Tuscarawas

• Atwood LakeBuilt 1936 · 1540 acres

How Tuscarawas began

Tuscarawas village is on the Tuscarawas River in Warwick Township, a few miles north of Gnadenhutten. It was laid out in 1816 by Abraham Ricksecker and Abraham Romig, attorneys for the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, owner Eberhard Freytig, and was called Tuscarawas or Tuscarawastown, then Trenton, before the post office name Tuscarawas was kept for the town. Its first settlers were Moravians from Pennsylvania, and it grew only slowly until the Ohio Canal came through in the 1830s. The ground is also linked by Chester Hale Sipe, in The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania (1927), to a Lenape town founded about 1756 by Tamaqua (King Beaver), though a 1761 journal quoted in the 1884 county history places a Delaware 'Beaver Town' opposite Sandy Creek, farther north. The village had 1,035 residents in 2020.

Settled 1800s (Elijah Seward, Warwick Township's first settler, lived near the south end of the later village from about 1800 or 1801), platted 1816, by Abraham Ricksecker and Abraham Romig, as attorneys in fact for Eberhard Freytig of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Where the name comes from

The name comes from the Tuscarawas River and, through it, from the Tuscarora (William Daniel Overman's Ohio Town Names, 1958, as quoted by Wikipedia). The 1884 county history says the village was first called Tuscarawas or 'Tuscarawastown', was renamed Trenton on petition, and kept the name Tuscarawas for its post office because a post office called Trenton already existed in Butler County.

Before the town

Chester Hale Sipe's The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania (1927), followed by Wikipedia, says Tamaqua ('The Beaver,' King Beaver), a leading Unalachtigo man of the Lenape (Delaware), founded a town here about 1756 and died in it in 1771. The 1884 Tuscarawas County history is less specific: it quotes the 1761 journal of Major Robert Rogers, who on January 13, 1761 reached 'Beaver Town or Tuscarora' on the west side of the Tuscarawas opposite a river 'about thirty yards wide', which the county historian places opposite Sandy Creek, then the home of leading Delaware chiefs including King Beaver, with about 180 warriors and some 3,000 cleared acres. Sandy Creek enters the Tuscarawas well to the north, so the exact relation of Beaver Town to the present village is not settled by these sources. Three Legs Town, a Lenape village near the mouth of Stillwater Creek, is a separate site. The Moravian mission towns of Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten and Salem, and the 1782 Gnadenhutten massacre, are covered in the county and Gnadenhutten files. The land was ceded by the Treaty of Greenville (1795).

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware).

• Tuscarawas (King Beaver's Town) (village) — site of present-day Tuscarawas village, on the Tuscarawas River, c. 1756-1771 (en.wikipedia.org)
• Three Legs Town (village) — near the mouth of Stillwater Creek, Tuscarawas County, 18th century (en.wikipedia.org)
• Beaver Town (Tuscarora), as described by Maj. Robert Rogers (village) — west bank of the Tuscarawas River, said by the 1884 county history to be opposite Sandy Creek; relation to Tuscarawas village unresolved, 1760-1761 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1756 — Tamaqua (King Beaver), a Lenape leader, is said by Chester Hale Sipe (The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania, 1927) to have founded a town on the Tuscarawas River at the site of present Tuscarawas village.
2. 1761 — On January 13 Maj. Robert Rogers reaches 'Beaver Town or Tuscarora' on the Tuscarawas, then the residence of the leading Delaware chiefs, among them King Beaver, and describes about 3,000 cleared acres and 180 warriors.
3. 1769 or 1771 — Tamaqua dies at King Beaver's Town, according to Sipe.
4. 1801 — Elijah Seward, a Moravian from Northampton County, Pennsylvania, settles near the south end of the future village; his son, born in 1802, is the first white birth in Warwick Township.
5. 1816 — Abraham Ricksecker and Abraham Romig lay out the village of 60 lots as attorneys for Eberhard Freytig of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; John Uhrich adds 24 lots the same year.
6. 1817 — Godfrey Westhafer opens the first hotel, 'The Westhafer House, Sign of the Cross Keys,' in a log house (the county history gives 1817 or 1818).
7. 1819 — Warwick Township, which includes the village, is organized by the county commissioners on April 1.
8. 1827 — John Minnich, born at Bedford, Pennsylvania, in 1798, opens the first store and becomes the first postmaster, trading from a log building moved from the deserted Goshen Mission.
9. 1828 — A U.S. post office called Tuscarawas is established (Wikipedia gives 1828).
10. 1834 — The Ohio Canal reaches the village; its population is about 120, and the town begins to draw settlers.
11. 1836 — The first church in the village, a large frame Lutheran building, is erected about this year through the efforts of John Minnich.
12. 1854 — Sharon Moravian Church, about a mile north of the village, replaces its log church with a large two-story brick building.
13. 1880 — The village has 314 residents, up from 292 in 1870, with four general stores, a drug store, and Lutheran and Methodist churches.
14. 1920 — The census counts 499 residents (391 in 1890, 412 in 1900, 471 in 1910).
15. 1960 — Population reaches 817 (631 in 1930, 700 in 1950).
16. 2020 — The census counts 1,035 residents, down 2.0 percent from 1,056 in 2010.

Stories

King Beaver's town on the Tuscarawas

Long before Euro-American settlers platted a village here, this stretch of the Tuscarawas River was, by Chester Hale Sipe's account in The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania (1927), the site of a Lenape town established around 1756 by Tamaqua, a leading man of the Unalachtigo phratry whom English colonists knew as King Beaver. Tamaqua had earlier lived at Kittanning and Sawcunk in Pennsylvania before moving his people west into the Ohio country, and his town on the river became known as King Beaver's Town. He died there in 1769 or 1771, only a few years before the Revolutionary War brought new waves of violence to the Tuscarawas valley. When American settlers later took up land on the same ground, the village they platted in 1816 was called Tuscarawas, briefly renamed Trenton, and kept the name of the river and the vanished Native town before it, Tuscarawas, a name that itself derives from the Tuscarora Indians who had passed through the valley generations earlier.

A town with three names and a post office that would not change

The village the Moravian settlers knew was platted in 1816 by Abraham Ricksecker and Abraham Romig, who acted for Eberhard Freytig, the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, landowner. For years it was Tuscarawas, or 'Tuscarawastown.' Then residents petitioned to rename it Trenton. But a post office named Trenton already existed in Butler County, so the office here kept the name Tuscarawas, and the older name stayed in use for the town. Godfrey Westhafer, a Mason whom some neighbors half believed to have uncanny powers, kept the first tavern, the 'Sign of the Cross Keys.' The village remained small until the Ohio Canal was dug through it in the 1830s, and by 1834 it held about 120 people.

The store built from a mission cabin

When the Moravian Indian mission at Goshen was broken up in 1823 its cabins stood empty. A few years later John Minnich, a young Bedford, Pennsylvania, man who had taught school after coming to New Philadelphia with his parents in 1805, came to Trenton and set up shop in a log building moved from the deserted mission. It was his store and his home until 1835. He bought some goods at Pittsburgh and had them teamed in, and had others wagoned over the mountains from Philadelphia; a clerk, Isaac Everett, worked for him at five dollars a month and board in 1833. Minnich was the village's first merchant and first postmaster, put up its first Lutheran church with money he advanced, and lived in the place until his death on June 5, 1870. Blacksmith Joseph Fries, a neighbor, had hired Goshen Indians to help build his shop.

Photographs

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

Groundwater wells (2 wells) The water here

• Tuscarawas Village96% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Gnadenhutten4% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 2 of 2 passed.

Ballot issues

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.
• Financial Audit, 2021 to 2022, released 2025-08-05

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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