Clough Pike

Land along Clough Pike remained predominantly farmland until the 1950s, and a late 1890s photograph of the Wolfe family farm shows buildings and fields beside a narrow dusty road; the rebuilt farmhouse now stands as an office building at 6740 Clough Pike. Anderson Township was established in 1793, ten years before Ohio became a state, and it was the only part of Hamilton County included in the Virginia Military District, the land between the Little Miami and Scioto rivers given to Virginia to pay its Revolutionary War soldiers. The township, Clough Creek, and Clough Pike were named for Richard Clough Anderson, principal surveyor of the district, who opened his office in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1784. Surveyor Ichabod Benton Miller came west from New Jersey in 1789, married Sarah Mercer in 1792, helped her father lay out Mercersburgh, now Newtown, and in April 1796 bought 440 acres between the Little Miami River and Clough Creek, where his diary indicates he had already built a log house. Miller later served as justice of the peace in Anderson Township, a county commissioner, and a state representative in 1803, and his Miller-Leuser Log House still stands on its original site under the ownership of the Anderson Township Historical Society. He surveyed many local roads, including the 1805 route from the mouth of Clough Creek to the Clermont County line that became the forerunner of today's Clough Pike, one of the township's oldest east-west roads. From about 1830 to 1920, Clough Pike operated as a turnpike under private corporations before Hamilton County took it over as a public roadway. About 1801, James Clark built his family home along Clough Creek; after coming to Anderson in 1797, he taught school, ran a distillery, operated a mill and orchard nursery, and served as a justice of the peace, a judge, and a state legislator, and his large dressed-stone house is one of Ohio's oldest stone houses.

Turpin Hills, Ohio · United States