How Hopkins got its name out of a hat
Local history says nine settlers put possible township names into a hat, and the winning slip honored Oziel Hopkins Round, a child who had died young.
Local histories say nine men each wrote a possible township name on a slip of paper and put the slips into a hat. The name drawn was “Hopkins.”
The selected name honored Oziel Hopkins Round, the young son of pioneer Jonathan Olin Round. Oziel’s death in 1839 was recorded as the first death among the township’s settlers.
Jonathan built the first log cabin in the area called Hopkinsburg in 1837, and his family joined him in 1838. The township was organized separately in 1852. About 30 years after the first cabin, a railroad line reached the area that is now the village of Hopkins, and business activity shifted away from Hopkinsburg toward the new station.
The hat story appears on the community’s heritage-trail marker and in the township’s linked local-history materials. It is best understood as the account Hopkins has preserved about its own name, rather than a detail that can be independently reconstructed from the brief township record alone.
Sources
Last reviewed against the listed sources: July 12, 2026.