How are Ohio/Midwest towns setup? (Cleveland, Warren: homes, school districts, upkeep)

[stewarthaas]

I currently live in Connecticut and the towns on average are about 25 sq miles....I notice that Ohio/midwestern town are very small in area, but Im confused as to what town it would be called thats a few miles out into the country from the town center. For ex: I was looking at Elida, OH which is 1 sq mile....what about the homes a few miles out of town or the farms, what are they listed under? Hopefully I don't sound too stupid, but its just setup differently from the northeast I guess. Thanks.

[JR_C]

AFAIK, Ohio counties are first divided into townships. Within townships, you usually have villages and cities. For mailing address purposes, you'd probably use the nearest village/city name.

There are exceptions, though. For example, here in Mahoning County, we have Boardman Township. They never formed a village or city, but many use Boardman as their mailing address.

[VideoEngineerAJS]

I was confused about the New England town system when I lived up in New Hampshire from September 2007 to September 2008, but in all actuality it's not that much different.

Like JR_C said, most of the time you use the city/village that's closest to you as your address. So in essence it's not much different, really the only difference is that instead of the city/village being in charge of upkeep on the roads outside of its limits, the township, county, or state take care of it.

[Ohioan58]

I think "towns" in Connecticut or New York are like townships in states like Ohio and Indiana. In like manner it throws me to drive in New York and to see a sign for a "town" and you're out in the middle of nowhere.

In Ohio "town" is an informal, not official designation. Here we have townships, and we have villages, and then we have cities. Those are our municipal units.

The "perfect" township layout in the midwest is 36 square miles, 6 miles by six miles, divided into "sections". Originally, a section's worth of land was dedicated to things like a public school.

[AnytimeAnywhere]

Villages are small towns in townships that are contained in counties, at least where I live. People living in the country may use the nearest village's name for their mailing address.

[rrtechno]

An exception to the "nearest village" for the mailing address would be if the village did not have a post office that provided rural delivery. In that case, the official mailing address would be that town whose post office delivers the mail. I grew up about 2 1/2 miles from a small village in NW Ohio that has a post office but no rural delivery. I tell people I am from that town, even though our mailing address was from a village in the next county, about 10 miles away. What was even more interesting was that our school, on the north side of the street INSIDE that small village, had mail delivered from the village in the next county. The people who lived across from the school inside the village who had home delivery, had addresses from the county seat of the county we were in, which was about 10 miles in the other direction from town.

Hope that makes everything as clear as mud.

[stewarthaas]

Yeah I pretty much got it down. In Connecticut everything is done by town I guess. When you enter it, no matter rural/city, your in it and everything is considered that town's name...not just the center of town. Pretty interesting though that its different out there, we dont refer to our counties much at all. Thanks for the help as I intend to move to Ohio next year.

[JefferyT]

Northeastern Ohio used to be part of Connecticut, the "Western Reserve", and they have a somewhat different size of township than the rest of Ohio. They also have villages with greens on them, and the center of the township sometimes has a village with the suffix "center".

The Connecticut Wesern Reseve (and Firelands)



A church

http://summithistory.org/photos/Community/tallmadgechurch.jpg (broken link)

A town green



(the town green of Cleveland is todays Public Square, the heart of downtown)

[Uplander]

I think towns in the northeast are somewhat equivalent to townships in Ohio. There are also two types of townships inOhio, Civil - statewide and Congressional - in much of the state. There is always a civil township, they will have names like "Washington Township" in areas covered by the public land survey there will also be congressional townships with names like "Township 8 North, Range 14 East". Civil townships are the poltitcal units and in many cases will coincide with congressional townships, but a feature like a river may be used as a civil township boundary rather than a surveyed line.

The Public Land Survey System (PLSS)

[CortlandGirl79]

Originally Posted by JefferyT

Northeastern Ohio used to be part of Connecticut, the "Western Reserve", and they have a somewhat different size of township than the rest of Ohio.

I was going to mention that in the Connecticut Western Reserve aka Ne Ohio i believe townships are 5X5 miles. My country, Trumbull is perfectly squard 25x25 miles.

Here's a map of my county:
from wiki

Township names are in the center of the blocks, cities and villages sometimes stretch across two or more townships. For example, my town or should i say, city? My city, Cortland (i believe a municipality has to have 5,000 people to be a city), is located w/in 3 townships, Bazetta, Fowler, and Johnston. The city or village rules if you live within it's boundaries. Also, zip codes and school districts can be misleading. Howland Township has a Warren zip code. Some parts of Fowler have a Cortland zip. Bazetta and Cortland make up the Lakeview School District, while parts of the city of Warren are in the Howland District. You'll figure it all out in time. Hope my map helped.