The story
Welcome to Cromwell
Cromwell grew at a crossroads in Sparta Township where Abel Mullen boiled black salts in 1849 and Harrison Wood laid out twenty-eight lots in 1853. Wood named it for Oliver Cromwell, and the railroad later made it a grain-shipping point for the farms of western Noble County.
Sparta Township was some of the earliest-settled ground in Noble County. John L. Powers, who had kept a tiny tavern in Perry Township, settled near the Goshen road in 1832 and for a time lived in a cave still known in 1882 as “Powers’ Cave.” Just east, in June 1836, Isaac Spencer and R. I. Dawson laid out the village of Sparta, which was named the first county seat that May; no courthouse was ever built there, and when the seat moved to Augusta in July 1837 Sparta soon emptied. The 1882 history also records a tradition that a man named Beers made brick from Sparta clay for a house the government promised the Miami chief Wah-wa-es-sa, or Flat Belly, whose reserve lay here; the house soon fell down and the settlers used its brick for hearths and chimneys.
In 1849 Abel Mullen built a log house at what became the crossroads and began making black salts from the ashes of the surrounding cabins and log heaps; he gave it up within a few years, having made no more than twelve tons. In June 1853 Harrison Wood had the county surveyor lay out twenty-eight lots at the junction of Jefferson and Orange streets, on section 16. Asked about the name, Wood said: “Cromwell was a good Republican, and I’ll name the town in his honor.” Aaron Moore opened a store worth about $1,000, A. D. Maggert and Jeremiah Carstetter sold goods, Isaac McCammon was the first blacksmith, and Dr. John Gants settled in the spring of 1858.
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The first schoolhouse in the township, a round-log building about twenty feet square, went up in 1840 near the spot where the Cromwell depot later stood, and Ross Rowan taught for $10 a month and board. Early in 1872 Sparta Township voted a tax of $3,796.15 to aid the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and by 1882 Cromwell had become “quite a point for the shipment of grain,” with more than four hundred people. A sawmill begun by Mr. Stall in 1853 was moved to the village, and its timbers went into the township’s only gristmill, built at Cromwell by the Miller Brothers and run until the early 1880s.
The Lutherans organized about 1866 and the Methodists built in 1870 or 1871; the two societies had tried to build a union church but, the histories say, the rigid views of members on both sides prevented it, so each built its own, the Lutherans a year ahead. The Cromwell State Bank was organized in 1904, and Forrest B. Robbins founded the Cromwell Advance on August 1, 1912, as an experiment to prove that a practical printer could make a small-town paper pay. The 1920 history put the population at about 550.
Jefferson Street between Second and Orange streets is the Cromwell Historic District, thirty-three buildings dating from about 1875 to 1953, among them the Queen Anne Hussey House of 1901, the Sparta State Bank of about 1915 and the Calvary Lutheran Church of 1910; it was listed on the National Register in 2015. The 2020 census counted 487 people in Cromwell.