Spencer

How Spencer began

Spencer village takes its name from the surrounding township, first settled in 1823 by John P. Marsh and organized and named in February 1832 after mill owner Calvin Spencer, who offered lumber toward a schoolhouse in exchange for the honor -- narrowly beating out an earlier proposal to call the township Marshfield or Marshtown for its first settler. The village's official post-office name was long Centerville, though residents always called it Spencer; growth accelerated sharply in 1891, when the Northern Ohio Railroad reached the village at the junction of two rail lines, prompting construction of a grain elevator and killing off the nearby, less favorably situated village of River Corners in the process. Jacob Firestone's Farmers Savings Bank, founded in the village in 1900, continues to operate today.

Settled 1823 (John P. Marsh, first settler in the township), incorporated 1832-02-18 (Spencer Township organized), by settlers of the township, who named it for mill owner Calvin Spencer.

Where the name comes from

Spencer Township's settlers first proposed calling it Marshfield or Marshtown, honoring first settler John P. Marsh, but Marsh himself objected that the name did not suit a township so rolling and hilly. Calvin Spencer, who owned the local Spencer's Saw & Grist Mills, then offered lumber toward building schoolhouses if the settlers would take his name instead; they agreed at the township's organizing meeting on February 18, 1832. The village that grew at the township center was officially named Centerville as a post office and platted village, though local people invariably called it Spencer instead, and that name eventually stuck for good.

Before the town

No Native village, mound, trail or documented encounter site specific to Spencer village turned up in the sources we checked; the surrounding township was not settled by whites until 1823, well after the 1805 Treaty of Fort Industry opened Medina County to settlement. The 1881 county history notes that salt springs in the west half of the township drew deer to "licks" where hunters, describing an unspecified earlier era, "the cautious red man with a coal of fire" would wait for game, and that Indian trails cut through the forest bottoms, but names no specific village, camp or event tied to this particular township. The Medina County history carries the fuller treaty context and the one specific, dated Native encounter located in the county -- Potawatomi hunters meeting a squatter in Liverpool Township in 1810.

Timeline

1. 1823 — John P. Marsh, the township's first settler, arrives with his family and settles on the banks of Black River, having bought the land from original proprietor Samuel Parkman of Vermont for $3 an acre.
2. 1823-fall — Phineas Davis and family arrive and occupy a cabin already built, but never lived in, by a settler named Rising; other families soon follow, and settlement clusters at a river crossing later called River Corners, or Spencer's Mills.
3. 1832-02-18 — Spencer Township is named and organized, with twenty-one votes cast; Calvin Spencer's offer of lumber for schoolhouses wins out over an earlier proposal to name the township for first settler John P. Marsh.
4. 1839 — After some years attached to Lorain County (apparently to help fund the Elyria courthouse), Spencer Township is re-instated into Medina County; neighboring Huntington and Sullivan townships remain part of Lorain.
5. 1849 — A post office called Spencer begins operation in the village.
6. 1862 — Company B, 124th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, forms in Spencer, with 40 township men enlisting in a single day before training at Camp Cleveland and fighting at Pickett's Mill and Chattanooga.
7. 1891 — The Northern Ohio Railroad extends its line through Spencer, killing the nearby village of River Corners while spurring Spencer's growth at the junction of two railroads; N.E. Fuller and J.H. Firestone build a grain elevator.
8. 1900 — Jacob Firestone founds the Farmers Savings Bank in Spencer, still operating as a privately held bank.

Stories

The Name That Almost Was: Marshfield

Spencer Township came within one polite refusal of being named for its own first settler. When the township organized in February 1832, the assembled settlers wanted to honor John P. Marsh, who had broken ground there nine years earlier, and proposed calling the place Marshfield or Marshtown. Marsh turned them down. He appreciated the gesture, he told them, but he knew as well as anyone that a name meaning flat, marshy ground was no fit description for country this rolling and hilly. The settlers were still without a name when Calvin Spencer, who owned the mills already anchoring the township's commercial life, made them an offer they found easier to accept: lumber toward building schoolhouses, in exchange for his name on the map. They took the deal on the spot, elected their first slate of officers, and Spencer Township has carried the miller's name ever since -- though the village that grew up at its center was registered as Centerville with the Post Office Department, a name the people who actually lived there never used, always saying Spencer instead, until the official record finally caught up with local habit.

The Railroad That Built One Village and Killed Another

In 1891, the Northern Ohio Railroad extended a new line through Spencer, and the difference it made was stark and immediate. Spencer itself sat at the junction of two rail lines, an advantage that quickly attracted commercial investment -- N.E. Fuller and J.H. Firestone built a grain elevator to handle the new rail traffic, and the village grew around the crossing. The nearby village of River Corners had no such advantage, and the same railroad expansion that built up Spencer effectively killed River Corners outright, leaving it to fade from the map entirely while its better-positioned neighbor thrived. It is a small, sharply documented example of how a single railroad routing decision could decide which 19th-century Ohio villages survived and which quietly disappeared.

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

Lake Erie, drawn through two separate offshore intakes serving the Lake Road filtration plant The water here

• Rural Lorain Co. Water A48% of residentsMostly Lake Erie (bought from Avon Lake); some New London Reservoir and Ashland wells
• Medina Co/northwest31% of residentsLake Erie
• Spencer, Village Of21% of residentsLake Erie

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Police stations (1)

Public EV charging (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2022: 1 of 1 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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