Winchester Township, Adams County

How Winchester Township, Adams County began

Winchester Township, the northwest township of Adams County, was organized on January 2, 1838 (the commissioners' list gives December 4, 1837), from a strip four by six miles off the west side of Scott Township and two by four miles off the north end of Wayne, and takes its name from the village of Winchester that Joseph Darlinton laid out in 1815. Joel Bailey, a court constable in 1799 who settled east of the village about 1805, was among its first settlers; the first mill was a horse mill built by Richard Cross in 1809 on the site of Winchester, and the first church, a Baptist congregation, was formed in 1813. Prehistoric mounds and circles lie north of the village. The township was the scene of an abolition meeting in 1837 or 1838 and, on July 15, 1863, of Morgan's Raid, and the Cincinnati & Eastern narrow-gauge railroad reached Winchester in 1877.

Settled c. 1799-1805, platted 1815, incorporated January 2, 1838 (Evans and Stivers); the commissioners' list gives December 4, 1837, by Joel Bailey among the first settlers; formed from Scott and Wayne townships.

Where the name comes from

The township takes its name from the village of Winchester, which founder Joseph Darlinton named for his former hometown of Winchester, Virginia.

Before the town

Evans and Stivers's 1900 county history records, in the northern part of the township, a number of small mounds built by the prehistoric inhabitants, some partly explored by treasure hunters, who found only fragments of human skeletons and small trinkets of stone and shell. It also records a fine mound and three circles about half a mile north of Winchester, the circles about 150 feet across with walls some five feet high when first found, and a cache of eighteen finely made spearheads found a mile north of the village in 1896 by James McNutt. It does not assign the works to a culture.

• Mound and three circles north of Winchester (earthwork) — About half a mile north of the village of Winchester, prehistoric, undated (archive.org)
• Cache of eighteen spearheads (other) — A mile north of Winchester on a branch of West Fork, found by James McNutt in 1896, prehistoric, found 1896 (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1799 — Joel Bailey, one of the first court constables when Washington on Ohio Brush Creek was the county seat, comes to Adams County; about 1805 he settles east of the future Winchester at the junction of the Buck Run and Seaman pikes and builds a stillhouse and a horse mill.
2. 1809 — Richard Cross builds an old-fashioned horse mill on the site of Winchester, the first mill in the township, and teaches the first school in a log house near the later cemetery; Spencer Records builds a treadmill on Brush Creek about the same time.
3. 1813 — A Baptist congregation is formed at the house of Spencer Records on West Fork, with Elder Charles B. Smith as first pastor until about 1820; the Methodist Episcopal church in the village follows in 1830.
4. 1815 — Joseph Darlinton laid out the village of Winchester in what became Winchester Township.
5. 1820 — Joel Baily builds the township's first sawmill on Elk Run, Joseph Marlatt a water mill at the mouth of Horner's Run and Stephen Tolle another on Elk Run; the Scott post office, later Winchester's, opens with Judge Joseph Eyler as postmaster.
6. 1838 — Winchester Township is organized on January 2 from a strip off Scott and a strip off Wayne; the commissioners' list of townships dates its formation December 4, 1837.
7. 1838 — Rev. John Rankin, Rev. Dyer Burgess and others hold an abolition meeting in a grove near Winchester after being refused the churches; O. R. Smith, who remembered the day, says there were no clubs drawn, no mob and no one thrown from the stand, and calls Howe's History of Ohio account of an abolition mob a fiction.
8. 1845-1848 — Dr. A.C. Lewis, the village's first resident physician, built the house that would later bear his name.
9. 1860 — The first fair of the Independent Agricultural and Mechanical Association of Adams, Brown and Highland Counties, organized in 1859, is held October 2-5 on twenty acres south of Winchester; it draws 6,000 to 10,000 people a year until about 1882 and ends in 1897.
10. 1863 — Confederate cavalry under John Hunt Morgan (Morgan's Raid) passed through the Winchester area during the Civil War.
11. 1864 — Winchester was incorporated as a village.
12. 1868 — A post office named Emerald is established in the north of the township with Sanford Burba as first postmaster.
13. 1877 — The first passenger train of the Cincinnati & Eastern narrow-gauge railroad, an excursion of flat cars, reaches Winchester on August 7, drawing a struggling crowd to see a locomotive.
14. 1887 — The Presbyterians of Winchester build a handsome frame church costing five thousand dollars.
15. 1980 — The Dr. A.C. Lewis House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, on October 31.

Stories

The doctor's house on the Underground Railroad

Dr. A.C. Lewis served as Winchester's first resident physician, building his house sometime between 1845 and 1848 as the young village, laid out three decades earlier by Joseph Darlinton, grew along the road from Virginia. Lewis was an outspoken abolitionist, and he used his own house as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers making their way north through Adams County toward Ohio's free soil and beyond. The house survived the Civil War, including the passage of Confederate raiders under John Hunt Morgan through the area in 1863, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, one of the clearest physical traces of organized antislavery activity in this part of Adams County.

A refused pulpit and a grove

In 1837 or 1838 the Rev. John Rankin of Ripley, the Rev. Dyer Burgess, a man named Weed, and John Mahan and some of the Huggins family from near Sardinia announced an abolition meeting at Winchester. The churches were closed to them, so they met in a grove out near where Dr. Noble's house later stood. O. R. 'Reece' Smith, who had lived in Winchester since boyhood, remembered the day for Evans and Stivers: a few townspeople, Dr. A. C. Lewis, Milton Colter and the Baptist minister Hiram Burnett, sympathized, but most disliked the cause, though none tried to suppress it. Many farmers were in town, there was some drinking and loud talk but not at the meeting, and Capt. William Stockwell, an old sea captain and author of Stockwell's Narratives, marched about the streets with a fife and drum corps. John Boone Fenton, Barney Mullen and Andrew Swearengen came close to a fight with James Huggins and his friends before older heads separated them. Smith insisted nobody was knocked from the speakers' stand and that the abolition mob described in Howe's History of Ohio was purely a fiction; opponents of the movement, he added, were found in both the Democratic and Whig parties.

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

Mostly private wells The water here

• Winchester Public Water System42% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Seaman Village30% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)
• Adams County Regional Wd27% of residentsOhio River Valley Aquifer (wells near Manchester)

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.
• Basic Audit, 2024 to 2025, released 2026-07-21

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