers and circumlocutions, records both a documented early crime and a tall tale that the author himself calls an invented allegory built around real unsolved disappearances.

Settled 1833, incorporated 1833, by organized on the petition of Lewis Jennings, presented to the county commissioners March 4, 1833; the first election was held the following month at Jennings's house.

Where the name comes from

The 1882 county history says Colonel Merrit Scott, a native of Kentucky and a veteran of General Harrison's army in the War of 1812, was 'without doubt the first settler', and that the naming of the township for him was a deserved compliment to one who had the resolution to begin improving its fertile lands.

Before the town

No source found records a Native village, trail, mound, or treaty event specific to Scott Township. The township lies within the region opened to settlement by the 1817 Treaty of the Maumee Rapids.

Timeline

1. 1828 — Colonel Merrit Scott, a Kentuckian who had served in Harrison's army in the War of 1812, becomes the township's first settler about 1828 or 1829; no land is entered there until 1830.
2. 1832 — Henry Roller, a Tennessee-born War of 1812 veteran from Columbiana County, Lewis Jennings, M. L. Smith, Jacob Rinehart and Philip Hathaway settle in the swampy township; an old settler later recalled mosquitoes so thick the sun seemed to dim.
3. 1833 — Scott Township was organized on the petition of Lewis Jennings, who became the first clerk; C. C. Barney was elected the first justice of the peace, and S. D. Palmer and Samuel Bickerstaff were among the first trustees.
4. 1834 — Dr. William Durbin, a graduate of Pennsylvania Medical College, became the township's first physician, locating at Rollersville and practicing there three years.
5. 1834 — Samuel Sprout settles at the west edge of Tauwa prairie and Hon. Benjamin Inman, later county commissioner for twelve years, settles in the township.
6. 1835 — The first land entries are put on the tax list; George R. Lewis, who never lived in Scott, holds the largest tracts for speculation and later gives several hundred acres to Western Reserve College.
7. 1836 — John L. Green laid out the village of Greenesburg, one of the oldest platted villages west of the Sandusky River, and opened its first store with a partner named Ryder; despite a road built to Fremont soon after, the village never grew beyond its plat.
8. 1842 — The Congregational church at Rollersville was formed through the efforts of Rev. M. P. Fay, who ministered to the congregation until 1878; its house of worship was built in 1860.
9. 1844 — Dr. Thomson, newly in practice, is chased by wolves on a corduroy road on a moonlit night riding to Wood County.
10. 1860 — Benjamin Inman is elected county commissioner and holds the office twelve years; during that time the ditching of the prairie marshes begins.
11. 1879 — A new Ohio law lets county commissioners contract whole ditches to the lowest bidder, replacing the old assignment of rods to each landowner that had failed in Scott; land that had been under water twenty years earlier now yields forty bushels of wheat to the acre.

Stories

The founding of Rollersville

Rollersville sits on the line between Scott and Madison townships and was platted by four different proprietors working on both sides of the boundary at once: Henry Roller and Wilson Teeters laid out the Scott-township half, while William Whitford and Luther Chase laid out the north part in Madison township. A settler named James Evans proposed the name, adopted as a compliment to Henry Roller, the oldest of the four founders. In its early years the settlement's business consisted chiefly of taverns rather than stores; the first, an eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot log building, was put up by Jonathan Fought, and the third, built by a man named Barringer, was a single sixteen-by-twenty-foot room where, the county history notes, the average weekly consumption of whiskey ran to about one barrel. Barringer once traded his tavern stand to the county sheriff for a horse he knew to be unsound, and was surprised when the sheriff, expecting the larger two-story tavern, discovered he had bought the smaller building instead.

The first burial in Scott

The first burial in what became Scott township was that of a veteran of the Revolutionary War who had lived about two miles west of the township line, in Wood County. Mourners gathered at the house, and six men volunteered to carry the body along a narrow path across marsh and prairie to an elevated spot on what became the Minkly farm -- a path in places too narrow for two men to walk abreast, so that the pallbearers moved single file, one scouting ahead, four bearing the coffin, and the sixth following to spell them. The 1882 county history records that by the time it was written, even the soldier's name had been forgotten, though the grave marked the beginning of what became a public cemetery.

The allegory of the monster snake

The 1882 county history's author writes that a group of old Scott township settlers spoke of certain people and places only in whisper and circumlocution during his first visit, convincing him some real criminal episode lay behind their reticence. He was eventually told a folk tale, which he states outright he believes to be 'an allegory invented by a churlish wag' rather than literal fact: that around 1841, a hunter in a township marsh shot and killed a snake reported to measure nearly nineteen feet long, and that a dissection of the carcass turned up part of a human skeleton, a packet of a peddler's notions, a stash of counterfeit coins and a coin-press, and the pocketbook of a land-buyer from the East whose boots had been found hanging in a tree the next morning. The author connects the tale to a real, unsolved local memory: a peddler who had once gone mysteriously missing from a hotel in neighboring Woodville township, whose disappearance he says had unfairly cast suspicion on a few of the township's own honest pioneers. He records the story for what it plainly was to him -- an oblique way for old settlers to gesture at real deeds of 'darkness and devilment' from the township's early years without naming names.

Draining the Scott marshes

Scott had more marsh and prairie than any other township in the county, with Tauwa, Mud Creek and Miller prairies and a two-mile swamp at the source of Sugar Creek. Under the old law the county commissioners assigned each landowner so many rods of ditch, and each farmer dug his piece when he pleased, often opening the upper part first and sending the overflow onto the lands below. The trouble in Scott led to the 1879 state law that let the commissioners contract a whole ditch to the lowest bidder and assess the cost on the land benefited, though the farmers thought it somewhat tyrannical. The history says land that was water twenty years earlier was producing forty bushels of wheat to the acre, and that the bullfrog and the mosquito had retreated.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Bradner Village74% of residentsGroundwater wells (5 wells)
• Gibsonburg Village26% of residentsGroundwater wells (5 wells)

Public schools (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Who holds office

Roster as of 2026-01-24: county board of elections.

Ballot issues

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, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-07-29

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