Worthington Township, Richland County

• Pleasant Hill LakeBuilt 1937 · 850 acres

How Worthington Township, Richland County began

Worthington Township was erected June 6, 1815 from the western half of Green Township, and named for Thomas Worthington, who was governor of Ohio at the time it was organized. Its first permanent settler, Samuel Lewis, arrived in 1809, and a wave of families followed in 1811; a blockhouse was built for protection in 1812 during the War of 1812 period. Water power on the Clear Fork of the Mohican shaped its early economy, giving rise to the platted town of Newville (1823) and, later, the village of Butler and the Rummell grist mill. Today the township, in the hilly southeast corner of Richland County, is a rural farming area anchored by Butler village and the unincorporated hamlet of Newville near Pleasant Hill Lake.

Settled 1809, incorporated 1815, by Erected from the west half of Green Township by act of the Ohio legislature; first settled by Samuel Lewis.

Where the name comes from

The township was named for Thomas Worthington, who was serving as governor of Ohio when it was organized in 1815.

Before the town

No named Native American village, trail, or documented treaty encounter specific to Worthington Township has been located in the sources consulted. The land lies within territory ceded by the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, and other nations under the Treaty of Fort Industry (1805) and confirmed in subsequent cessions. The one site-specific feature found, the Lafferty mound east of Bellville, was disputed even by contemporary observers as possibly a natural glacial-kame formation rather than a built earthwork, and it was never excavated or scientifically examined, so its cultural origin (if any) is unconfirmed.

• Lafferty Mound (mound) — On Uriah Lafferty's farm in the Clear Fork valley, about four miles east of Bellville, Worthington Township, Unknown / undetermined (possibly natural glacial kame rather than an artificial mound) (richland.ohgenweb.org)

Timeline

1. 1809 — Samuel Lewis becomes the first permanent white settler in what would become Worthington Township.
2. 1811 — Henry Nail, William Slater, Peter Zimmerman, and James Wilson settle in the township.
3. 1812 — Samuel Lewis erects a blockhouse for the protection of settlers during the War of 1812.
4. 1815 — Worthington Township is erected on June 6 from the west half of Green Township and named for Governor Thomas Worthington.
5. 1815 — John Frederick Herring builds the township's first grist mill at Newville.
6. 1817 — Monroe Township is created out of the north half of Worthington on February 11, reducing Worthington to six miles square.
7. 1823 — Newville is platted in December by John Frederick Herring, with Abraham Nye among the first settlers who urged Herring to lay out the town.
8. 1850 — Daniel J. Rummell builds the present Rummell Mill on the Clear Fork about one mile east of Butler, on what is now Worthington Township Road 349.
9. 1899 — The Mansfield News publishes A. J. Baughman's account of the disputed Lafferty mound east of Bellville, noting it had never been scientifically examined.
10. 1974 — Amish carpenters complete major repairs to the Rummell Mill, which had stopped water-powered operation in the late 1940s.
11. 1982 — Rummell Mill is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the only surviving mill in Richland County with its original machinery intact.

Stories

The mill that outlasted its neighbors

By the mid-1800s, Worthington Township's stretch of the Clear Fork of the Mohican powered a string of grist and saw mills built to serve the farms scattered through its hilly terrain. Daniel J. Rummell built the mill that still bears his name around 1850, about a mile northeast of Butler, and it ran on water power for nearly a century. One by one the township's other mills closed or were torn down, but the Rummell mill kept its original machinery in place even after the wheel stopped turning in the late 1940s. In 1974 a crew of Amish carpenters carried out the repairs that kept the deteriorating frame structure standing rather than letting it collapse. The National Park Service listed it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, recognizing it as the last mill in Richland County to survive with its works intact, and a local preservation group, Friends of Rummell Mill, has since worked to keep it standing.

A mound nobody would dig

Four miles east of Bellville, on Uriah Lafferty's farm in the Clear Fork valley, stood a large oblong rise of earth that local residents called an Indian mound. Writing in the Mansfield News in 1899, A. J. Baughman described it as roughly 100 feet high with a base covering six acres, so symmetrical in its east-west orientation that people assumed it had been built rather than formed by nature. By Baughman's telling, the mound's summit had long served as a burial ground for area families, including eight or nine members of the Myers family who died of flux in 1823. Yet no one had ever opened the mound to find out what, if anything, lay beneath the graves, and educated opinion in the county was split down the middle over whether it was a genuine ancient earthwork or simply a glacial kame that people had come to read as something it was not. That uncertainty was never resolved, and the mound remains a case of a striking landscape feature whose human story, if it has one, was never recovered.

Photographs

Local history sources: richland.ohgenweb.org · en.wikipedia.org · richland.ohgenweb.org · richland.ohgenweb.org · historic-structures.com · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Richland County on the full map

Mostly private wells The water here

• Butler Village66% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Bellville Village18% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Perrysville Village14% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Clearfork MHP3% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Mohican Young Star Academy0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (2)

Spills reported since 2021 (3)

Money issues on the ballot since 2015: 1 of 1 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.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-03-10

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