Tuscarawas Township, Coshocton County

How Tuscarawas Township, Coshocton County began

Tuscarawas Township, organized in 1811 the year the county itself was formed, is a small (9.3 square mile) township in south-central Coshocton County immediately south of the city of Coshocton, and most of its land is now occupied by that city. Its documented history reaches back to 1776, when the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger built the Christian Delaware town of Lichtenau, 'pasture of light,' less than a mile south of the Delaware capital Goschachgunk in 1776, at the invitation of the Delaware leader Netawatwees, and the settlement was abandoned in 1780. The canal-era hamlet of Canal Lewisville, laid out in 1832 on the Ohio and Erie Canal, sits on the township's border with Keene Township and carries the township's one National Register listing, the Lamberson-Markley Houses.

Incorporated 1811.

Where the name comes from

The township, like Tuscarawas County and the Tuscarawas River, takes its name from the Delaware word for the river valley. No separate account of the township name is recorded.

Before the town

Hill's 1881 chapter says it would be hard to find another tract of equal size in this part of Ohio with so many scenes of Indian history. In the winter of 1751 Christopher Gist stayed a month in the Wyandot village that Hutchins's map calls Old Wyandot Town, on the Tuscarawas several miles from its forks with the Walhonding and probably near Canal Lewisville; on Christmas Day he read the English service and preached to the Indians, and he found there the blacksmith Thomas Burney, the trader George Croghan and Andrew Montour. Bouquet's army of 1,500 men camped on the highland about a mile north of the mouth of the Walhonding from October 25 to November 18, 1764, with four redoubts and houses for captives, and received 206 prisoners; remains of the camp survived until about 1850. Hutchins's map also shows 'A Delaware Town' on the site of Coshocton and 'Bullets Town' some distance below, probably near Lichtenau, the Moravian town laid out in a cross two miles south in 1776. Near the larger mound, a large burial ground of several acres with graves in rows, heads west, was plowed over; Hill, citing C. H. Mitchener, reports skeletons with iron nails and oak boards and a bullet-pierced skull, and judges it probably the Moravian mission cemetery. About three-fourths of a mile south lies a conical mound 25 to 30 feet high and about 80 feet across, never excavated and the largest in Coshocton County, with two lesser mounds beside it that have been plowed away, and another mound once stood in Coshocton at Fourth and Locust streets. The Indian Phillips was killed by an Indian named Johnson on what is now Phillips' Hill on the old Massillon road, sometime between 1803 and 1807. Indians hunted here and traded at Coshocton in numbers until the War of 1812. The land passed by the Treaty of Greenville (1795).

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot.

• Lichtenau (village) — Less than a mile south of Goschachgunk (present-day Coshocton), within Tuscarawas Township, 1776-1780 (en.wikipedia.org)
• Goschachgunk (village) — At the forks of the Muskingum, on the site of present-day Coshocton, adjoining the township to the north, 1760s-1781 (en.wikipedia.org)
• Old Wyandot Town (village) — on the Tuscarawas several miles from its forks with the Walhonding, probably at or near Canal Lewisville, 1750-1751 (archive.org)
• Bouquet's camp (camp) — highland about a mile north of the mouth of the Walhonding, probably at the foot of Johnson's (Salliard's) hill, Oct 25-Nov 18, 1764 (archive.org)
• Large conical mound south of Coshocton (mound) — about three-fourths of a mile south of the Lichtenau burial ground, near the river road, prehistoric; undated (archive.org)
• Burial ground near Lichtenau (burial) — west of the railroad, south of the lane east from Samuel Moore's residence, probably 1776-1780 (Moravian), per Hill (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1751 — Christopher Gist spends a month at Old Wyandot Town on the Tuscarawas, reading the English service to the Indians on Christmas Day.
2. 1764-10-25 — Bouquet's army of 1,500 men camps a mile north of the mouth of the Walhonding until November 18 and receives 206 Indian captives, among them the ancestors of local families.
3. 1776 — David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder, with eight Christian Delaware families, build the mission town of Lichtenau south of Goschachgunk at Netawatwees's invitation.
4. 1780 — The Christian converts abandon Lichtenau.
5. 1800-04-15 — The patent for the Price (northeast) military section, wholly in this township, is granted by President Adams to Benjamin Morgan and Chandler Price.
6. c. 1803 — The brothers Jesse, John and Samuel Fulton settle about a mile and a half south of Coshocton on land bought from Matthew Denman and Martin Baum, among the first permanent settlers outside the town.
7. 1808 — Benjamin Fry of Redstone, Pennsylvania, buys land south of John Mitchell, a future associate judge, and keeps a small stock of goods.
8. 1811 — Tuscarawas Township is organized the same year Coshocton County itself is formed.
9. 1814 — John D. Moore, a tailor and former deputy sheriff, takes over the Fry farm; he helps the sick in the cold plague of 1815.
10. 1815 — The cold plague sweeps the township; John Fulton and many others die.
11. 1825 — William Cantwell, the post boy, is shot from his horse just across the Tuscarawas County line while carrying the mail.
12. 1832 — T. Butler Lewis and others lay out Canal Lewisville on the new Ohio and Erie Canal, on the township's border with Keene Township.
13. 1835 — Lafayette Township is formed, leaving Tuscarawas Township at its present limits; in 1836 the part west of the Muskingum is added from Jackson Township but soon restored to it.
14. 1881 — Tuscarawas Township is the smallest civil township in the county but, with fertile river bottoms making over half its land level, probably the best for farming; the Ohio canal and the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis railroad cross it.
15. 1984 — The Lamberson-Markley Houses at 713 Main Street, Canal Lewisville, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places (October 18).
16. 2020 — Tuscarawas Township has 1,759 residents.

Stories

A pasture of light, undone by war

In the spring of 1776, with the Revolutionary War just beginning to unsettle the Ohio country, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger and his colleague John Heckewelder led eight Christian Delaware families a short distance south from Goschachgunk, the Delaware capital, to found a new town. Netawatwees, the elderly Delaware leader at Goschachgunk, who never converted to Christianity but was influenced by the Moravian missionaries, had asked them to build it near him, and they named it Lichtenau, German for 'pasture of light,' after the biblical image of a green pasture lit by the gospel. But the same war that had made the site necessary soon made it untenable. In 1780 the Christian Delaware abandoned the town they had built only four years before and moved upriver, and Lichtenau went back to open ground, its name surviving only in the county histories and the U.S. Geological Survey's list of extinct Ohio towns.

Bouquet's camp at the forks

In the fall of 1764, after his campaign up the Tuscarawas, Colonel Henry Bouquet camped 1,500 men on the highland about a mile north of the mouth of the Walhonding, probably at the foot of what was later Johnson's hill. Four redoubts guarded the corners, the ground north of the camp was cleared, a storehouse was built for provisions and another for receiving the Indians, and three houses with separate rooms were put up for the captives, so the camp looked like a small town. From October 25 to November 18 the Delaware, Shawnee and other nations brought in 206 captives, among them six children of one Somerset County, Pennsylvania, family whose father met them at Fort Pitt after seven years not knowing their fate. Thomas Hutchins, Bouquet's assistant engineer, drew the map that fixed the Indian towns of the region in the record. Traces of the camp survived until about 1850, and some soldiers of the expedition came back to settle.

Five stories of one killing

Among the earliest events remembered at Coshocton was the killing of an Indian named Phillips by another named Johnson, on the hill east of town since called Phillips' Hill. The county's local historian of the 1860s, Mr. Calhoun, collected so many contradictory accounts that, in the words of the 1881 history, he 'dare not follow any of them'. Some said an old grudge lay behind it, some that the two quarreled over dividing a bear killed on Rocky Run, some that they fell out cutting a bee tree, some that they walked toward town together from Phillips' camp when the deed was done. Some dated it to 1807, others to 1803, and some to the fall, others to the dead of winter. It is said Phillips's widow walked three times round his grave and stumbled on the fourth, dying within three years, and that though it was the 21st of December and very cold, the blood on the ground was not frozen by Christmas morning. The historian concludes only that Phillips was certainly murdered and buried somewhere in Coshocton, though no two people agreed where.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · roadsidethoughts.com · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · archive.org

Every historic place in Coshocton County on the full map

Wells in a buried sand-and-gravel valley aquifer just off State Route 83 N, near where Mill Creek meets the Walhonding River north of downtown Coshocton The water here

• Coshocton99% of residentsSand & gravel aquifer near Walhonding River/Mill Creek valley (wells)
• Bomac Mobile Home Park1% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

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Spills reported since 2021 (4)

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• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-06-26

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