The story
Welcome to Sparta Township
Sparta Township, in western Noble County, held the county’s first seat of justice, the short-lived village of Sparta of 1836. Cromwell, laid out in 1853, and Kimmell, on the Baltimore & Ohio, are its villages, and Indian Village keeps an old name.
Sparta was named as a township at the first session of the county commissioners in 1836. Its first settler, the 1920 history says, was John L. Powers, who in 1832 settled a short distance north of where the railroad crosses the Goshen road and for a time lived in a cave in the western part; John Dillon came the same year. Before 1836 they were followed by John Conklin, Richard Bray, Robert McAfee, Mitchell McClintock, John Johns, Obadiah Tilton and others. McClintock and Tilton were squatters on the Indian reservation, and when it came on the market George Platter entered both farms before they could.
Tradition records that a man named Beers, sent by the government, made a brick kiln here sometime between 1816 and 1821 and built a brick house for the chief Wah-wa-es-sa, or Flat Belly; it soon tumbled down and settlers used the brick for hearths. The first sawmill was built about 1847 on Turkey Creek by Thomas H. Bothwell and Thomas H. Wilson.
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In June 1836 Isaac Spencer and R. I. Dawson laid out Sparta on sections 13 and 24, and a post office opened that fall. The first county seat was fixed there in May 1836, but in July 1837 it moved to Augusta, and Sparta, which never had more than twenty-five people, dwindled away. The first township election was held there about 1838, with seven votes. Cromwell was laid out in June 1853 for Harrison Wood, who named it for the Protector because, he said, Cromwell “was a good Republican”; it had about 550 people in 1920. Indian Village, in section 30, had stores and two United Brethren churches.
The Baltimore & Ohio, for which Sparta voted a tax in 1872, began running trains in 1874, and Kimmell grew up at its station, practically on the old site of Sparta; it had about 250 people in 1920 and the Kimmell State Bank from 1918. The 2020 census counted 2,776 people in the township.