The "College Township" was the full survey township located in the northwest corner of Butler County, Ohio, now corresponding to the civil township of Oxford, designated by the Ohio General Assembly to be the site of the state university now called Miami University. When Congress, on May 5, 1792, authorized the sale to John Cleves Symmes of the land known as the Symmes Purchase, one of the terms was that he would allocate a full township of land to support a university, a promise he never fulfilled. The United States Congress subsequently allowed the State of Ohio to pick a township in the public domain for a college. They chose a township in the first range in the Congress Lands, namely R1E T5.
The village of College Corner takes its name from its position in the northwest corner of this section and the Indiana town of College Corner took its name from its Ohio counterpart.
When Butler County was originally divided into townships in 1803, this land was included in St. Clair Township, then later Milford Township before Oxford Township was erected in 1811.
Ohio’s first appropriation for roads, passed at the second General Assembly, (February 18, 1804), included $1585 for the road from Chillicothe (then the state capital) to the college township via Lebanon. In Butler County, this corresponds to the present-day State Route 73.
Famous quotes containing the words college and/or township:
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)