Photo by Otto E Ehrhart
By: Stan Jordan
I asked Josh Steiner if he knew why this township is called Carryall and he didn’t know.
The above picture is of that rock taken from Mr. Ehrhart’s book.
If you go west on 424, where the Maumee River runs the closest to the highway, you look down into the river and you can see this big rock.
Carryall Township was organized in the late 1820’s, It contained 36 square miles. It had its first election as a township in 1830. That was at John Snook’s place at the north end of North Main Street about where the corporation line is.
That huge rock in the river, somehow reminded the old settlers of a French wagon and would carry anything. At that time anything and everything was carried by horse or oxen and wagon.
Over the years, almost 200 of them, the sun, weather and water has changed the shape of that rock and now it looks just like a big boulder.
That area there is full of Antwerp History. Right there is where the water tank for the locomotive on the Wabash Railroad was located by the tracks and the steam pumping station that put the river water into the tank right down by the water on the west side.
In the early 1930’s the nation was under prohibition and election time was coming up soon, people wanted the nation to be able to have beer and whiskey if they wanted.
So someone took white barn paint and wrote “VOTE WET” on that big rock, sort of electioning at that time. We always called that the Vote Wet Rock. And they did repeal prohibition on that election.
Over the years, that area has added to Antwerp’s history. Now the US 24 highway is not there, the locomotives are gone, the watering tank is gone, the pumping station’s long gone, but the big rock is still there and so is Carryall Township.
See ya!
