Texas Township, Crawford County

How Texas Township, Crawford County began

Texas Township, in the northwest of Crawford County on the northern edge of the old Wyandot Reservation, was set off on March 6, 1845, when the creation of Wyandot County reshaped the county; it was named for the annexation of Texas, which was a hot political topic, alongside Polk, Dallas and Todd townships. Before that its two miles had been part of Crawford Township of Delaware County (1821) and then Sycamore Township (1825). George Bender, with an ox and a horse in his team, made the first farm in 1824; trespassing hunters from the reservation were the other early residents. The village of Benton (with its Poplar post office, 1837) was laid out in 1841 and incorporated in 1845 only to give a twelve-square-mile township the village the law required; the Ebenezer church nearby gave the crossing the name Pipetown. The township had 352 residents in 2020.

Settled 1824 (George Bender), platted Benton, August 1841 (George Bender and John Hazlett), incorporated March 6, 1845 (organized by the Crawford commissioners); Benton incorporated as a village August 23, 1845, by Crawford County commissioners.

Where the name comes from

The 1912 county history says the township was named for the independent state of Texas, whose admission to the Union had been a political topic for years; it notes that the annexation act had been signed five days before the Crawford commissioners named the township on March 6, 1845. The 1881 history reportedly adds that four townships created at the same time were given the names Polk, Dallas, Todd and Texas for the issues of the 1844 campaign.

Before the town

The township lay on the northern border of the Wyandot Reservation, the 12-mile-square tract at Upper Sandusky created by the Treaty of Fort Meigs (September 29, 1817), and was first inhabited by white hunters who lived by trespassing on the reservation, where game was more plentiful. Wyandot people regularly visited settler cabins to beg for food; one party at Martin Holman's cabin saying 'Me sick, me sick' emptied his pantry, and on another occasion Wyandot men claimed a deer that John Hazlett and Nicholas Ulary had shot because it carried an earlier wound. The 1912 history says that, though the Wyandot were great beggars and sometimes thieves, no serious trouble ever occurred between the two peoples after white settlement of the township began. The Wyandot left their reservation in 1843 (the date the 1912 history gives in its account of the Johnny Cake family in Polk Township), two years before the township was organized. No mound, village or trail inside Texas Township is recorded.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot.

Timeline

1. 1821 — Crawford Township, organized by the Delaware County commissioners, includes the future Texas Township, a dense forest with no settler.
2. 1824 — George Bender, a Pennsylvanian with a wife and three children, enters land in the southern part and builds a round-log cabin, the first settler of the farming kind.
3. 1825 — Crawford Township is divided and its eastern miles become Sycamore Township; Eli Adams, Adam Miller, Doddridge Paul, Charles Morrow and others arrive that year.
4. 1826 — Crawford County is organized; Texas Township had been under Seneca County's jurisdiction until then.
5. about 1827 — Bender builds a dam on Sycamore Creek and hires James McGrew to build a sawmill, sawing the boards in the open air; John Hazlett takes it over in 1829 and it runs until a flood destroys the dam in 1834.
6. about 1834 — The settlers of the north build the frame Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church, 30 by 40 feet, on the road that becomes the county line (it falls in Wyandot County after 1845); Rev. Thomas Thompson is the first minister, and the nearby clay-pipe store gives it the name of the Pipetown church.
7. 1836 — Isaac Miller builds a saw-mill below Benton, running it about eight years until a spring freshet takes the dam.
8. July 3, 1837 — The Poplar post office is established with George Bender as postmaster.
9. August 1841 — Benton is laid out by George Bender and John Hazlett and named for Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, whom Hazlett admired.
10. 1842 — John Hazlett builds Benton's first frame house; Alvin Williams and Amos Westover keep the first store.
11. 1844 — William Sigler opens a tavern in Hazlett's building, and Dr. Pitezel begins a fourteen-year practice in the village.
12. March 6, 1845 — The Crawford commissioners organize Texas Township from township 1 south, range 15 east, 'known by the name of Texas.'
13. August 23, 1845 — Benton is incorporated as a village so that the 12-square-mile township meets the legal requirement; Alvin Williams is elected mayor and Joseph Pietzel recorder.
14. 1850 — Daniel 'Bishop' Tuttle, a tavern-keeper, begins publishing the occasional newspaper The Divinity Physician to satirize the churches; the last issue appears in 1870.
15. 1853 — Tuttle runs for the legislature and receives one vote in his own township.
16. 1891 — The railroad station of Plankton, two miles north of Benton, opens with a post office and grain elevator.
17. November 30, 1905 — The Poplar post office is discontinued and rural delivery takes over.
18. 2020 — The census counts 352 residents in the township.

Stories

The horse-and-ox team

Early settler George Bender farmed his land with a team the 1881 county history called a common but odd sight in the township's earliest years: a large bay horse harnessed alongside a single ox. Bender rode astride the horse rather than walking behind the pair, reasoning that from that position he was better able to administer a flogging to the ox whenever it fell into its well-known habit of holding back. Driving an old-fashioned wide-track wagon behind this mismatched team, Bender became a familiar sight on the roads into Bucyrus and was frequently hired by newly arriving settlers to help them locate their farms, his years in the township having made him one of its most knowledgeable early residents.

Two waves of settlement meet

Texas Township's earliest farming families arrived from two directions at once. Settlers who took up land in the northern half came almost without exception from Seneca County, where large numbers of New England families had settled even before the War of 1812 and, having filled up the available land there, pushed on south in search of cheap farms. Settlers in the southern half came instead from Mansfield by way of Bucyrus, part of a separate wave moving west. The two currents of settlement met inside Crawford County, leaving Texas Township's central, flatter and wetter land the last to be claimed since both groups preferred the better-drained hills along its streams. Many arrived with almost nothing: when Adam Miller reached the township, his entire money and credit amounted to twelve and a half cents, and he began clearing his farm with only an ox, a rifle, and his wife's cooking utensils.

Old Pipes and Pipetown

In the early 1830s a storekeeper near the crossing of the old state road from Plymouth to Sycamore and the Crawford-Wyandot county line noticed the joy of Indians who got one of Adam Coon's combination tomahawk-pipes, and saw a fortune in selling cheap pipes to Indians and settlers alike. He bought a large stock of clay pipes, and visitors found pipes to the right of them, pipes to the left, pipes in front. The venture failed; neither Indians nor settlers took to the pipes. But the neighborhood named the storekeeper 'Old Pipes' and the crossing Pipetown, and the name stuck: the Ebenezer Methodist church built nearby about 1834 was seldom called Ebenezer, the little graveyard was the Pipetown graveyard, and the school stands by it still.

'Bishop' Tuttle's hotel rules

Daniel Tuttle kept the Tuttle House at Benton, and on October 29, 1852 posted a notice: meals cost 12 1/2 to 50 cents 'according to the quality and quantity of the fixings packed or stowed in,' lodging 12 1/2 cents, and a gill of tobacco juice on a clean floor 25 cents, on a white wall behind a bed 50 cents, and a 'loafer' who tracked 100 pounds of mud into the sitting-room owed $1. An infidel who published The Divinity Physician from 1850 to 1870 at a cost of several thousand dollars, he was called 'Bishop' because of his enmity to the churches; he defended free speech, wrote a letter denouncing the mob that attacked an abolition meeting in Bucyrus in 1837, and ran for the legislature in 1853 saying he would stay home and mind his own business, receiving one vote in Texas Township and none in Tod. Removed as postmaster in 1859 for backing Douglas, he went on publishing.

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

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