An old Indian trail, decades old and barely visible in some places, snaked through the land that would become Perry Township. Ebenezer Zane followed that Indian trail as he blazed the narrow trace that cut through southeastern Ohio. After Ebenezer Zane completed the trace in 1797, there would still be no free white settlers in Perry Township until the beginning of the new century.
Perry Township's first free white settler, James Brown Sr., traveled from his home state of Massachusetts with his wife and children. The war veteran and his family traveled until they reached present-day Bridgeville in 1801. He promptly opened a tavern along Zane's Trace, also known as Old Wheeling Road, and built a cabin for his family in 1802.
Other free white settlers soon followed. Jacob Livingood arrived in Perry Township in 1807 and promptly hired Christopher Shuck, a Perry Township resident, to build a saw mill and grist mill on Big Salt Creek. Jacob's daughter, Mary, soon became Mrs. Christopher Shuck in the first wedding in Perry Township. Jacob's brother, Peter Livingood, settled near his brother's mills in 1810. The Livingood family would be a prominent family in Perry Township until the late 1870's, when the last Livingood remaining in the township died.
The small community's spiritual needs were addressed in 1808, when the Wesley Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church was established. The small congregation met in various houses until a church was built in 1846 near Sonora. A small school was established in 1811 on the Comstock farm. A small, informal cemetery was constructed in 1809 about half of a mile east from Sonora. St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church would later buy this plot of land and use it for their church's cemetery.
In 1812, eleven years after James Brown Sr. had first established his small tavern on Zane's Trace, Perry Township was officially organized. Like many townships in Ohio at this time, they chose to name the township "Perry" in honor of Commodore Perry, who would later defeat the British naval fleet at Lake Erie. Perry Township had been established for eight years before its first census was taken in 1820.
Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Muskingum County Ohio. Chicago, IL: The Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1892.
History of Muskingum County Ohio. J. F. Everhart and Company, 1882.
Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Sutor, J. Hope. Past and Present of the City of Zanesville and Muskingum County, Ohio. Chicago, IL: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1905.
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