Tully Township, Marion County

How Tully Township, Marion County began

Tully Township occupies the northeastern corner of Marion County and holds no incorporated municipality; its center is the unincorporated community of Martel, laid out in 1881 and also known on old maps as Baker, Three Locusts, and Tully City, which had a post office from 1883 to 1996 and a station on the Big Four railroad. The lost hamlet of Stringtown, at the intersection of the Marseilles-Galion Road and Lyons Road, also lies within the township. Ohio's only other Tully Township is in Van Wert County.

Settled before 1824 (Clyde settlement), incorporated 1828-03-04 (township organized), by Alanson Packard and others of the Clyde settlement.

Where the name comes from

The 1883 county history says the township was named Tully at its organization in 1828 at the suggestion of Alanson Packard, in honor of a township of that name in New York State, from which he had recently come.

Before the town

No Native village, mound, or trail specific to Tully Township is recorded in the sources checked. The township lay north of the 1795 Greenville Treaty line and, like most of Marion County outside Waldo and Prospect townships, stayed closed to legal settlement until the land sales that followed the 1817 Treaty of the Maumee Rapids and the 1818 Treaty of St. Marys, opening in 1819.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot.

Timeline

1. 1795 — The Treaty of Greenville fixes a line closing what became Tully Township to settlement for roughly a generation, part of the county-wide pattern described in the 1883 county history.
2. 1828-03-04 — The county commissioners organized Tully Township from surveyed Township 4, Range 17 and a tier of sections of Range 16, at first 42 sections; it was trimmed to twenty sections by 1829 and by the creation of Wyandot County in 1845.
3. 1828 — John McNeal and Philip Hubbert came; the only regular road was the Marion and Mansfield State road, which settlers abandoned for a winding track over the high ground, and Hubbert and Joseph McNeal headed the petition for the first county road.
4. c. 1830 — Jonathan Clark, among the first settlers, built the first grist mill on Whetstone Creek and the first brick house in the township.
5. 1831 — The first schoolhouse, of logs, was built; by 1883 the township had six school buildings.
6. 1845-03-23 — After the creation of Wyandot County, the commissioners reorganized Tully and the other northern-tier fractional townships under their old names.
7. 1851 — Emanuel's Reformed Church was formed with twelve members in the District No. 3 schoolhouse by Rev. George Wiler; with the Lutherans it built a $700 frame church, replaced in 1868 by a $2,000 brick church.
8. 1858 — The German Methodist Episcopal society built a 30-by-40-foot frame church on Section 16 for $700.
9. 1880 — The Tully Township hall on Martel Road was built.
10. 1881 — In August the settlement at the railroad crossing, called Three Locusts and later Martel, was surveyed, replatted and recorded in sixty-nine lots; in March Dr. G. T. Harding had platted an adjoining town across the railroads as Tully City, later absorbed in Three Locusts.
11. 1883 — By 1883 the community had a post office named Three Locusts, with John M. Baker as first postmaster; Wikipedia records a Martel post office from 1883 to 1996, after which the mail went to the Caledonia ZIP code.
12. 1883 — The township reported 10,570 acres owned, 56,790 bushels of corn and 14,769 pounds of wool, and Three Locusts at the junction of three railroads had three stores, a hotel, a saw mill and a drug store.
13. 2020 — The census counted 834 residents in the 21.0-square-mile township.

Stories

Three Locusts

The railroad town at the junction of three lines in Tully Township owes its first name to a post office. The first house was John M. Baker's, and Baker wanted the office named for himself, but the Post Office Department rejected Baker. Some people met to find a name not already used in Ohio, and on a hot midsummer day they sat in the shade of three locust trees that stood in a group nearby. Many names had been suggested and turned down when one of them pointed to the waving leaves overhead and asked why not honor the trees. The name Three Locusts was sent to Washington, and the department adopted it, with Baker as first postmaster for a number of years. In August 1881 the place was surveyed and platted in sixty-nine lots, and Dr. G. T. Harding's rival plat, Tully City, was soon swallowed by it.

The Clyde settlement

When Marion County was organized in 1824 few settlers lived in Tully, and most were in what was called the Clyde settlement, named by Alanson Packard after the old song The Banks of the Clyde, which young Samuel Hazlet had sung. The Packards, Parcels and Gleasons lived there. John Campbell, who settled in neighbouring Canaan in 1822, said that Tully as it now stands did not hold a single white inhabitant. Packard later suggested the name Tully for the township, after the New York township he had left. Water for mills was a worry: the first mills were small and poor, and in some cases settlers carried grain as far as the Clear Fork of the Mohican near Belleville.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · ohioghosttowns.wordpress.com · en.wikipedia.org · marionmade.org · hmdb.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org

Del-Co's East Knox wellfield at Bryant and Lucerne Rds, Wayne Twp, about 5 miles WSW of Fredericktown The water here

• Del-co Water Company, Inc.65% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Aqua Ohio - Marion22% of residentsScioto River and Little Scioto River intakes, blended with local groundwater wells
• Galion City13% of residentsBlack Fork/Rocky Fork of Olentangy River via Amman, Amick & Powers Reservoirs
• Spring Valley Mobile Home Park0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Bridges rated poor (2)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

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.
• Basic Audit, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-05-07

Cite this page