(This first part was contributed for the book by Thomas Cole of Amanda Township, written March 13, 1877) At your request, I send you the following items pertaining to Toby Town... Toby Town was the name of an Indian village situated in what is now Bloom Township, section 33, about 80 rods eastward from the west line of said section, and about 20 rods north of its southern line. A small stream, known in early times as Toby Creek, and so marked on the old maps, ran through the village, but its eastern bank was its principla site. Said creek has long been known and called by those living along its entire length, by the name Little Walnut, and so marked on late maps. Tradition says nothing of the origin of the village, but in about 1806, or 1807, the Indians left it, and went to Sandusky, among the Wyandot tribes, and no doubt became a part of that people. A few straggling ones were occasionally seen for a year or two afterwards, when they all finally disappeared. A few incidents relating to them I will state:

Shortly after they left, William Clark built on the old village site, and in digging for clay to daub his cabin, he came upon Indian remains, supposed to be those of a chief, as a large double-handful of silver rings, brooches and other ornaments were discovered with the bones. Elijah Clark, a little son of Horatio Clark, being about thirty rods off, brought some of them to his mother, who fancied she could perceive and unpleasant odor, and thereupon ordered the little boy to return them to their sacred resting-place. The next Sunday, however, they were again taken up by two young men named Wintersteen, whose parents lived in section 32, one half mile westward, at or near the site of an old family grave-yard, where now repose the ashes of several of the Clark family, some of whom settled near Toby Town in 1799.

The Indians would take a short journey eastward and come back with plenty of lead, which they traded to the whites. No one ever knew, nor was it ever found out where they obtained it; but from the length of time they were absent, the place could not have been very distant. An opinion long after prevailed that it was obtained near the present site of the rock-mills. But all search for the place has thus far proved futile.

The Clark family, who settled within thirty rods of them in 1799, were never seriously molested by the red-skins, though they frequently found prudence the better part of valor, when their red neighbors paid devotion to Baccus. About twenty years ago Mrs. Clark related to me, that on one occasion that she remembered, Indians came to her house hunting whisky, and that she took her little children and hid in the brush until after they went away. Mrs. Clark's grandchildren are the present occupants of the farm, and they tell me that for many years human bones, arrow-heads, and other Indian relics were frequently turned up by the plow. Tradition alone now marks the spot. The village and tribe took their names from their chief, whose name was Toby." In the same book, page 3, it is written: "There was another small village of the Wyandots' nine miles west of Tarhe Town, near the present site of Royalton. This was Toby Town, and was governed by an inferior chief whose name was Toby. At the close of the Indian wars of the north west, a general treaty was held at Fort Greenville, the present county seat of Darke county, Ohio. In this treaty the Wyandots surrendered their possessions on the Hockhocking, and soon afterward removed to the Sandusky. There were however a few of their number who for several years afterwards lingered about the country, as if unwilling to leave their old hunting grounds and the graves of their relatives. They were for the most part peaceable, and gave little trouble to the white settlements, unless where they were misused. But at last, finding the game becoming scarce, they went away and joined their friends at the north. The Treaty of Greenville was signed on the 3rd of August 1795.

(same book, page 224) Lemuel and Jedediah [ALLEN] gave ground for a village, and about 1810 William Hamilton, then living on section 22, surved and laid out the village of Royalton, about one mile southeast of Toby Town. For some years it went by the name of Toby Town, generally, but by the Allen family it was called Royalton, after a village in Vermont, from whence they came. Elvira Allen, now Mrs. Meeker, was born in 1803, the first female child born, it is supposed, in that part of the township. Mrs. Meeker still distinctly remembers the Toby Town Indians coming over the prairie in single file, the squaws carrying their papooses on their backs, lashed to a board, and on arriving at her father's house, would stand up the boards upon which they little responsibilities were tied, against the outside, while they went in.

Genealogy in Bloom Twp., Fairfield Co., Ohio, Hompage