Bellbrook

The first cabin on this ground went up in 1797, built by Joseph Vance, one of the first settlers in Sugarcreek township. It became the township's polling place, where men came from the Montgomery county line to vote, and where the first preaching in that part of the county was held in 1804. The village itself came later. In 1815 three men, Stephen Bell, Henry Updyke, and James Clancey, laid out the town of Bellbrook where the Lebanon road crossed toward Wilmington, and sold the lots at auction that October. Sugarcreek had been one of the county's four original townships since 1803.

Sugarcreek township took its name from the creek, and the creek is why the village stood where it did. When the founders advertised their new town in 1815, they sold the water first: a healthy situation, springs that could be piped through the streets, saw and grist mills already within a mile, and a stream alongside the town lots on which, they wrote, all kinds of machinery might be raised. Stephen Bell was a millwright by trade and had already built mills on the Miami and on Sugar creek. The valley had good water, and a man who could turn a wheel could make a living on it.

Joseph C. Vance, who built that first cabin, was the busy kind of man a new county needs. He was the first clerk of Sugarcreek township, sat on the first grand jury, and in 1803 was hired to survey the county seat and lay off the town of Xenia, for which the court paid him forty-nine dollars and twenty-five cents. His son grew up here, a boy called Joe who drove an ox cart over the Pickney road, the first road cut in the county. That boy, also named Joseph Vance, became governor of Ohio in 1836. The cabin is gone, but the road he drove is still there.