Yellow Creek Township, Columbiana County

How Yellow Creek Township, Columbiana County began

Yellow Creek Township, on the Ohio River in the southeast corner of Columbiana County, was organized by 1805 and holds the county's most important Native American historical site: the mouth of Yellow Creek, where the Mingo leader Logan kept a hunting camp and village documented from 1773, and where the April 30, 1774 Yellow Creek massacre of his family, across the river in present West Virginia, triggered Lord Dunmore's War. William Wells settled the riverfront in 1797, Scottish and Virginia families took up the creek bottoms, and salt-boiling on Yellow Creek flourished briefly before 1812. Wellsville occupies the township's southeastern corner and has its own record; the 1846 Daniel McBean Farmhouse, a stone farmhouse, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Settled 1797 (William Wells) and 1798, incorporated 1805 (township on the tax list; the county history gives no exact date), by William Wells, first settler.

Where the name comes from

Named for Yellow Creek, the stream at whose mouth the township sits; it is the only Yellow Creek Township in Ohio. The creek's own name is not explained in the sources reviewed.

Before the town

By 1773 the Mingo leader Logan (Tah-gah-jute), born Cayuga, kept a hunting camp and small village at the mouth of Yellow Creek, on the northwest side of the Ohio River in what is now Yellow Creek Township near Wellsville. On April 30, 1774, Virginia militia under Daniel and Jacob Greathouse lured members of Logan's family across the river to Joshua Baker's trading post, in what is now West Virginia, and killed them, including his brother and sister, in the Yellow Creek massacre -- an event that triggered Lord Dunmore's War and led, later that year, to Logan's widely reprinted 'Logan's Lament.' Local county histories also place the traditional 1782 Adam Poe-Big Foot fight near the mouth of Little Yellow Creek, about a mile below Wellsville, within or adjacent to this township (accounts of that tradition differ on its location and date). No other Native site specific to the township was found in the sources reviewed.

Nations recorded here: Mingo (Seneca-Cayuga).

• Logan's Mingo village and camp, mouth of Yellow Creek (village) — Mouth of Yellow Creek, Yellow Creek Township, near Wellsville, Occupied by 1773; family members killed in the April 30, 1774 Yellow Creek massacre (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. 1773 — The Mingo leader Logan establishes a hunting camp and small village at the mouth of Yellow Creek.
2. 1774-04-30 — Virginia militia kill members of Logan's family across the river from Yellow Creek, triggering Lord Dunmore's War.
3. 1797 — William Wells buys the 304-acre tract on the Ohio where Wellsville later stands; on the Virginia shore opposite stands a government block-house that sheltered settlers until the Indian campaign closed in 1795, and Wells is commissioned a justice of the peace by Governor St. Clair on July 15.
4. 1798 — Jacob Neisley of Virginia buys a tract on Yellow Creek for his son, and Nathaniel Meyers and Emmons settle on the creek and on 'Big Bottom'; Hickman, Robert Boyce, Alexander McDonald, the Swearingens and Robert Dobbins settle soon after.
5. 1800 — A few Highland Scots settle on the 'Scotch settlement' tract, ten miles long and three to five wide, mostly in Madison Township but partly in Yellow Creek; Andrew McPherson, who lived to be ninety-nine, and Alexander McBane are among them.
6. 1805 — Yellow Creek Township is organized, appearing on the county tax list this year with a levy of $57.60; it originally includes a row of sections on the south.
7. 1812 — Salt-boiling on Yellow Creek is quite an industry: as many as twenty wells are sunk this year, but more profitable discoveries elsewhere end the business after a brief existence.
8. 1829 — The Methodist Protestant church is organized in Joseph Wells's house at Wellsville by Rev. George Brown, with ten original members.
9. 1832 — On the creation of Carroll County, the row of sections on the township's south is given to Jefferson County to compensate it for lost territory; the early township records are lost.
10. 1846 — The Daniel McBean Farmhouse, a stone farmhouse, is built within the township.
11. 1850 — Oak Ridge Presbyterian Church, four miles west of Wellsville, is built, two years before its organization in 1852 by members of the Yellow Creek and Wellsville Presbyterian churches.
12. 1879 — The trustees of the township are J. C. Smith, C. W. Paisley and Harmar Blackburn; Wellsville is the only incorporated village and the only collected settlement in the township.
13. 2020 — The census counts 1,973 people in Yellow Creek Township.

Stories

Logan's Lament

By 1773 the Mingo leader Logan, born Cayuga and given the name Tah-gah-jute, kept a hunting camp at the mouth of Yellow Creek, on the Ohio side of the river in what is now Yellow Creek Township. On April 30, 1774, a party of Virginia militiamen under Daniel and Jacob Greathouse lured members of Logan's family across the river to Joshua Baker's trading post and killed them, including his brother and sister, in what became known as the Yellow Creek massacre. Logan, who had been away, returned to find his relatives dead and led retaliatory raids along the frontier that summer, helping trigger Lord Dunmore's War. After declining to fight at the war's decisive battle that October, Logan instead sent a message so widely reprinted -- published in the Virginia Gazette in 1775 and later carried by Thomas Jefferson into Notes on the State of Virginia -- that it became one of the best-known pieces of Native American oratory in early American literature.

Fighters and a crop-eared Yankee

The 1879 county history remembers the early Yellow Creek settlers for their muscle. Near the creek lived the salt-boilers, among them 'Fighting Bill Wells,' Parsons, Bassett and Knapp, and when Knapp first arrived and was forced into a fight with a noted bruiser, he beat the man so completely that he became known thereafter as a great fighter; in those days, the historians observe, muscle commanded respect. 'Big Billy McIntosh,' it is told, once armed himself with a fence rail over some fancied injury and routed the whole community of West Beaver, whose people fled before him 'like chaff before the wind.' Abel Geer, 'the crop-eared Yankee,' had lost one ear in Connecticut under a law that took an ear as the penalty for certain misdeeds; it is related that he asked a storekeeper in Ohio how much he would charge for tobacco enough to reach from ear to ear, then pointed to his right ear and said his left was nailed to a post in Connecticut, and bade the man measure.

Photographs

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

Every historic place in Columbiana County on the full map

No water-system data is linked to Yellow Creek Township, Columbiana County's ZIP codes yet.

Power plants (1)

High-hazard dams (1)

Museums, historical societies, gardens and zoos (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2023: 2 of 2 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

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

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