Cedarville Township

Cedarville was a village before it was a township. The county let it sit inside Xenia, Caesarscreek, Ross, and Miami until 1850, then cut a new township around it with boundary lines so irregular that the older townships were left crooked too. It was the first township in the county drawn that way. The neighbors fought it. In 1848 citizens of Ross protested to the commissioners that they would not have their township, already too small, cut up to gratify the caprice or spleen of any. They lost. On December 6, 1850, the township was organized, and the first election was held in Cedarville at the house of John W. Walker.

The township was drawn on heavy timber. Southwest of the old crossroads school lay nearly three thousand acres of woodland, and a few miles east stood a larger forest the settlers called simply the Big Woods. Massies Creek ran through the cleared ground toward the Little Miami, and from there to the Ohio, so even this farm country sits at the head of a long drainage. But the timber came first and it held on. So much of the district stayed unbroken forest that it was slow to settle and weak on the tax rolls for years, a place that was woods longer than it was farms.

In 1825 the woods still had wolves. They killed sheep, and one of the settlers, James Cresswell, shot one on the Sabbath, which the district talked about as much for the day as for the wolf. When the wolves got bad enough the men organized a hunt. More of them turned out than anyone had known lived nearby, and they strung themselves along the road to drive the woods and shoot what came out. They shot nothing. The woods were wild with howling the whole next night. Hogs ran loose in the same timber, each farmer's marked by a notch cut in the ear, and in winter the men killed them and divided them by the marks, on the honor of it, which not every man kept.