MIDDLEBURY TOWNSHIP — New Year’s resolutions are like socks: You know you had some, but they keep disappearing.
But if I were to make one resolution for 2023, it would be to try and get more columns completed about reader requests. The truth is, I simply don’t have the time (and gas money) to get to every story that crosses my path. But I hope to track down more of them with each year that passes.
That brings me to this week’s column, which attempts to answer a couple of questions sent in by reader Lisa Philpott.
Lisa asks: “What is the history of the Batemantown church? I heard that Batemantown actually was located where the reservoir is today.”
To address both of these, we have to go into the deep history of the region.
Let’s take a dive into Batemantown, the small crossroads hamlet in Middlebury Township in northwestern Knox County, near Waterford (where we recently addressed the history of another church). Batemantown was named after the people who founded it. To learn a little something about them, we have to go back into colonial times.
Luther Bateman was born in the Connecticut colony in 1749. Though he married in 1773 and had a child with his wife Ruth a year later, he was a patriot and served in the Revolutionary War which kept him away from his wife for a time.
After the war, he came home, then moved his wife and child to Vermont and got serious about being fruitful and multiplying. Luther had several more children with his wife there, including sons Luther, Jr., and Alvin. Luther Jr and Alvin decided to head west to the Ohio frontier when they grew up, arriving here in 1815, making them among the earliest settlers of Knox County.
There’s an interesting feature about the location of Batemantown. If you look on a map, you will find that Batemantown is located on Yankee Street. Yankee Street is a long, unusually straight road that runs southwest to northeast through Knox County.
That straightness is unusual for an old road in these parts. Many old roads were shaped by the local topography, including the ones that overlay even old American Indian trails. But Yankee Street doesn’t do that, even though it is one of the oldest roads in the county.
What is does do, however, is to suddenly — for no apparent reason — take a little jag to the southeast at one point in Middlebury Township. That anomaly is no accident or coincidence, for this little detour is the exact location of Batemantown.
The reason for this is that Yankee Street was laid out on the Greenville Treaty Line. This was a treaty that the young United States signed with Indian leaders in 1795.
The line was a border, and this border declared that the lands to the northwest would belong to the natives, while Ohio lands to the southeast would be open to settlement by U.S. citizens expanding into frontier territories.
One native who didn’t sign the treaty was Tecumseh, and when tensions between the U.S. and England erupted into the War of 1812, Tecumseh joined in with the British, in hopes that it would discourage the relentless colonial expansion westward. Tecumseh and the British were defeated, and in the aftermath, the old treaty line was ignored.
Since the treaty was still technically on the books, when Luther and Alvin Bateman arrived in Knox County in 1815, it appears they decided to play it safe, and relocated the course of the road just far enough southeast that their houses, and the houses of others who settled in Batemantown, would be just south of the treaty line, in case it would ever be reestablished.
It never was, but by the time it was clear that any native claim to lands in the region would be ignored, the houses had been built. Batemantown has forever remained on the offset section of Yankee Street.
When Middlebury Township was organized in 1824, the first election of officers was held at Luther’s house. By 1830, the township boasted over 700 residents. Batemantown grew slightly over the coming decades, though Waterford at first outpaced it.
N.N. Hill’s 1881 history of Knox County laments, “Batemantown seems doomed never to become a town at all. A half dozen houses constitute the village at present.”
Despite that gloomy prediction, the place has hung on over the years, and even grown a little.
A church was built in Batemantown in 1831 on the present site of the United Methodist Church.
That building was replaced in 1858, and the second building was replaced by the current one in 1911. The current building is one of the loveliest country churches in Knox County, graciously offset by the fertile farm fields that surround the town.
Batemantown has been in the same position for its entire history. When one looks at the nearby Kokosing Reservoir on a map, you might think that Waterford Road and Batemantown had to be moved for the formation of the lake, but that is not the case.
The reservoir was built in 1970 on the North Fork of the Kokosing, but it’s a shallow valley that had always been prone to flooding — indeed, the reservoir is never more than 10 feet deep. Because of the flood risk, Batemantown and the road going through it to Waterford were built on the high ground on the southern bank of the river.
Thus, a comparison with a map as far back as 1871 shows that both Waterford Road and Batemantown were in the same positions they are now.
The Batemans have continued to be notable community members over the centuries. The unusually named Kar Kiosk Bateman is remembered as a folk artist of the first order for his exquisite paper cuttings.
If any readers can advise on the current whereabouts of any of Bateman’s artworks, drop me a line at mark@bardfood(dot)com. I’d love to do a column about him.
Another prominent family member was Paul E. Bateman, who served as Knox County Treasurer from 1961 to 1969.
So, there you have it, my first installment of my resolution. Now, to find those socks. I suspect my kitty, Miss Jane, might have a collection stashed away somewhere.
