Troy Township, Delaware County

How Troy Township, Delaware County began

Troy Township was organized December 24, 1816 out of parts of Marlborough and Delaware townships, entirely on United States Military District land set aside for Revolutionary War veterans, and settled by families such as Joseph Cole (1808) and David Dix (1809) who cleared farms along the Olentangy River. At "Horse Shoe Bend" on the river the Mingo people had a large village that the 1880 county history connects to Logan, the Mingo leader whose eloquence and mercy toward white captives made him one of the best-known Native figures in early Ohio history. Troy never grew a town of its own - by 1880 it had no village, post office, mill or store within its boundaries, though part of the city of Delaware later extended into its southern edge - and its history survives instead in settler stories: a captive girl rescued from a Delaware and Wyandot war party, and Hugh Cole's narrow escape from a highwayman while carrying the mail to Mansfield as a teenager.

Settled 1808, incorporated 1816-12-24.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted explains why the township is named Troy, one of seven Ohio townships bearing that classical name (a naming fashion common across the early republic, drawing on ancient Greek and Roman place names). The 1880 county history gives only the organizing order of December 24, 1816: petitioners from Marlborough and Delaware townships asked the County Commissioners for a new township with specified boundaries, "and the same is hereby erected into a new township by the name of Troy."

Before the town

The 1880 county history's Troy Township chapter records a Mingo village at "Horse Shoe Bend" on the Olentangy River, within the township, and states that Logan - the Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga) leader famous for his wartime mercy toward white captives and for the speech attributed to him after his family's 1774 murder - belonged to this tribe of the area, though the source does not claim Logan personally lived at this specific village. The same chapter records an incident, undated but placed in the township's early history, in which a joint Delaware and Wyandot war party returning from a raid into Pennsylvania made camp on Clear Run within the township with a captive white girl, before a pursuing party of settlers surprised them and recovered her unharmed. No mounds or earthworks are recorded within the township. For county-level Native history - the Delaware and Mingo villages near the city of Delaware, the Adena-period mound excavated in neighboring Brown Township, and the treaties that opened the county to settlement - see the Delaware County file.

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

• Horse Shoe Bend Mingo village (village) — on the Olentangy River within Troy Township, at the bend giving the "Horseshoe" branch its name, before removal, early 1800s or earlier (dn710906.ca.archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1795 — The Treaty of Greenville cedes most of what becomes Ohio, including the future Troy Township, to the United States.
2. 1806-07 — A tornado passes over the northwestern corner of what becomes Troy Township, felling timber over a narrow track, an event still visible in the landscape decades later.
3. 1808 — Joseph Cole, originally from New York by way of Virginia, becomes one of the township's earliest settlers, purchasing 640 acres near present Norton.
4. 1809 — David Dix, Sr., a Vermont native known as the "Green Mountain Boy," settles in the township after first living in Liberty Township with a Quaker neighbor.
5. 1814 — Only seven families are recorded living in the future township: William Reed, Levi Hinton, Duval, William Hinton, David Dix, Joseph Cole and Duncan.
6. 1815 — Joseph Cole is elected Justice of the Peace, an office he holds for twenty-one years without a single decision of his being reversed by a higher court.
7. 1816-12-24 — Troy Township is organized by the County Commissioners out of parts of Marlborough and Delaware townships.
8. 1969 — Del-Co Water Company is founded by Ralph Scott, Timothy McNamara and Gerald Solt, financed through the USDA Farmers Home Administration, later reaching rural Troy Township customers.

Stories

Logan's People at Horse Shoe Bend

Where the Olentangy River curls into the bend that gave it the name "Horseshoe," within Troy Township, the Mingo people kept a large village before white settlement began. The 1880 county history connects this settlement to the tribe of Logan, whose 1774 lament after the murder of his family by frontier settlers - "Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one" - became one of the most widely reprinted speeches attributed to a Native American in early American literature. Whether or not Logan himself ever stood at this particular bend of the river, the settlers who came to Troy Township a generation later inherited a landscape whose place names and stories still carried his memory forward.

The Rescue on Clear Run

A Delaware and Wyandot war party once returned from a raid into Pennsylvania with several prisoners, including a young white girl, and made camp on Clear Run inside what is now Troy Township. Pursuers - among them two of the captive girl's own brothers - traced the party as far as the Olentangy near the old stone mill north of Delaware and lost the trail, until one of them spotted smoke rising from the trees a mile or two to the north. Advancing cautiously, the rescue party surprised the camp, drove the raiders into the woods, and recovered the girl unharmed. The 1880 county history preserves the story without naming the girl, but it stands as one of the few detailed accounts of contact between Troy Township's earliest white families and Native people still moving through the region after the main line of settlement had been pushed back.

A Sixteen-Year-Old Outrides a Highwayman

For four years starting at age sixteen, Hugh Cole, son of pioneer Joseph Cole, carried the mail on horseback between Delaware and Mansfield over a route that was little more than a pack-horse trail through unbroken forest. One evening his horse balked and refused to go forward; following its gaze, Cole made out a man's arm behind a tree and realized, too late, that he had left his pistol back in Delaware. With a shadow closing in behind him as well, he leaned low over his horse's neck and spurred past the tree at a dead run. The waiting robber lunged and seized his leg, striking with a knife that missed its mark and buried itself in the saddle instead; the horse's momentum tore Cole free of the man's grip, and he rode on to Mansfield unhurt. He married shortly afterward and, by 1880, was living in Ashley.

Photographs

Local history sources: dn710906.ca.archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · delcowater.org · en.wikipedia.org

Olentangy River intake at Del-Co's plant on Olentangy River Rd, Liberty Twp, south of the city of Delaware The water here

• Delaware City58% of residentsOlentangy River (blended with deep wells)
• Del-co Water Company, Inc.42% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Marysville City0% of residentsMill Creek via Marysville Reservoir (Raymond Rd) + wells

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