The story
Welcome to Brimfield
Brimfield was laid out in March 1861 by William Bliss beside the railroad in Orange Township, where Daniel Brumbaugh had lived since 1840. Bliss named it after his birthplace, Brimfield, Massachusetts, and for some years it was better known as Rome Station, the shipping point for the mills of Rome City.
Daniel Brumbaugh located on the site in 1840 and built its first house; Jacob Long and Reason Dye followed. The Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana Railroad built a station there in 1851, and before the Grand Rapids & Indiana reached Rome City the place served as the outlet for the Rome City factories, so that for a time it was commonly called Rome Station. A log schoolhouse went up half a mile north about 1842, where James Lake, Joe Warner and Mary Ann Nash taught, and ten years later a frame schoolhouse was built just south of the railroad bridge.
William Bliss was born at Brimfield, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1816. He bought wool for a woolen factory at Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for ten or twelve years, came to Wolcottville in 1857 and made woolen goods at Rome City as William Bliss & Co. before settling on a farm of 210 acres; by 1882 he owned about 160 acres adjoining the village. In March 1861 he had the county surveyor, E. B. Gerber, lay out twenty-three lots on section 29, and he named the village after his native town.
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David and John Seeley opened a store as soon as the village was laid out, Kinney & Rhodes began selling hardware, and John Seeley was the first postmaster. Judge Seeley’s sawmill was an excellent mill in its day, but in May 1855 its boiler burst and killed Christopher, James and Washington Cooper, William Collett and A. C. Hewett; the old mill was torn down about December 1894. By 1882 the village had three general stores, a druggist, two grocers, a hardware, a milliner, two hotels, two liveries, a sawmill, a wagon shop, two blacksmiths and a physician, and an Odd Fellows lodge organized on August 25, 1881. “The pride of the town,” the 1882 history wrote, “is a literary society which has an admittance fee of $5.” The Noble County Medical Society was organized at Brimfield in the 1870s.
The Methodists met for years in the schoolhouse and began a church in the spring of 1875, finishing it the next year at a cost of about $2,700, with Bliss among its building trustees; the 1920 history places it, of brick, on the hill near the Bliss homestead, and by then it formed one charge with the Wawaka church. A brick schoolhouse was built in the 1880s, and the United Brethren remodeled the old two-story school into a church, which burned in the winter of 1910 and was replaced in 1911. In 1920 Brimfield had about three hundred people, one rural route, a Busy Bee Club and a Knights of Pythias lodge, and lay five miles north of Albion, its nearest banking point. Orange Township counted 3,934 people in 2020.