Whetstone Township, Crawford County

How Whetstone Township, Crawford County began

Whetstone Township, the largest in Crawford County at nearly 44 square miles, was surveyed in 1819 on the 'New Purchase' the Wyandot and other nations ceded in 1817. The forest gave way, a little east of its center, to the Sandusky Plains, which settlers at first avoided for the timbered, spring-fed land to the north. Delaware County's commissioners erected the township on March 2, 1824, naming it for Whetstone Creek, and Marion County's authorized its organization that December. Its settlers, many from New England, Pennsylvania and Ireland, included Hugh Stewart and his five sons (1822); Robert Reid, a Presbyterian from Ireland; and the cabinetmaker Eli Odell and the miller Peter Wert, who ran Underground Railroad stations in the 1840s. New Winchester was laid out in 1835, Olentangy in 1840 and North Robinson in 1861. The township had 1,931 residents in 2020.

Settled 1819-1820 (John Kent, Seth Holmes and others), platted New Winchester 1835; Olentangy November 1840; North Robinson March 1861, incorporated March 2, 1824 (erected by the Delaware County commissioners); organization authorized by Marion County, December 7, 1824; first election April 1825, by Delaware County commissioners, on petition of the settlers.

Where the name comes from

The 1912 county history says the township 'was named after the Whetstone creek,' and the 1881 history that the name was the one the settlers suggested in their petition to the commissioners for a new township. Whetstone Creek and Mud Run drain the southern part of the township.

Before the town

Whetstone lies in the 'New Purchase,' the land the Wyandot, Seneca, Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Ottawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi ceded at Fort Meigs on September 29, 1817 (the 1912 county history says the township was obtained by treaty in 1817), and the Wyandot reservation lay to the northwest. The 1912 history reports two Native places in the township: 'an Indian village on the banks of the Whetstone, at or near where Seccaium Park now is,' where many relics have been plowed up, and another camp between the Stewart graveyard and the river. The western plains were used for ring hunts, in which the grass was fired to drive deer to a common center; the 1881 history says the Wyandot continued to camp outside their reservation wherever hunting was good, riding in at a gallop 'with whoop and halloo' to scare the settlers into giving them food, and tells of a family named Crum camped on Whetstone Creek with a newborn child in its deer-thong cradle. The army of Col. William Crawford marched through the township in 1782 on its way to its defeat, entering about a mile below North Robinson, and its rear guard fought a skirmish on the Olentangy that Butterfield places in the northeast quarter of Section 22, north of a monument on the Galion road. The old Indian trail from Galion to Upper Sandusky ran along the high ground there.

Nations recorded here: Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware).

• Indian village on the Whetstone (village) — banks of Whetstone Creek at or near Seccaium Park, Bucyrus, present when the first settlers arrived (about 1820) (archive.org)
• Camp between the Stewart graveyard and the river (camp) — Whetstone Township, north of the Whetstone, about 1820 (archive.org)
• Crawford expedition skirmish on the Olentangy (battle) — northeast quarter of Section 22, north of the Galion road (per Butterfield, cited in the 1912 history), 1782 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1782 — The army of Col. William Crawford marches through the township on its way to defeat and back; its rear guard fights on the Olentangy near the Galion road.
2. September 29, 1817 — The Wyandot and other nations cede the 'New Purchase' at Fort Meigs; Whetstone lies within it.
3. 1819 — The township is surveyed by Sylvanus Bourne (the 1881 history says 1821 or 1822); John Kent, probably the first settler, has an acre cleared by 1820.
4. 1820 — Seth Holmes, Joseph Young, Noble McKinstry, Ralph Bacon and John Willoughby settle in the northern half.
5. 1822 — Hugh Stewart, a native of Ireland born in 1757, arrives with five grown sons and buys 240 acres on Section 8 for $300; Henry Harriger, James Armstrong and Heman and Abner Rowse come the same year or soon after.
6. March 2, 1824 — The Delaware County commissioners erect Whetstone Township on petition of the settlers; Marion County's commissioners authorize its organization on December 7, and the first election is held in April 1825.
7. 1824 — James Armstrong builds the township's first shingle-roofed cabin; Robert Reid, who had walked the New Purchase to choose a site before it was opened, brings his family from Washington County, Pennsylvania; in 1826 Armstrong burns the township's first kiln of bricks.
8. 1828 — The Parcher brothers build a small horse-powered sawmill and begin distilling whiskey on their farm, both discontinued within a few years as unprofitable.
9. 1830 — The first county census shows Whetstone the most populous township, with 750 inhabitants, 24 more than Bucyrus.
10. soon after 1830 — The 1881 county history's Whetstone chapter places the murder of Bender, shot by one of two strangers who had joined Hammer and Bender on the road, near the Eberhardt sawmill on the Olentangy; its Polk Township chapter dates the same attack to 1836, near Polk's western boundary.
11. August 8, 1833 — William Fitzsimmons is appointed postmaster of the Whetstone post office, in his tavern on the Galion road; it is discontinued February 20, 1838 after he becomes county surveyor.
12. 1835 — New Winchester is laid out by the Marion County surveyor for Benjamin Fisher, Samuel Lechner, William Stuck and Henry Wise, named for Winchester, Virginia, home of several settlers.
13. November 1840 — Olentangy is platted on the Galion Road with forty-seven lots by Paul J. Heddick, George Sweney and William Snyder; it never grows between Bucyrus and Galion.
14. 1840-1850 — Eli Odell, cabinetmaker, openly runs an Underground Railroad station, with fugitives brought by Peter West of near New Winchester; the miller Peter Wert's mill at New Winchester is also a station, the first point north of Iberia (the histories' Peter West and Peter Wert may be one man).
15. 1845 — Wyandot County is created and Crawford reorganized; Whetstone gains two miles from Marion County, including New Winchester, and becomes the largest township in the county.
16. May 1, 1860 — Masked men break into John Albright's house near New Winchester, club him and his son, and steal $300 in cash and valuables; Albright dies in August, and the robbers are never found.
17. March 1861 — The village of North Robinson is laid out in the northeast.
18. 2020 — The census counts 1,931 residents in the township.

Stories

The cabinetmaker's secret railroad

Eli Odell came to Whetstone Township among its earliest settlers and made a modest living as the township's first cabinetmaker, turning out rough furniture from about 1826. Between 1840 and 1850 he gained a different kind of notice: he publicly declared it every man's moral duty to help runaway slaves reach Canada and to defy the law requiring their return, and made no secret that he fed and sheltered every escaped slave who reached his house before moving them on to the next station. Peter West, a neighbor near New Winchester who shared Odell's conviction that slavery was a sin, brought the fugitives to him; together the two men are believed to have helped dozens escape. Odell was careful enough in his methods that the law never caught him in the act, and exactly where the people he sheltered went after leaving his house — probably to a contact near Annapolis — was still an unsolved question when the county history was written in 1881.

Married in a potato patch

Philip Hubbert was for eight years justice of the peace of a Marion County township just south of Whetstone, and one June day a young man asked him to marry the young man and his bride-to-be. On the wedding day Hubbert drove to the bride's house, only to discover that it stood in Whetstone Township, Crawford County, outside his commission, so that a marriage performed there would be absolutely void. The house stood only a few rods from the Marion County line, only the width of the road away, and the squire proposed a remedy: the couple would step across the road into Marion County for the ceremony. The wedding was therefore held in a potato patch, in the presence of the guests, after which everyone returned to the house for the marriage feast, and, the 1912 county history says, all went merry as a marriage bell.

The robbery of the Albrights

On the night of May 1, 1860, at 2 a.m., a gang of disguised men wrenched a post from the gate and broke John Albright's door in at his house near New Winchester, demanding the money that everyone believed the old shoemaker and farmer kept. When he refused they clubbed him senseless; his son John knocked two of them down before he too was beaten unconscious, and the women were frightened into silence while the robbers took $300 in cash and jewelry and other valuables. Both men were badly bruised, the father so badly that he died in August. Suspicion fell on several people who had left the neighborhood hurriedly, and a trail led to Mount Vernon, where a girl arrested for stealing meat and church-library books named parties who had committed several robberies around New Winchester. No trace of the robbers was ever found.

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

Sandusky River (via Outhwaite & Riley up-ground reservoirs) The water here

• Bucyrus City80% of residentsSandusky River (via Outhwaite & Riley up-ground reservoirs)
• Galion City13% of residentsBlack Fork/Rocky Fork of Olentangy River via Amman, Amick & Powers Reservoirs
• Del-co Water Company, Inc.5% of residentsOlentangy River, O'Shaughnessy and Alum Creek reservoirs, plus Knox County wells
• Aqua Ohio - Marion1% of residentsScioto River and Little Scioto River intakes, blended with local groundwater wells
• Spring Valley Mobile Home Park0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)

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