Union Township, Union County

How Union Township, Union County began

Union Township occupies the southwestern corner of Union County and takes in the Darby Plains, a level, damp prairie-and-oak-opening country that early settlers thought poor farmland until New England families took it up cheaply. George Reed settled on Big Darby Creek in 1799 and built the mill that gave the village of Milford Center its start; the township was one of the county's original three divisions in 1820 and was later cut down by the creation of Liberty (1822) and Allen (1827) townships. Besides Milford Center it holds the railroad station of Irwin and the nearly vanished hamlet of Homer. The 2020 census counted 1,710 people in the township, 807 of them in Milford Center.

Settled 1799 (George Reed on Big Darby Creek near Milford; the first survey, for Lucas Sullivant, dates from 1799), incorporated 1820-01-10, by George Reed was the first settler; the township was formed as one of Union County's original three townships, and was reorganized March 12, 1821.

Where the name comes from

Named, like the county itself, for the union of Franklin, Delaware, Madison and Logan county land that formed Union County in 1820; no separate naming story for the township is recorded.

Before the town

No mound, treaty line or named Native village inside Union Township is recorded in the sources checked. The county history does record that the first corn planted in Union County by Native people was on a farm it calls the 'Indian Field Farm' in its Union Township chapter, and that Herbert Reed, born in the township in December 1800, was in childhood a playmate of the Indian children in the neighbourhood, so Native families were still living on the Big Darby in the first years of Euro-American settlement. The township lies in the Big Darby watershed; for the Wyandot, Shawnee and Mingo presence along the creek and the treaties that opened the land. Jonathan Alder, captured as a boy in 1782 and raised by a Mingo chief and his Shawnee wife, later farmed on Big Darby Creek in the Union and Madison county borderland.

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

Timeline

1. 1799 — The first land survey in the township, for Lucas Sullivant (200 acres), is made, and George Reed, a Pennsylvanian, settles on the Big Darby near the future Milford, the first white settler in this part of Union County.
2. 1800 — Robert Snodgrass, who married a sister of George Reed, settles on Big Darby; his son Herbert Reed, born December 2, 1800, is the first child born in the township and the third in the county.
3. 1808 — Rev. Samuel Woods, who settled on Big Darby in 1806, is ordained and becomes first minister of the Presbyterian church at Milford Center, then called 'Upper Liberty.'
4. 1809 — A post office is established at Milford with Aaron Watson as postmaster (Wikipedia gives 1823 for the Milford office).
5. 1810 — The area of the township, then still part of Delaware and Madison counties, has a population of 1,757.
6. 1811 — George Reed's log grist mill on the Big Darby at Milford is running by about 1810-1812, among the first mills in the future county; it burns in 1818 and Reed replaces it with a frame mill.
7. 1813 — A party of Vermonters who had gone to Canada and left it at the outbreak of the War of 1812, led out from Worthington, buy land on the Darby Plains and build the cabins of the 'Post Road settlement' between Irwin and Pleasant Valley.
8. 1816 — George Reed platted the village that would grow into Milford Center, within what became Union Township.
9. 1820-01-10 — Union County was organized and divided into three original townships, Darby, Mill Creek and Union.
10. 1820-04-01 — Milford Center, inside Union Township, briefly served as the first county seat of the newly organized Union County.
11. 1821-03-12 — The county commissioners redefined township boundaries, leaving Union Township as one of five resulting divisions.
12. 1822 — Liberty Township is created out of Union Township; Allen Township is cut from what remained in 1827.
13. 1829 — The Milford post office is renamed Milford Center with William Gabriel as postmaster; it was called Flint until January 1866, when the Milford Center name was restored.
14. 1834 — The hamlet of Homer on Little Darby Creek is surveyed on October 10 for Elisha Reynolds; by 1840 it had a sawmill, furniture and carriage shops and a woolen mill, but by 1880 only about six houses were left.
15. 1837 — The Ohio Gazette describes Milford Center as a post town of thirty dwellings, three stores, a tavern, a grist mill, a saw mill, a physician and Presbyterian and Methodist meeting houses.
16. 1853 — Milford Center is incorporated as a village on a petition to the county commissioners; its government lapsed during the Civil War and it was re-incorporated in 1866.
17. 1880 — A large brick school building costing $6,000 is erected at Irwin, a Big Four railroad station and hay-and-straw shipping point named for pioneer John Irwin.
18. 1914 — Milford Center has about 750 people, Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian, Christian, Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches, and Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias lodges; Irwin has about 125 residents.
19. 2020 — The census counts 1,710 people in Union Township, 807 of them in Milford Center.

Stories

The township that held the first courthouse

When Union County organized on April 1, 1820, it needed a seat of government before Marysville was built up enough to serve. It picked Milford Center, the mill town George Reed had platted at the Darby Creek ford four years earlier, inside what is now Union Township. A small log courthouse went up there to handle the county's first business. The arrangement did not last: within the decade the county seat moved to Marysville, and Milford Center settled into life as one of many farm-service villages, though it kept the name change to 'Milford Center' that came with its short turn as a seat of government.

Vermonters who walked out of Canada

Early in the 1800s many Vermonters crossed into eastern Canada, where land was cheap, and prospered. When the United States and Britain went to war in 1812, the settlers, many of them Revolutionary soldiers or their descendants, would not take up arms against their countrymen and would not sit quietly either, so they set out for the Ohio country. The first party, among them Russell Bigelow, Moses Patrick, Asa Plummer, Joab Hoyt, Amos and Dr. Gideon Hawley and Nehemiah Sabine, left on September 20, 1812 and reached Worthington after more than six weeks on the road. The next summer they chose the Darby Plains, which others thought a barren waste, bought land and built cabins; Joseph Green of New York was first into his cabin and the place was long called the Green Settlement. A second party followed in 1814. John F. Sabine told the story in the Marysville Tribune in 1882, and Curry's county history reprints it as the settlement of the 'Post Road' between Irwin and Pleasant Valley.

A ford, a mill and a name

Curry's history explains Milford's name this way. In the first years of the 1800s settlers on both banks of Big Darby Creek cleared brush from the stream so wagons could cross, and people spoke of crossing at Darby Ford. Then George Reed built his mill beside the crossing, and the place became Mill-ford, then Millford, and finally Milford with one 'l' dropped. Reed, a Pennsylvanian who had come in 1799, had also built a sawmill that cut much of the early lumber of the district, and he platted the town on April 6, 1816, on ground that was then in Delaware County. In the 1820s, when the town hoped to be the county seat, it took the name Milford Center. Reed died in 1836 at 67.

The saw-mill frame and the bed-cord

In 1820 William B. Irwin, a young man known for his mechanical gifts, set out to raise a sawmill on Little Darby Creek, which needed more hands than the neighbourhood could supply; he rode fourteen miles the evening before to fetch them, with rain falling and the creek rising. While he was gone his wife, Anna Bigelow Irwin, grew anxious for the timbers at the mill site, went to the creek and found them beginning to float. She secured the smaller ones herself, put her baby in its cradle, took the cord from her bed, ran back to the creek and tied the timbers to the bushes on the bank, saving the whole frame. Irwin, whose father John had come in 1806 and started the township's first Sabbath school, later served as brigadier general of militia, justice of the peace for twenty-eight years and county surveyor for twenty.

Local history sources: uccogs.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · historicalmarkerproject.com · hmdb.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Milford Center Village64% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Marysville City36% of residentsMill Creek via Marysville Reservoir (Raymond Rd) + wells
• Del-co Water Company, Inc.0% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells

Bridges rated poor (3)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 1 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.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-06-11

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