The five silver dollars, the fifty kettles, and the salt spring that named Liverpool

Sometime early in 1810, a Revolutionary War veteran named Seba Bronson Jr. left Columbia Township and settled on the Rocky River in what is now Liverpool Township. He had heard the ground held salt. He had heard the Potawatomi knew where to find it.¹

Bronson and his partner Jared Pritchard found a Potawatomi guide and paid him five silver dollars for the location of the hidden salt spring. That figure is passed down from the memoirs of Moses Deming, a settler's son who arrived the next year and began writing them down in 1849. It is oral tradition put to paper decades later. It is also the version the Liverpool Township Historical Society bolted to a bronze marker in 2010.²

Bronson did not keep the spring. A Connecticut newcomer named Justus Warner outmaneuvered him through Judge Walworth of Cleveland and General Perkins of Warren. By 1811 Warner was boiling brine over twelve iron kettles. Within a few years he had fifty. The salt sold for five dollars a barrel, then fifteen, then twenty. It was the first industry in Medina County.³

In December 1813, an Ohio settler named Ephraim Lindley walked twenty-five miles from Hudson to Liverpool to buy half a bushel of salt. He walked home through wolves. The trip is recorded in N. B. Northrop's 1861 Pioneer History of Medina County, which is independent of the Deming memoirs and confirms the salt works was operating.⁴

The settlement around the works picked up the name "Hardscrabble." People knew what they meant by it. In 1816 Daniel Coit, the Connecticut Land Company proprietor, formally named the township Liverpool, after the English salt-works city on the River Mersey.

The Erie Canal opened in 1825. Cheaper salt from New York state reached Ohio by water. The Liverpool works closed. Within twenty years the industry was completely gone. The name "Hardscrabble" outlasted the salt by nearly two centuries: the old tavern at the corner of Columbia and Grafton Roads carried the name until about 2000, when it was rebranded as the Jumping Frog Tavern.⁵

Ruth Deming, wife of the salt master's brother, became the first white settler death in Medina County on July 26, 1812. She is buried in Myrtle Hill Cemetery, which grew up around her grave. The 2010 bronze plaque stands next to the Liverpool Township Depot Museum at 6615 Center Road. The salt spring is on private land.