Wayne Township, Adams County

How Wayne Township, Adams County began

Wayne Township lies in the western tier of Adams County on the Brown County line and was formed in 1806 (an 1880 atlas gives December 2, 1803), one of six townships in the county's reorganization, taking in the land that later became Scott, Winchester and part of Oliver townships; it is named for General Anthony Wayne. Samuel Wright of Kentucky settled on Cherry Fork in March 1799, and Associate Reformed Presbyterian families organized the Cherry Fork congregation there in 1805. The abolitionist Col. William McVey laid out North Liberty, today's Cherry Fork, in 1848, and its academy operated from the 1850s until it became a public school in 1893. The smaller villages of Eckmansville and Youngsville grew around a blacksmith shop and a store in the 1820s-1840s.

Settled 1799, platted 1848, incorporated 1806 (December 2, 1803, in an 1880 atlas), by Samuel Wright settled on Cherry Fork in March 1799; Col. William McVey laid out North Liberty in 1848; the township was formed in 1806.

Where the name comes from

Named for General Anthony Wayne ('Mad Anthony'), victor over the Indians at Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Before the town

Neither the 1880 atlas nor the 1900 county history records a Native village, mound or trail in Wayne Township The township's name commemorates Anthony Wayne's 1794 victory over the Indians at Fallen Timbers.

Timeline

1. 1799 — Samuel Wright came from Kentucky in March and built a cabin on Cherry Fork just west of the later North Liberty, probably the first settler in the township.
2. 1800 — Adam Kirkpatrick came from Bourbon County, Kentucky, to Grace's Run, and Joseph and James McNeil built cabins on Cherry Fork about a mile southeast of North Liberty.
3. 1802 — Samuel Wright built the township's first mill, a tub-wheel on Cherry Fork (the 1880 atlas dates it to 1799).
4. 1802 — The first burial in the Cherry Fork cemetery at North Liberty is the little son of William Davidson, killed by lightning, according to General Robert Morrison, who dug the grave.
5. 1805 — Associate Reformed Presbyterian members on Cherry Fork were organized as a separate congregation in the spring, meeting in a floorless log church without fireplace or stove.
6. 1806 — Wayne Township was formed as one of the six townships of the county's reorganization, including the territory later made into Oliver, Scott and Winchester townships (an 1880 atlas dates its formation to December 2, 1803).
7. 1808 — Rev. William Baldridge of Big Springs, Virginia, took charge of the Cherry Fork and West Union congregations, paid for his Cherry Fork half partly in goods at fixed prices such as whiskey at 50 cents a gallon.
8. 1824 — Henry Eckman, a blacksmith, settled at what became Eckmansville; the 1880 atlas says the village was laid out July 9, 1850, in 42 lots.
9. 1833 — The Cherry Fork congregation built a 50-by-50-foot brick church with fifty-eight pews.
10. 1837 — Slavery and temperance divided the Cherry Fork congregation, and Col. William McVey and others formed the Associate Congregation of North Liberty.
11. 1840 — David Young opened a store at Youngsville, two miles south of the later Seaman.
12. 1848 — Col. William McVey, a Liberty Party abolitionist, laid out North Liberty on the north bank of Cherry Fork, the 1880 atlas giving the date as March 28.
13. 1855 — The Cherry Fork United Presbyterian congregation built its present 50-by-70-foot brick church.
14. 1857 — A newspaper notice announced the opening of North Liberty Academy on April 1, in a temporary room, taught by Rev. N.R. Kirkpatrick assisted by Rev. Gilbert Small.
15. 1879 — Mill owner Stewart McCormick was killed on December 11 when his clothing caught in the belting of his steam mill at North Liberty.
16. 1879 — The township enumerated 375 school-age youth, including 21 Black children taught by a Black teacher.
17. 1882 — E.B. Stivers leased the academy and opened a normal and training school for teachers, with nearly 100 students in 1883.
18. 1893 — The academy building and grounds were sold to the Wayne Township Board of Education and made a public school.
19. 1894 — On January 10 a mob overpowers the sheriff at the West Union jail, takes Roscoe Parker, about sixteen,, a Black youth arrested for the December 1893 murders of Luther and Mary Rhine near Winchester, and hangs him half a mile beyond North Liberty on the Winchester pike; he is buried January 13 in the pauper's corner of the Cherry Fork cemetery.
20. 2014 — Voters chose to disincorporate the village of Cherry Fork.

Stories

A pastor paid in whiskey and flax

Associate Reformed Presbyterian families from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky began gathering near West Union and on Cherry Fork in the late 1790s, and in the spring of 1805 the Cherry Fork members became their own congregation, worshipping in a log house with chinked walls, no floor, no fireplace and slab seats on pegs. When Rev. William Baldridge of Big Springs, Virginia, took charge in 1808, the congregation agreed to pay $165 for half his time, half of it in goods at prices set by a committee chaired by Judge Robert Morrison: beef and pork at $2.50 a hundredweight, wheat at 58 cents a bushel, corn and oats at 25 cents, whiskey at 50 cents a gallon, and maple sugar at 12 1/2 cents a pound. The log church was enlarged to 35 by 55 feet, though stoves did not come for another ten or twelve years. A brick church followed in 1833, and a larger one in 1855.

North Liberty and its academy

Col. William McVey kept the first store in the township from 1835 at his house on Cherry Fork, where elections were held, and in 1848 he laid out a village on the north bank of the creek. A radical abolitionist and Liberty Party man, he named it North Liberty. A select school begun by Rev. Jacob Fisher in the winter of 1848-49 grew into North Liberty Academy, later housed in a domed frame building raised by a joint stock company in the 1850s. The school changed hands repeatedly: sold in 1868 to Rev. Joseph Smith, a Baptist and Democrat whom the 1900 history says the mostly abolitionist Presbyterian community shunned; leased in 1882 by E.B. Stivers for a teachers' normal school; then bought by the United Presbyterian church; and finally sold to the township board of education in 1893 as a public school. The village later took the name Cherry Fork from the stream, named for its wild cherry trees.

A mob at the West Union jail

On December 19, 1893, Luther 'Pitt' Rhine, past eighty, and his wife Mary, past seventy, were found beaten to death in their farmhouse on Elk Run southeast of Winchester; they were members of the church at Cherry Fork. Suspicion fell on the neighboring Parker family, and Roscoe Parker, about sixteen, who had helped Rhine drive a calf to market the week before, was arrested after bloodstains were found on his clothes. A crowd demanded his life at a preliminary hearing in Winchester, and a constable drove him in a closed carriage to the West Union jail with a mob in pursuit. The sheriff moved him to Portsmouth, but when the new sheriff brought him back before the grand jury met, a mob broke down the old jail doors on the night of January 10, 1894, carried him ten miles in his underclothes through a stinging cold night, and hanged him from an ash limb on the Winchester pike beyond North Liberty, riddling the body with bullets. The Evans and Stivers history of 1900, which tells the story in its miscellany chapter, adds that Parker was never tried, that his body was buried in the pauper's corner at Cherry Fork, and that Leonard Johnson, a former slave from the nearby Black settlement, who passed under the body before daylight, never again walked that stretch of the path.

Local history sources: archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · adams.ohgenweb.org · archive.org · archive.org

Eight ~75-ft wells in the Ohio River sand-and-gravel aquifer, on the south side of US 52 just west of Wrightsville, east of Manchester; groundwater seeps slowly east to west, the same direction as the Ohio River. The water here

• Winchester Public Water System46% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Adams County Regional Wd36% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Seaman Village10% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• West Union Public Water System8% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 1 of 1 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

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