WINDSOR TOWNSHIP – To nonnatives, Windsor Township might not look like much more than a wide spot along U.S. Route 322, but for a small group of people who live there and love their community, taking the time to learn its history has become more than a hobby.
The Windsor Historical Society hosted an open house Saturday, Aug. 15, with grilled dogs and burgers with all the fixings, as well as a chance to peruse the museum, a converted Episcopalian church stacked near to the rafters with artifacts, photographs and a lot more for people to see and to learn about the history of this little corner of the world.
“People give me a lot of history,” Lucy Bean, president of the Windsor Historical Society, said. “Some of them I look at and say, ‘Why have they given me that?’ It might be someday one of their great-great grandchildren may come and ask if we have anything.”
The museum itself is an important local artifact, housed in the Christ Church Episcopal of Windsor Mills, which was built in 1832 and consecrated the following year.
It served as the mother church for the Ohio Episcopal Diocese for many years.
The church was built along the meeting room style popular in Connecticut at the time the first settlers arrived from that state. Its spare style includes a Crown of Thorns-style steeple, which Bean said she was surprised to learn never held a church bell.
All the materials used in construction, the church’s furnishings and fixtures were handmade in Connecticut and shipped in by horse and oxcart, including the original kerosene chandelier, according to Bean.
As attendance declined, the Episcopal Diocese of Cleveland leased the church to the Ashtabula County Historical Society for $1 a year, on the condition the nonprofit maintain the building and its grounds. The Society operated it as a local history museum from 1955-1975.
Eventually, as the lease term was set to expire, the Ashtabula County Historical Society looked to terminate the lease due to scarcity of funding and the cost of maintaining a 144-year-old building.
“We can barely take care of what we have now,” Judy Pallutch, a historian with the Ashtabula County Historical Society, said.
So, a group of Windsorites decided to take over the lease and operate the museum with a more local focus, according to Bean. They leased the church through 1995, after which they purchased it from the diocese with a $5,000 down payment and the remaining $10,000 paid over a term of 10 years.
According to Bean, the first settlers arrived in what is now Windsor Township in 1799, coming down Phelps Creek from Austinburg and building a hut out of bark for the first summer. There were bands from several local Native American tribes in the area who were friendly toward the settlers.
The following year, retired judge and wealthy Connecticut landowner Solomon Griswold came to the area and built the first permanent house on 10,000 land-grant acres near what is now the intersection of Noble Road and New Hudson Road.
“He found a wide spot in the river and thought it’d make a good landing,” Bean said.
Griswold’s brother followed about six months later and built the township’s first church, a small meeting house, across the road, which was later shared with the first Methodist congregation before they commissioned their own church at the township center.
In 1801, Judge Griswold hosted an ailing man who’d been walking from Austinburg to Mesopotamia to seek treatment from a doctor. During the night, he passed away – the first death in Windsor.
Griswold decided to set aside a piece of his property, atop a steep ridge and useless for farming, where the man could be buried. This became Pioneer Cemetery.
Jonathan Parker, primary aide-de-camp to Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War, is among the notable people buried there.
Limestone quarries were the principal employer during Windsor Township’s early days. Stone was shipped by rail to Burton Township, where the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad took most of it to construct some of the grand old buildings of Pittsburgh.
“If you’re ever in Pittsburgh now and you look at some of the old buildings, you can see the stone from Windsor there,” Bean said.
A nearby example is the Old Courthouse in Warren, Bean added.
After the quarries were mined out, a creamery in what is now a township park produced 1,000 pounds of butter using milk from local dairies – all by hand. The milk was brought in and the butter hauled out by horse-drawn wagon as what is now Windsor Center grew.
As late as 1950, Windsor hosted a mechanic’s shop, several hair salons, an ice cream parlor and the Elk Hotel, built in 1809, where travelers could get a bed for a night and have their horse stabled, fed and rubbed down for 15 cents, according to Bean.
“It was many things in its day,” Bean said, including a post office, a general store and a smithy.
Near the church, Windsor Mills hosted a gristmill, a feed mill, a basket factory and cheese factory – all gone now, but the memories are preserved in the museum for future generations.
Bean said Windsor Center once held a memorial, built in 1943 to honor 118 boys and men from Windsor Township who shipped out to fight in World War II. Two of them didn’t make it back to their friends and families alive and one went missing and has never been located.
In 1990, vandals cut down the memorial, and it’s never been found or returned, according to Bean.
The Windsor Historical Society is trying to honor those men, their service and sacrifice again with a new memorial at the museum’s flagpole.
A 5-foot-diameter circle will be dug around the pole, and the round will be lined with inscribed bricks, each bearing a name that was on the downtown memorial. Bean said the Society is seeking sponsors.
For more information or to sponsor a memorial brick, contact Lucy Bean at 440-537-9088.
