The first cabin in Medina County

Harrisville Township is not just Medina County's oldest township. It is where the county itself began.

Joseph Harris bought 200 acres in the surveyed but unsettled wilderness of what would become Harrisville Township in 1810. He built a cabin there that year. On February 14, 1811 — Valentine's Day — he arrived to occupy it with his wife, his son Albert, and an 11-year-old boy named James S. Redfield. They were the first party of settlers in what would become Medina County.¹

Redfield, that 11-year-old, grew up. In 1820 he opened the first dry goods store in the settlement. He also ran the mail line.²

By 1817 there were 35 families living in the settlement, then called Harrisville. That year the settlers built their first schoolhouse and held their first township election. In 1818, Medina County was officially organized. Harrisville was the seed.³

What is easy to miss now: the original Harrisville Township was huge. It initially included what are today Lafayette, Westfield, Chatham, Spencer, Huntington, Rochester, Troy, Sullivan, and Homer townships. Only over years did those separate out into their own governments.⁴

Harrisville became Lodi. The town-meeting story about the name change (someone stood up and recited a poem called “Napoleon at the Bridge” referencing Napoleon's 1796 victory at Lodi, Italy) is village tradition. An alternate theory says “Lo-di” simply described the settlement's location on the low divide.⁵ Both stories are on the village record; neither is footnoted to a period document.

The Harris family later deeded Central Park in Lodi to the village. The Waite-Harris House at 111 Harris Street is now home to the Lodi-Harrisville Historical Society. If you stand in the park, you're on land the family that started Medina County gave back to the town.