Jimtown

The story

Welcome to Jimtown

Jimtown began as Jamestown, a village James Davis laid out about 1835 on the bank of Baugo Creek, beside the sawmill he and William Richason had built. It never became a business town, but the 1905 county history still called it a well-known locality as one of the oldest settlements in the county, and its name lives on in the township’s schools.

Baugo Township takes its name from Baugo Creek. The 1881 history explains that the Indian name was Baubaugo, meaning the “devil” or “devil river,” for the creek’s terribly swift current in a freshet, when even an expert canoeman dared not venture out; the settlers, finding the word took too much wind to say, dropped the first syllable. According to Daniel Richason, whom the historian called the most authentic source, William Mote was the first settler, in 1830, followed by John McNey, James Davis, John Barnes, a Mr. Kellog, Jacob Rupel and William Richason, and later Azel and Horace Meads.

Richason and Davis built a sawmill on the Baugo at Jamestown, and about 1835 Davis laid out the town on section 26, on the creek’s bank. Samuel Cotterel built the first house, a frame, and opened the first store. The first schoolhouse in the township, of logs, stood in Jamestown, and the township’s first election was held in the schoolhouse there in 1836. The Methodists built a chapel thirty by forty feet in 1854, Zenas Belden its builder, and about twenty years later the Baptists put up a church costing $1,700 on section 27, surrounded by a cemetery laid off in wards.