The Richland County Museum

        Richland County formed 1808 and the Village of Plymouth, in the far, northern reaches of the County, grew up in the years following the War of 1812.

      It was a town before any one thought of laying out or platting it.  Plymouth, or “Paris,” as it was first called, was located on Beall's military road.  A year after the war, when Abraham Trux and his companions came along this trail hunting new homes, they came upon a vast cleared area where Beall had camped.  Abraham Trux erected his cabin in the spring of 1815 and became the first settler.  The village of Paris was not laid out until 1825, by which time there were sixteen log houses.  The early settlers generally picked up what work came to the place, passing the remainder of their time hunting, trapping and farming. 

     Very soon after the town was laid out, Abraham Trux erected the gristmill and a sawmill near his house, on a branch of the Huron River.  Two distilleries were also erected, one by Lemuel Powers and the other by William McKelvey.  These distilleries purchased the corn, which they made into whisky, and therefore created a market for corn, about the only article of produce the farmer could sell.  The whisky was hauled to the lake--except what was consumed at home, which was no small quantity-where it found a ready market.  The distilleries were, however, soon discontinued, Mr. McKelvey receiving a disableing injury, and Dr. Powers having taken “the pledge.”     

     The first school, erected by subscription and volunteer labor, was also built in 1825, and used also as a church on Sunday.  Previously, school had been a sometime thing, conducted by subscription in winter only in various log cabins.

      The first post office in this part of the County was established about 1817, a few miles cast of Paris.  It was kept by a Hollander named Jacob Vanhouten and called "Plymouth."  The name of the village being Paris and the name of the post office Plymouth, many mistakes were made in the mail and freight business and the town was finally chartered as “Plymouth” in1838.

      The first frame house was erected in 1822, by Fleming Wilson, and the first brick house in 1823, by James Douglas.  Mr. Douglas made the brick himself, on his own land; and it is stated that one morning, when the workmen went out on the brickyard to work, the tracks of a panther were plainly impressed on the soft bricks that had been left on the yard the evening before.

      The Sandusky, Mansfield & Newark Railroad was finished to Plymouth in 1846.  Before it was fairly finished to Mansfield, a large number of Plymouth citizens went down on open cars attached to the construction-train to attend a meeting called to recruit volunteers for the Mexican war.

Information for this series is adapted from A.A. Graham’s “History of Richland County, Ohio.