Washington Township, Warren County

• Fort Ancient EarthworksFort Ancient in Warren County, Ohio, is a Hopewell hilltop enclosure of about 100 acres, built roughly 2,000 years ago and bought by the state in 1891.

How Washington Township, Warren County began

Washington Township was created by the Warren County Commissioners on June 27, 1818, and named, like forty-two other Ohio townships, for President George Washington. Lying wholly within the Virginia Military District and surveyed by metes and bounds rather than the rectangular grid used elsewhere in Ohio, it was settled from 1797 by families following Todd Fork and the Little Miami River, and it remains the only one of Warren County's eleven townships that contains no incorporated municipality. Its defining feature by far is Fort Ancient, the largest prehistoric hilltop enclosure in the United States, built by the Hopewell culture on a bluff above the Little Miami between about 200 BC and AD 400; a second major Hopewell ceremonial site, the Stubbs Earthworks near Morrow, lies outside the township in Hamilton Township. Today the township is rural, drained by Todd Fork and bordered by the Little Miami, with its population served by the Clarksville, Lebanon and Waynesville post offices.

Settled 1797, incorporated 1818-06-27, by Warren County Commissioners.

Where the name comes from

Washington Township was named for President George Washington, a name shared by forty-two other townships across Ohio, making it the single most common township name in the state. No source found gives a more specific local reason for the choice beyond the general practice of naming new Ohio townships after the first president.

Before the town

Washington Township holds a major Native American site: Fort Ancient, a 100-acre hilltop enclosure with three and a half miles of earthen walls, built in at least three construction stages over roughly 400 years by people of the Hopewell culture (about 200 BC to AD 400), using deer-shoulder-blade and elk-antler tools and shell hoes to move an estimated 553,000 cubic yards of earth. Early white settlers assumed the walls were defensive and named the site a 'fort,' but the many gateway openings, interior ditches, and evidence of astronomical alignments with solar and lunar events have led archaeologists to conclude the walls served ceremonial, social and economic purposes rather than as a fortification. Ohio bought the site in 1891 and made it the state's first state park; it later became a National Historic Landmark, and in September 2023 it was inscribed, together with seven other Ohio sites, as part of the UNESCO Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks World Heritage Site. A second major Hopewell ceremonial center, the Stubbs Earthworks (also called the Warren County Serpent Mound), stood near Morrow in Hamilton Township, outside this township: an earthen enclosure with circular and rectangular elements plus a separate timber circle of 172 posts, 240 feet across, excavated in 2005; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 4, 1978, though farming, gravel quarrying and development, including Little Miami High School built over part of it in 2000, have destroyed much of it. No specific historic-era Shawnee, Miami or other named village or trail within the township turned up in the sources checked; the nearest historic-era village the 1882 county history names, the Shawnee town of Old Chillicothe (Chalahgawtha) on the Little Miami near present Oldtown, lies outside the township in Greene County. As elsewhere in Warren County, the Miami confederacy held the general territorial claim through the 1700s before the Shawnee moved onto the upper Miami rivers around 1765; both, with the Wyandot and Lenape (Delaware), ceded their claim to the region at the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. See the county file for county-wide detail.

Nations recorded here: Hopewell culture, Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware).

• Fort Ancient (earthwork) — Washington Township, on a bluff above the Little Miami River, about 7 miles southeast of Lebanon on State Route 350, Hopewell culture, c. 200 BC - AD 400 (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1797 — William and Benjamin Smalley built a double log cabin on the southeast bank of Todd's Fork, about a mile west of Clarksville, the first permanent settlement recorded in what became Washington Township.
2. 1798-1799 — Revolutionary War veterans William Trotter and his brother-in-law Ezra Robertson settled in the township.
3. 1801-1802 — John Barkley built near what became the McCray farm, part of the second wave of settlement.
4. 1802 — Nebo Gaunt, working as millwright, carpenter and blacksmith, built the township's first mill at Freeport.
5. 1806 — William Smalley was operating a mill and small distillery near his house, and Timothy Titus opened the township's first blacksmith shop.
6. 1811 — William Smalley built what the county history records as the first brick house in the township.
7. 1818-06-27 — The Warren County Commissioners created Washington Township.
8. 1838 — The earliest surviving Washington Township trustee record book begins.
9. 1840 — The Harris, Hadley and Wilkerson families began opening and improving the township's remaining swampy bottomland around Todd's Fork and the Little Miami.
10. 1891 — The State of Ohio purchased the Fort Ancient earthworks, making it Ohio's first state park.
11. 2023-09 — Fort Ancient was inscribed as part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ohio's first, alongside seven other Ohio sites.

Stories

The first night in the Smalley cabin

In 1797, William and Benjamin Smalley put up a double log cabin on the southeast bank of Todd's Fork, roughly a mile west of what would become Clarksville — the first permanent white settlement recorded anywhere in the township. The families had come in with, as the county history records it, 'strict injunctions to show no signs of fear if any Indians came.' That first night, the instruction was tested immediately: eight Native men stayed in the cabin overnight. Mrs. William Smalley did not sleep. She sat up rocking a cradle while one of the visitors lay near the fire, the two of them sharing the same small room until morning. The Smalleys stayed and prospered: within a decade William was running a mill and a small distillery, and by 1811 he had built what county historians called the first brick house in the township.

The fort that was never a fort

For more than a century after white settlers found it, the great hilltop enclosure above the Little Miami was assumed to be exactly what its name says: a fort, built by some vanished people for defense. The scale alone seemed to demand it — three and a half miles of earthen walls looping across a hundred acres on a bluff 270 feet above the river, enclosing enough ground for an army. But archaeologists who later mapped the walls found the wrong things for a fortification: ditches on the inside of the embankments rather than the outside, eighty-four separate gateway openings that would be indefensible against any real attack, and no real evidence anyone had ever lived inside it in numbers. What the walls do align with are the sun and the moon — solstices, equinoxes, and points in the 18.6-year lunar cycle — built up over some four hundred years by people of the Hopewell culture using nothing sharper than deer shoulder blades, split elk antlers, and clamshell hoes, carrying the dirt in baskets of thirty-five to forty pounds at a time. Ohio bought the hilltop in 1891, before archaeology had entirely caught up with the site's real purpose, and made it the state's first state park. In September 2023 it became part of Ohio's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · washington-township.org · warren.ohgenweb.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · sites.rootsweb.com · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Western Water Company76% of residentsLittle Miami River valley wells (51%) plus Cincinnati Ohio River water (49%)
• Clarksville Village10% of residentsOhio River (Miller Plant, ~88%) plus Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer wells (~12%)
• Waynesville Village7% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Warren County3% of residentsWells in the Little Miami and Great Miami river valley aquifers
• Morrow Village3% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• South Lebanon City1% of residentsOhio River (Miller Plant, ~88%) plus Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer wells (~12%)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (10)

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, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-10-21

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