Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States is divided into twenty-one townships.
When Cuyahoga County was founded, it was divided into civil townships for purposes of rural government, as were other Ohio counties. By 1990, this county was the most urbanized county in Ohio, and as a result, most of its townships have been annexed by the city of Cleveland or one of the other municipalities in Cuyahoga County. In Ohio, when the entirety of a civil township has been annexed by one or more municipalities, it ceases to have governmental powers and becomes a paper township, existing on maps but possessing no governmental powers. Today, nineteen of Cuyahoga County's townships are paper townships, with only a part of Olmsted Township and a tiny section of Chagrin Falls Township remaining as civil townships — just 10.5 square miles (27 km2) of Cuyahoga County's total area of 458 sq mi (1,190 km2).
Although the land that became Bedford Township was bought by the Connecticut Land Company in 1795, no white settlers came until Elijah Nobles arrived in 1813, and the first permanent settler came only in 1821. The township was organized on April 7, 1823, and the city of Bedford was incorporated as a village on March 15, 1837. Throughout the rest of the century, the township remained an agricultural area with little industry, but major industries began to arrive in the early twentieth century.
1915 saw the first political change in the township since 1837, when Maple Heights was incorporated as a village. The rest of the township remained unincorporated until 1951, when it was divided between Bedford Heights, Oakwood, and Walton Hills. As of the 2000 census, these cities and villages had a total population of 57,812.