WATERFORD — I’m always looking for places where I can find old photos for this column, and one such place I recently discovered was a Facebook group that specializes in old and forgotten Ohio photos.
I was amused to find that more than once links to my columns have already been posted there! I’ll be posting this one there myself, because it will clear up a question or two for those readers.
First of all, I want to thank Dave Sapienza of DSap’s Photos for allowing us to use this image free of charge, as the original postcard it came from was already sold. He posted this vintage but undated postcard of the “M. E. Church, Levering, Ohio.” A couple readers posted questions about Levering, which can be found on no modern map.
There’s a little bit of information to unpack from this. First of all, “M. E.” stands for Methodist Episcopalian Church, which for a long time was the main Methodist sect in the US. But the organization had taken on that name in 1784 to distinguish itself from the English Episcopalian Church after the American Revolution.
In 1939, the church changed its name to simply “Methodist Church” after a couple separatist groups rejoined, then in 1968 became the United Methodist Church after merging with the Evangelical United Brethren Church.
This tells us that the postcard comes from before 1939, which matches the black and white photography, which matches Dave’s estimated date for the card of 1910. Beyond that, the photo doesn’t tell us a lot.
There is some sort of debris pile toward the back of the lot. Perhaps the remains of an earlier church building which was replaced by this one? In the distance is a large house and a small barn.
So, where was this? Online references said that Levering was in Knox County, but you won’t find it today. This is because of the changing situation with post office names in the 1800s, when mail was sorted by hand, long before the U.S. Post Office had thought of using geographical codes to sort mail.
The problem, in this instance, was that there was a community in northwest Knox County which called itself “Waterford.” Waterford had been around a good long while, and had been the home of a large private school, the Westminster Academy, from 1868 to 1875, which we examined in a previous column.
The problem for the USPS was that there was already a Waterford in Ohio, in Washington County, down near the Ohio River. That Waterford isn’t huge, but it’s quite a bit larger than our Waterford, and had been established earlier. Today with zip codes, the name difference wouldn’t be a problem, but in the 1800s, it was a big problem, so the USPS informed the Knox County village that if they wanted to have a post office, they’d have to rename the community.
As was done in many communities, the post office was named after the postmaster. In Waterford’s case, this was troublesome because the two prominent merchants of the town both wanted the position.
John Levering and Josiah Fawcett also happened to be of two different political parties: John was a Democrat and Josiah was a Whig. What this meant is that from 1836 until 1854, the postmaster kept changing depending on which party had won the election for U.S. President. As the postmaster changed, so did the name of the post office, which was effectively the name of the town, at least as far as the USPS was concerned.
For almost 20 years, Waterford went back and forth between being known as Levering and Fawcett.
The USPS decided that they’d had enough of that after the 1853 election, when Whig Millard Fillmore lost to Democrat Franklin Pierce, and the post office became known for good as Levering. Although several of the subsequent postmasters were not Leverings, some were, and the name stuck until the office was discontinued in 1903 because of the low volume of mail.
Service was at that time transferred to Fredericktown.
All this time, most people had kept referring to the town as Waterford, and at some point, it reverted to that name, even on envelopes. But the Levering name persisted for a time, and it makes sense that a postcard, intended to be mailed, would be credited as Levering, Ohio.
The church itself is still there, though a large modern addition now sits behind it. Reflecting the changing name of the organization and of the community, it is now known as the Waterford United Methodist Church. It sits on the site identified in the 1871 atlas map of Waterford as a store, and in the 1896 atlas as a Presbyterian Church. Somewhere between 1896 and 1939, it became an M. E. Church, then UMC in 1968.
The farm in the background of the vintage postcard image could be John Levering’s original farm. The barn still appears to be standing today, though the house is gone.
In the original layout of the village, a road known as West Alley ran behind the church and the Levering farm, rejoining Waterford Road at the western edge of town.
No trace of that road remains evident from Waterford Road today, reflecting the shrinkage of the village from its heyday in the mid-1800s to today,
