Wayne Township, Ashtabula County

How Wayne Township, Ashtabula County began

Titus Hayes passed through Wayne Township in June 1798 as a lone surveyor, swimming the Pymatuning creek with only a dog for company, but did not stay; permanent settlement began in October 1803, when Joshua Fobes, his wife Dorothy, and his brother Elias, of Connecticut, completed a forty-nine-day journey and built a cabin near lot 57. It was genuinely remote frontier -- the nearest neighbors were five miles off in Windsor Township, and Native visitors occasionally supplied the family with venison and bear meat, though Mrs. Fobes once drove off two who grew threatening over whisky with nothing but a broomstick. Future U.S. Congressman Joshua Reed Giddings arrived as a young boy in June 1806 -- the family's journey timed, memorably, to the day of a total solar eclipse -- and much of the township's early history survives because Giddings himself recorded it in a semicentennial address delivered in 1853. The township organized on April 11, 1811, separating from Green Township in Trumbull County, and is named for General Anthony Wayne.

Settled October 1803 (Joshua, Dorothy, and Elias Fobes, first settlers), incorporated April 11, 1811 (organized, separated from Green Township, Trumbull County), by Joshua Fobes and family, of Somers, Connecticut.

Where the name comes from

The township is named for General Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary War and Northwest Indian War commander whose 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers led to the Treaty of Greenville that opened much of Ohio, including the Western Reserve, to American settlement.

Before the town

Native people living in or passing through Wayne Township supplied early settlers with gifts of deer and bear meat and are described in the 1924 county history as helpful neighbors, a characterization the 1878 county history complicates: Native visitors occasionally called at the Fobes cabin demanding whisky, and on one occasion grew threatening enough that Mrs. Fobes, alone at the time, had to drive two of them off the property with a broomstick after they drew knives. The 1924 history separately records a genuine local mystery: a circular earthen embankment enclosing two full acres near Brown's Mill, in the township's southeastern section, almost certainly an ancient fortification of some kind -- but the Native people the settlers asked about it said plainly that they had no history or tradition explaining who built it or when, meaning the earthwork was already an unexplained relic of a still-earlier period even to the Native inhabitants of the early 1800s. This pattern -- a Late Prehistoric or earlier earthwork with no surviving oral history attached -- is consistent with the deeper Adena, Hopewell, or Whittlesey-era mound-building traditions documented at the county level.

• Circular embankment near Brown's Mill (earthwork) — southeastern Wayne Township, near Brown's Mill, undetermined; unknown even to Native people encountered by early 1800s settlers (conneautohio.us)

Timeline

1. June 1798 — Titus Hayes, a young surveyor traveling alone with only a dog, becomes the first white man recorded in the township, entering near its northwest corner and swimming the Pymatuning creek near lot 28, but not settling.
2. spring 1803 — Simon Fobes, of Somers, Connecticut, contracts with Oliver Phelps for 1,500 acres, an entire tier of lots in the township.
3. October 8, 1803 — Joshua Fobes, his wife Dorothy, and his younger brother Elias -- after a forty-nine-day journey from Connecticut and a delay caused by Joshua's illness -- move into a cabin near the southeast corner of lot 57, becoming the township's first settlers.
4. April 21, 1804 — Mrs. Fobes gives birth to a son, Alvin, the first child born in the township.
5. winter 1804-05 — Titus Hayes and Elisha Giddings remove from Canandaigua, New York with their families, wintering in Hartford, Trumbull County before reaching Wayne on October 8, 1805 and settling on lots 33 and 34.
6. June 16, 1806 — The family of Joshua Giddings -- including his young sons Joseph and Joshua Reed Giddings, the future U.S. congressman -- reaches Conneaut on the day of a total solar eclipse, on their way to join Joshua Giddings Sr. at his cabin on lot 45 in Wayne Township.
7. November 2, 1806 — The township's first sermon is preached at Joshua Fobes's home.
8. 1807 — Sarah Fobes marries Philemon Brockway, the township's first recorded wedding.
9. April 11, 1811 — Wayne Township organizes, separating from Green Township in Trumbull County; George Wakeman and a man recorded as Joshua Giddings are elected trustees at a meeting held at Nathan Fobes's home.
10. 1816 — A Congregational church formally organizes, after years of Sabbath services led by Simon Fobes at private homes.
11. 1820 — Loomis & Brown build the township's first grist mill, on Pymatuning Creek.
12. 1823 — A post office opens with Hari Miner as postmaster.
13. 1825 — Hayes & Stevens open the township's first store.
14. 1831 — The township's original log church, built with wooden shake shingles and heated by a central fire, is destroyed by fire.
15. 1846 — A stock company establishes Wayne Academy for higher education.
16. 1852 — Local cheesemaker C. C. Wick exhibits about four tons of cheese at the Ohio State Fair, reflecting the township's growing dairy industry.
17. August 24, 1853 — The Hon. J. R. Giddings, who had come to Wayne Township as a boy in 1806, delivers a semicentennial anniversary address on the township's settlement that becomes the primary source for its early history in the 1878 county history.

Stories

An earthwork no one could explain, even then

In the southeastern part of Wayne Township, near Brown's Mill, settlers found a circular earthen embankment enclosing a full two acres of ground -- clearly built, clearly old, and clearly meant for some deliberate purpose, likely defensive given its scale. Naturally curious, they asked the Native people they knew in the area what it was and who had built it. The answer they got back, as the 1924 county history records it, was not a legend or a half-remembered story but a flat admission: the Native people themselves said they had no history or tradition that explained it. Whatever culture had raised those walls -- and the scale and form suggest one of the older mound-building traditions rather than anything built within the settlers' or their informants' living memory -- had vanished from both peoples' knowledge long before either group arrived on the scene. It is a small, honest moment in the record: an acknowledgment, preserved by the very settlers who might otherwise have claimed to explain everything, that some of what came before them was already unrecoverable.

The future congressman's eclipse-day arrival

Long before Joshua Reed Giddings became a leading antislavery voice in Congress, he was a small boy making the last leg of a long journey to a cabin in the Ohio wilderness. His father, Joshua Giddings, had gone ahead in the winter of 1805-06 to break ground on lot 45 near the center of Wayne Township; the rest of the family -- his wife, son Joseph, and young Joshua Reed, the youngest -- followed that spring under the escort of a recently married neighbor, Nathaniel Coleman. They came down the old Salt Road and crossed the Pymatuning into the township, reaching Conneaut on June 16, 1806, a date fixed in the settlers' memory because it coincided with a total eclipse of the sun. Giddings grew up in the township his father had chosen and, fifty years later almost to the season, stood before its residents at a semicentennial celebration and delivered the address that became the backbone of the township's written history -- a case of a single boy on that eclipse-day journey growing up to be the historian of his own childhood home.

Local history sources: conneautohio.us · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Andover-camplands Water45% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Orwell Village41% of residentsGroundwater wells (6 wells)
• Andover Village14% of residentsGroundwater wells (5 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

High-hazard dams (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (4)

Money issues on the ballot since 2023: 3 of 3 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 2026-05-07
• Financial Audit, 2022 to 2023, released 2024-09-17

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