Stone Creek: Two Names, One Train Ride
Near Berlin, Ohio
The village in Tuscarawas County got its name the practical way. In the early years of settlement, a man named Philip Burrier hauled loads of stone to the local creek and laid a ford across it so horses and wagons could cross. People started calling the crossing Stone Creek, and the name stuck when a post office was established in eighteen forty.
But then the town was formally platted in eighteen fifty-four, and the man who laid it out, Phillip Leonhardt, named it Phillipsburg after himself. Decades passed. In nineteen oh four, two council members, Charlie Kughler and Fred Haas, took the train all the way to Akron to file the village's incorporation papers, only to discover that another Phillipsburg already existed near Dayton. So they came home, revived the old creek-crossing name, and officially became Stone Creek. It is a village that got its identity from a stone ford, lost it to a developer's vanity, and reclaimed it on a train ride.
