Four farmers, one mortgage, and the land they lost back to the man Granger was named for

In October 1817, four farmers left Bristol, in Ontario County, New York, and rode out to the Western Reserve in a carriage drawn by two horses.¹ Their names were James Ganyard, Elizur Hills, Anthony Low, and Burt Codding. Their business was land.

They stopped at the cabin of Ezekiel Mott, a squatter who had put up the first structure in the township the year before, on the ground now known as Lot 2. Then they made a deal. They bought three-quarters of the entire township from Gideon Granger of Suffield, Connecticut, for four dollars an acre. They sold their New York farms to Granger in part payment. They signed a joint mortgage bond of more than fourteen thousand dollars on the Ohio land.²

Gideon Granger was Postmaster General of the United States under Jefferson and Madison. He had been given first refusal on the tract when its previous absentee owner, Oliver Phelps of the Connecticut Land Company, went insolvent.³ Granger, back in Connecticut, had never seen the ground.

The first emigrant train arrived in mid-March 1818, hauled in by ox sled: Elizur Hills with his sisters Abigail and Marilla, Elizur Wolcott, John Codding with wife and one child, Festus and James Ganyard, Seth and Richard Paull with their families, and Seth Dye and his wife. That was the founding population.⁴

Then Congress opened federal lands south of the Western Reserve at less than half the price the Granger buyers had paid. Immigration bypassed the township. The families could not sell their surplus acres. The mortgages came due. Perrin's 1881 county history puts it as plainly as it can be put: "In the course of a few years, the mortgages became due. The owners were unable to meet the obligations, and their lands and possessions reverted to the former proprietor."⁵

When the township organized in February 1820, it held its first election at the house of Seth Paull. The trustees voted on a name. The options were Berlin, Ontario, Codding, or Granger. They chose Granger, in honor of the man in Connecticut who owned most of the ground they had just cleared. The first money that came into the township treasury was a twenty-five-cent fine imposed for swearing. Half went to buy paper for the record book. The other half paid William Paull for bringing the state laws from the county seat.⁶

Some of the founding families kept enough land to stay and build. Elizur Hills's son Stacy became a country doctor and built the 1840s Western Reserve farmhouse now called the Thompson-Work Museum House on Granger Road, which the Granger Historical Society still opens for tours. Their surnames are on the road signs, in the cemeteries at Coddingville and Granger Fairview, and on the doors of every neighbor whose house sits on a plot that once belonged to them.

The name on the township itself belongs to the man in Connecticut.