Hanover Settlement and St. Paul Lutheran, Napoleon Twp.

I forgot to mention in the last post that Johann Friedrich Elling also applied for his naturalization papers in 1860.

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Napoleon Township

My thanks to Lucille Sunderman of Henry County who graciously agreed to let me post a response she sent me when I asked her about the location exactly of the Hanover Settlement. In our correspondence, we also discovered that her Arps ancestors came from Stellichte (like Anna Maria Engel Fuhrhop) and her Panning ancestors came from Dueshorn parish (like our Elling ancestors). She is trying to form a database of the native German villages for the people of the Hanover settlement. I think it will be no surprise that many of the people may have known each other in the "old country."

Here is her response:
"The original Church of New Hanover (also known as Zion) in 1851 purchased property and built a log cabin on Henry County Road Q-1, a mile and a half west of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Napoleon Township. This is a half mile east of the Adams Township, Defiance/Henry County Line. There still is a cemetery on the site that, I believe, is maintained by St. Paul, Napoleon Township.

The members of the New Hanover congregation lived around the nuclei of that church in both Defiance and Henry County. In the 1850's, when more emigrants were arriving from Germany, the two Bethlehem Lutheran churches in Adams Township were organized by residents of the Hanover Settlement."

The St. Paul history booklet stated: "In 1848 Henry Helberg and Dietrich Badenhop came from Germany, bringing with them the bodies of little Maria Helberg, aged 1 1/2 years, and Christian Dachenhaus, aged 17.  These settlers needed a burial ground so they immediately decided to arrange for a cemetery and to build a church next to it.  Among others, the well-known preacher, Rev. August Knape, served this little group.  It was a group from this congregation which founded St. Paul's Lutheran Church and when Rev. Damman was called, the congregation dissolved itself and merged with St Paul's in Napoleon Township."
 

In 1866, St. Paul, Napoleon Township built a church on the site near their present cemetery on the corner of Q-1 and 17.

In 1882, the original Church of New Hanover disbanded. Since that time, the people belonging to St. Paul congregation have been referred to as being from the "settlement."

Hope Lutheran Church, Hamler, was also started by families from the Hanover Settlement that had moved into the Hamler/ Holgate area in the 1860's.

In the same local history booklet entitled, "The Story of Old St. Paul's Church, The House of Worship for Old St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Napoleon Twp., Henry County, Ohio - 1867 - 1980," on page 14, the first membership list is published:

"The first Membership List found in the records consisted of heads of households and others who were voting members while the new church was being built:

Kaspar Oberhaus

Heinrich Helberg

Wilhelm Freytag

Frederick Ludeman

Christoph Helberg

Heinrich Rohrs

Friedrick Imbrock

Heinrich Othmer

Herman Arps

Herman Mahnke

Heinrich Wittenberg

Johann Wachtman

Charles Bokerman

Friedrich Kruse,

F. H. Freytag

Firedrich Plassman

Christian Buchele

H. J. Stockman

J. Fred Oberhaus

J. Heinrich Otte

Fred Wendt

Friedrich Elling

Heinrich Panning

Diedrich Jost

Heinrich Schorling

Benjamin Huber

Friedrich Schuette

Herman Norden

Heinrich Precht

Heinrich Deilen

Friedrich Helberg

Heinrich Dachenhaus

Wilhelm Othman

Heinrich Mahnke

Joseph Schumacher

Henry Wolkman

Herman Hahn

Wilhelm Orthman" 


In 2001 a group of descendants of German immigrants who chose to settle in Northwest Ohio in the mid-19th century, met to see if enough interest could be generated to organize a group in order to preserve their German heritage.
We now meet four times a year at the Lutheran Social Services building on State Route 66 near State Route 34. Non-members with an interest in their German heritage are always welcome."
Lucille Sunderman

Shunk

Recently, I attended a program about towns that once were in Defiance County but now no longer exist - ghost towns.  I began to think about those in Henry County and really, I could only think of a couple. 
One was Ratsville- love the name, don't you?  So appealing.  I remember it from my childhood because once in awhile my family would go there to the one (and only) store to pick up something we needed.  It could have been that a house was across from the store, but that's about it for the town of Ratsville.

Shunk was once a ghost town, but really all I know of it now is the cemetery there.  Once called Shunk Cemetery, it is now known as Hoy Cemetery and many of the Delphs, Ordways and related families are buried there.  Shunk is located in Harrison Township on Turkeyfoot Creek at the corner of State Route 109 and Road N-2.

Quite a few years ago, a group at Northwest State Community College did a research project on ghost towns in the area, led by Mr. Helwig.  Eventually, they produced a series of books, telling the historical background of each town...very interesting, no longer for sale, but probably can be found in local libraries.

Here's what was said about Shunk (p.59-60):
"The exact origin of Shunk is shrouded in mystery; however, it has been said that an Indian village was located near the site,a nd thus the legend of the Indian Ghost of Shunk.  In the late 1830's, the Indians of Northwestern Ohio were asked to leave their ancestral homes in the Maumee Valley and move to reservations in Kansas. 

The Indians knew that the journey west would be hard and long, and that they would be able to take with them only a few personal belongings and/or tribal treasures.  Because of the treacherousness of the trip, many valuable items were left behind with white settlers who had befriended the Indians...

As legend has it, the Indians near Shunk decided to bury their treasures and perhaps, someday, they could return...to reclaim their tribal riches.  It has also been said that this buried treasure at Shunk, in fact, contained gold sheets used to make coins for paying General Wayne's soldiers.  This gold was probably, if it did indeed exist, enroute to Fort Defiance and was stolen from an army courier by the Indians.

The legend says that these Indians left the ghost of a dead warrior to guard their buried treasure at Shunk.  This ghost warrior was said to be dressed in full armor and sitting on a horse.  In the years that followed the Indians departure to the West, numerous treasure hunters have tried to find the buried riches at Shunk, but none have succeeded.
At least two of these treasure seekers, a young boy and a stranger, have looked up from their diggings and seen the "Ghost of Shunk" astride a horse, armed with weaponry and riding down on them."

Well, the truth is that no treasure has ever been discovered at Shunk!

Shunk was named after John Shunk who ran a trading post there and a post office in the late 1830's.  No one knows too much about him.  In 1840, David Hoy bought a large tract of land in the Black Swamp and on a high spot, built the first residence in Shunk.

On January 4, 1849, Shunk opened its first official post office under Alonzo Packard, postmaster, and it ran until March 1857.  But by May 1857, another post office opened with William Match as postmaster.  This office was in existence for seven years until closing its doors in 1864.  In 1870, A. S. Stuckey built a water powered sawmill on the banks of the Turkeyfoot and it ran until 1914 or 1915.

Sometime in the late 1800's, the residents of Shunk discovered that their clay soil would be ideal for making tile, so two tile mills were soon erected in Shunk - one operated by the Bliss family and the other by the Fishers.  Tile produced here was used to drain the Black Swamp.

It was noted that the town limit signs of Shunk were only .2 miles apart!

Resource:
Henry County, Ohio, Vol. 2.  The Henry County Historical Society, Taylor Publishing Company, Dallas TX, 1976.  Shunk was researched by Joanne Westhoven and James Nartker.