History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column here each Saturday reflecting on the community's history.
JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP — If you dig deep enough into history, you’ll sometimes find that there were places that had names which may have been acceptable in previous times, but which would never fly today.
Some of them are startlingly extreme to the point that I can’t even publish them here, including one in Virginia apparently named after a naughty act that took place there doing the early settlement period.
Although Knox County’s example isn’t quite in that league, it’s still a word that I don’t care to share in this column, though it will show up on one of the maps I’ll reference.
But I think it’s worth looking into the history of location names, to see what we can learn from them.
The place in question is one that many have seen if they visit the Bridge of Dreams on the Kokosing Gap Trail in eastern Knox County.
If you turn off Ohio 62 to go to the trail, you cross over a little creek before arriving at the entrance driveway that goes steeply up the hillside to get to the covered bridge that takes the trail across the Mohican River.
It depends on how dense the foliage is during different times of the year as to whether or not you can see the creek from the trail. In the winter, definitely, and it was still easily visible last time I was there, a couple of weeks ago. This small tributary of the Mohican River bears an interesting name.
According to current maps, it is called Negro Run.
From the confluence with the Mohican, it is only in Knox County a mile or less before it continues, going upstream, into Holmes County’s Richland Township. United States Geological Survey (USGS) information tells us there was a Negro Run School at some point in that valley’s history, and that’s about all the information I found.
After just a few miles’ course, it can be traced back to a hillside spring in Holmes County.
But what’s the story behind the name? I wondered if that was a “cleaned-up” modern version of the name.
Sure enough, following that hunch back to a USGS map from 1913, I found the original version of the name, which I’ll simply render here as “N-Word Run.” According to the USGS map, the “n-word” originally applied to both the creek and the school.
It’s interesting that this federal map has not yet censored the name by 1913, while the local atlases were doing so by the 1870s.
Does anyone know of any information about any Blacks living in this area near Brinkhaven long ago?
Such names are usually connected to actual settlers.
The stream runs out of Holmes County, but that is an Ohio county with a notoriously intolerant racial history. As recently as 1892, a Black man was lynched in Millersburg, apparently simply for being there.
An astonishing news report titled “LYNCHED FOR VAGRANCY: The Only Negro in Holmes Co, O., Hanged for Loafing About Doorways,” was carried by a number of newspapers across the state and beyond. It states that a solitary Black man was seen at this time in Millersburg with no apparent community connections, nor any apparent means of support.
The populace ended up seizing him and hanging him from a tree on the lawn of the Holmes County Courthouse. They didn’t even bother to find out his name.
An ad in the Coshocton newspaper of the period gives a sense of the narrow-minded prejudice of the time and place. The ad proclaims: “The papers contain frequent notices of rich, pretty and educated girls eloping with negroes, tramps, and coachmen.
“The well-known specialist, Dr. Franklin Miles, says all such girls are more or less hysterical, nervous, very impulsive, unbalanced; usually subject to headache, neuralgia, sleeplessness, immoderate crying or laughing. These show a weak nervous system for which there is no remedy equal to Restorative Nervine.”
Holy monkey. I can hardly begin to peel away the layers of racism, sexism, classism, and general nastiness in this ad for a quack medicine that was probably mostly alcohol, regardless.
Perhaps it’s good to remember that despite our current difficulties, we’ve generally come a distance from that kind of baldly hateful meanness, even if there are still those among us who would agree with it.
I’m sure such sentiments were widespread in the rough backcountry of Holmes County in the 19h century.
Richland Township might be thought as even rougher than Millersburg, for it is the roughest terrain in the county, and was infamously the home of French Ridge, just south of Glenmont, which hosted the futile rebellion of Fort Fizzle during the Civil War, which I’ve written about previously.
In short, this was not an area known for friendliness to Blacks, even if Negro Run bubbles out of the side of French Ridge.
So how did the creek get its name? Did any Blacks actually live in that valley?
I did find a couple of families named Black on the Holmes County side. Could the name have been an elaborate joke teasing them?
I’ve not been able to turn up anything yet relating to the part of the waterway that runs through Knox County.
The 1871 Knox County Atlas shows us that the properties the stream crosses before joining the Mohican River were owned by Robert Sapp and A. Shrimplin, both well-known White families of the area.
But it’s certainly possible that the history of the name runs much further back in time.
Perhaps the name is a now-forgotten reference to some early historical occurrence.
If anyone knows anything about it, drop me a line at mark@bardfood.com, and we’ll do a follow-up.