Xenia Township

By 1805 there was a courthouse town in the middle of the county and no township around it. So a few men, James Collier and John Sterrett and James McCoy among them, petitioned the commissioners, and on August 20 the board drew a new township and called it Xenia. They drew it on the water: east of the Little Miami, above the mouth of Massies Creek, up the main fork of Caesarscreek to the county line and back down the river. James Galloway Sr. was the county treasurer that year, and his son James Jr. was the surveyor. The family that had come first now held the offices.

The whole township was written in water. Its lines ran with the Little Miami, the mouth of Massies Creek, and the forks of Caesarscreek, because in 1805 the streams were the only fixed marks on the ground. Where Massies Creek comes down to the river there is a point of land the first settlers argued over, some calling it an island, until someone traced both streams up and found them separate. Massies Creek itself carries a surveyor's name. It was called after Nathaniel Massie, who ran many of the early land entries in this county, the man whose lines turned the woods into property.

James Galloway Sr. came up from Kentucky in 1798 with his wife and children and was the first settler on this northern ground of whom there is any record. He had hunted game for the army during the Revolution, and in one fight the renegade Simon Girty, a white man who fought on the Shawnee side, caught him unarmed, called him by name, and shot him through the shoulder. The ball lodged near his neck and he carried it for years. It ached before a change in weather, so the family read him like an instrument: when something needed fair skies, they sent young Hugh to ask Galloway what the bullet said.