Tully Township, Van Wert County

How Tully Township, Van Wert County began

Tully Township was organized in 1839 and named, unusually for this county, not for a person or a patriotic virtue but for a place: Mrs. John G. Morse, at whose home the township's first election was held, named it for her hometown of Tully, New York. Much of the township lay within a wet lowland long called the Bear Swamp, land nearly worthless until systematic ditching after about 1868 turned it into some of the county's most productive farmland. Its one large village, Convoy, was named for Convoy, Ireland by settler Robert Nesbitt and relocated to its present site along the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway starting in 1854, moving away from an earlier position on a Native American trail; by 1928 it stood as the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway in Ohio.

Settled by 1839; earliest land entries in the township date to the late 1830s, incorporated organized as a civil township, first election 1839, by Van Wert County commissioners.

Where the name comes from

Named for Tully, New York, the home town of Mrs. John G. Morse, who suggested the name before the township organized in 1839; her husband's home hosted the first township election. The township's one large village, Convoy, carries an unrelated and separately documented name origin: Robert Nesbitt, an immigrant from Convoy, County Donegal, Ireland, named the Ohio village after his home town.

Before the town

No Native village, mound or treaty site specific to Tully Township was located in the sources consulted. The township's early record as set out in the 1906 county history begins instead with its 1839 organization and the difficult work of settling the Bear Swamp lowland. The village of Convoy's own history page notes, without naming a specific tribe or date, that the settlement's original site lay along 'an old Native American trail' before it relocated to its present location near the new railroad in 1855 -- a general trail reference rather than a documented, site-specific record.

Timeline

1. 1830s — The earliest land entries in the future Tully Township are made, in an area that will remain part of Ohio's undrained 'last frontier' for decades.
2. 1839 — Tully Township holds its first election at the home of John G. Morse, whose wife names the new township for her hometown of Tully, New York; William Henry is chosen justice of the peace and Thomas Anderson township clerk.
3. 1854-06-16 — Convoy is laid out and platted in the township's eastern portion, moving the settlement from its earlier position along a Native American trail to a site near the new railroad.
4. 1855 — The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad is completed through Convoy, establishing market access to the wider Midwest and confirming the village's move to its present site.
5. 1865 — Only four or five houses stand north of the Sugar Ridge road that crosses the township, and only four buggies are owned in the entire township -- a measure of how undeveloped the Bear Swamp lowland still was two decades after settlement began.
6. 1868 — Systematic ditching of the township's wet ground begins in earnest, after which farmers start raising good crops and making substantial improvements.
7. 1872 — Convoy has grown into a lumber center, with a stave mill producing 20,000 staves a day and an adjacent hoop mill manufacturing barrel components; a post office opens under the Convoy name.
8. 1874 — Convoy incorporates as a village.
9. 1900 — Land in section 11, at the center of the old Bear Swamp, is appraised at $18 an acre, up from $1.25 in 1880 -- a fifteenfold rise in twenty years driven almost entirely by drainage.
10. 1913-07-01 — The Lincoln Highway Association is founded, with Henry Joy of the Packard Motor Car Company as president and Frank Seiberling of Goodyear as a major backer; the $10 million transcontinental highway project, running from Times Square to San Francisco, will eventually make Convoy its western terminus in Ohio.
11. 1928 — The Boy Scouts of America install concrete markers averaging one per mile along the Lincoln Highway, each with a small bust of Lincoln and the inscription 'This Highway Dedicated to Abraham Lincoln'; in Ohio the highway runs from Van Wert to East Liverpool.
12. early 1900s — Two separate fires each destroy roughly half of Convoy's business district; residents rebuild after both.
13. 1975 — Convoy holds a Centennial celebration, leading to the establishment of Edgewood Park and an annual Community Days.
14. 2010-07-04 — The Convoy Community Foundation and local civic groups rededicate Robert Nesbitt's restored gravestone at Sugar Ridge Cemetery; Ray Bonar, a representative from Convoy, Ireland, attends the ceremony.

Stories

From $1.25 to $100 an acre: draining the Bear Swamp

Section 11 of Tully Township sat near the center of what pioneers simply called the Bear Swamp, ground so waterlogged and unproductive that in 1880 the county's own real-estate assessor, John Shaw, appraised it at $1.25 an acre, exclusive of any buildings -- a price that told settlers plainly the land was worth almost nothing as it stood. The township had been heavily timbered everywhere except its swamps, and it made little progress until around 1868, when farmers began digging ditches and opening outlets to carry the standing water away. The change compounded for decades: by 1890 the same section was worth $5 an acre; by 1900, $18; and by the time the county's history was compiled in 1906, land that had sold for a dollar and a quarter was fetching $80 to $100. It is one of the clearest surviving numbers from the whole of northwest Ohio's Black Swamp transformation -- an entire regional economy's worth of ditching, tiling and patience compressed into one assessor's re-appraisal of one section of ground.

Here lies Robert Nesbitt

Convoy's name did not come from a wagon train or a military term, as a passerby might guess, but from a single homesick immigrant. Robert Nesbitt came to Van Wert County from Convoy, a small town in County Donegal, Ireland, and when the village he helped found needed a name, he gave it his home town's. Nesbitt is buried at Sugar Ridge Cemetery, which has been under the care of the Tully Township Trustees since its founding, and for decades his gravestone went largely unremarked. That changed in 2010, when the Convoy Community Foundation, the Convoy Lions Club, the Convoy Business Association and Convoy Community Days Inc. raised the funds to restore it properly. On July 4 of that year the village held a rededication ceremony, and Ray Bonar, a representative sent from Convoy, Ireland itself, crossed the Atlantic to attend -- closing, for one afternoon, the distance between an Ohio farm township and the Donegal town it had carried in its name for a century and a half.

A trail becomes a railroad becomes a highway

Convoy's location has never been an accident of geography so much as a series of deliberate moves toward whatever route mattered most at the time. The village's own history records that its earliest position lay along an old Native American trail, the kind of established travel corridor that shaped where many Ohio settlements first took root. When the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad came through in 1855, the settlement picked itself up and moved to sit beside the tracks instead, trading a foot-and-horse route for a rail one and setting the shape of the modern village. Convoy's relationship with through-routes did not end there: in 1928 the Boy Scouts of America installed concrete markers, each bearing a small bust of Lincoln, along the length of the new Lincoln Highway -- and in Ohio, that highway's western terminus landed at Convoy, a farm village whose entire settlement history had already been a story of moving toward whatever road ran through the county next.

Local history sources: archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · remarkableohio.org · villageofconvoy.com

Mostly private wells The water here

• Convoy Village100% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

Power plants (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (6)

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 2025-09-30

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