History of Ohio

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Earthworks in Ohio, evidence of Prehistoric people in Ohio

Road to Fallen Timbers. Banks of the Maumee, Ohio. Anthony Wayne commanded two US Army regiments
with the mission of defeating the native Americans of the Northwest who had twice defeated the US Army. On
20 August 1794 it routed the enemy and cleared the way for white settlers to expand into the Ohio Valley.
See Battle of Fallen Timbers.[1]

Downtown Cincinnati

The history of Ohio as a state began when the Northwest Territory was divided in

1800, and the remainder reorganized for admission to the union on March 1, 1803 as
 the 17th state of the United States. The recorded history of Ohio began in the late 17th
century when French explorers from Canada reached the Ohio River, from which the
"Ohio Country" took its name, a river the Iroquois called O-y-o, "great river". Before
that, Native Americans speaking Algonquin languages had inhabited Ohio and the
central midwestern United States for hundreds of years, until displaced by the Iroquois
in the latter part of the 17th century. Other cultures not generally identified as "Indians",
including the Hopewell "mound builders", preceded them. Human history in Ohio began
a few millennia after formation of the Bering land bridge about 14,500 BCE –
see Prehistory of Ohio.
By the mid-18th century, a few American and French fur traders engaged historic Native
American tribes in present-day Ohio in the fur trade. The Native Americans had their
own extensive trading networks across the continent before the Europeans arrived.
American settlement in the Ohio Country came after the American Revolutionary
War and the formation of the United States, with its takeover of former British Canadian
territory. Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory which presaged Ohio
and the five states of the Territory entering the Union as free states. Ohio's population
increased rapidly after United States victory in the Northwest Indian Wars brought
peace to the Ohio frontier. On March 1, 1803, Ohio was admitted to the union as the
17th state.
Settlement of Ohio was chiefly by migrants from New England, New
York and Pennsylvania. Southerners settled along the southern part of the territory,
arriving by travel along the Ohio River from the Upper South. Yankees, especially in the
"Western reserve" (near Cleveland), supported modernization, public education, and
anti-slavery policies. The state supported the Union in the American Civil War, although
antiwar Copperhead sentiment was strong in southern settlement areas.
After the Civil War, Ohio developed as a major industrial state. Ships traveled the Great
Lakes to deliver iron ore and other products from western areas. This was also a route
for exports, as were the railroads. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fast-
growing industries created jobs that employed hundreds of thousands of immigrants
from Europe. During World War I, Europe was closed off to passenger traffic. In the first
half of the 20th century, a new wave of migrants came from the South, with rural whites
from Appalachia, and African Americans in the Great Migration from the Deep South, to
escape Jim Crow laws, violence, and hopes for better opportunities.
The cultures of Ohio's major cities became much more diverse with the blend of
traditions, cultures, foods, and music from new arrivals. Ohio's industries were integral
to American industrial power in the 20th century. In the late 20th century, economic
restructuring in steel, railroads, and other heavy manufacturing, cost the state many
jobs as heavy industry declined. The economy in the 21st century has gradually shifted
to depend on service industries such as medicine and education.

Contents

 1Prehistoric period
o 1.1Beaver Wars
 o 1.2Dunmore's War
 2European colonization
o 2.1New France
 2.1.1French and Indian War
o 2.2British Empire
o 2.3American Revolution
 3Territory and statehood
o 3.1Rufus Putnam, the "Father of Ohio"
o 3.2Northwest Territory
o 3.3Statehood
o 3.4Shawnee War and War of 1812
o 3.5Indian Removals
 4Industrialization
o 4.1Innovation
o 4.2Infrastructure
o 4.3Urbanization and commercialization
 4.3.1Education
 5Social history
o 5.1Religion
o 5.2Ethnic groups
o 5.3Popular culture
o 5.4Depression years
 6Civil War
o 6.1Prison camps
o 6.2Veterans
 7Ohio politics
o 7.1Rebellion of 1820
o 7.2Sovereignty
o 7.3Anti-slavery
o 7.4Ohio in national politics
o 7.5Progressive era
 7.5.1Women's rights
 8Early through mid-20th century
o 8.1Constitutional Convention of 1912
o 8.2Ku Klux Klan
o 8.3Great Depression
o 8.4World War II
o 8.5Cold War
 8.5.1Un-American activities
 9Late 20th century to present
 10See also
 11References
 12Bibliography
o 12.1Surveys and textbooks
o 12.2Specialized studies
o 12.3Local history
o 12.4Primary sources
 13External links
Prehistoric period[edit]
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The Great Serpent Mound earthwork in Adams County

Artists conception of the Fort Ancient period SunWatch Indian Village in Dayton

Main article: Prehistory of Ohio

A fossil which dated between 11,727 and 11,424 B.C. indicated that Paleo-Indians
hunted large animals, including Jefferson's ground sloth, using stone tools.[2] Later
ancestors of Native Americans were known as the Archaic peoples. Sophisticated
successive cultures such as the Adena, Hopewell and Fort Ancient, built
monumental earthworks such as massive monuments, some of which have survived to
the present.
The Late Archaic period featured the development of focal subsistence economies and
regionalization of cultures. Regional cultures in Ohio include the Maple Creek Culture of
southwestern Ohio, the Glacial Kame culture of western Ohio (especially northwestern
Ohio), and the Red Ochre and Old Copper cultures across much of northern Ohio. Flint
Ridge, located in present-day Licking County, provided flint, an extremely important raw
material and trade good. Objects made from Flint Ridge flint have been found as far
east as the Atlantic coast, as far west as Kansas City, and as far south as Louisiana,
demonstrating the wide network of prehistoric trading cultures. [citation needed]
About 800 BC, Late Archaic cultures were supplanted by the Adena culture. The
Adenas were mound builders. Many of their thousands of mounds in Ohio have
survived. Following the Adena culture was the Hopewell culture (c. 100 to c. 400 C.E.),
which also built sophisticated mounds and earthworks, some of which survive at
Hopewell and Newark Earthworks. They used their constructions
as astronomical observatories and places of ritual celebration. The Fort Ancient
culture also built mounds, including some effigy mounds. Researchers first considered
the Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio to be an Adena mound. It is the
largest effigy mound in the United States and one of Ohio's best-known landmarks.
Scholars believe it may have been a more recent work of Fort Ancient people. [citation needed] In
Southern Ohio alone, archaeologists have pinpointed 10000 mounds used as burial
sites and have excavated another 1000 earth-walled enclosures, including one
enormous fortification with a circumference of about 3.5 miles, enclosing about 100
acres. We now know from a great variety of items found in the mound tombs - large
ceremonial blades chipped from obsidian rock formations in Yellowstone National Park;
embossed breast-plates, ornaments and weapons fashioned from copper nuggets from
the Great Lakes region; decorative objects cut from sheets of mica from the southern
Appalachians; conch shells from the Atlantic seaboard; and ornaments made from
shark and alligator teeth and shells from the Gulf of Mexico - that the Mound Builders
participated in a vast trading network that linked together hundreds of Native Americans
across the continent.[3] It has also been found that Hopewell era settlements were cities
by population density alone, with thousands of residents at their peak.
After the Hopewell collapsed, though, there was little to nothing left but small,
unaffiliated farming villages until after 900 AD, when new cultures slowly began to
emerge. Sometime, presumably between the years 1100 and 1300 AD, Iroquoian
people's began to aggressively expand their influence, conquering into Ohio from the
northeast and displacing many of the preexisting cultures in the Great Lakes Region.
When modern Europeans began to arrive in North America, they traded with numerous
Native American (also known as American Indian) tribes for furs in exchange for goods.
In the year 1600 AD, Ohio was divided between several native tribes who were part of
three cultures- Iroquoians, Algonquians and Siouans. The tribes we know by name were
the Erie in the extreme Northeast corner, the Whittlesey culture a culturally
unidentifiable melting pot of Algonquian, Siouan and Iroquoian aspects along the lake
shore from Geauga County to Sandusky,[4] the Mascouten north of the Maumee River,
the Miami in the west and the Mosopelea in the southeast. Fort Ancients held the south
and another group called The Monongahela Culture extended slightly into eastern Ohio,
just south of the Erie, from across the Ohio River. But, a combination of war and
disease quickly decimated the local people's before much interaction could take place
and all tribes except the Miami were either permanently driven away, or destroyed.
When the Iroquois Confederacy depleted the beaver and other game in its territory in
the New York region, they launched a war known as the Beaver Wars, destroying or
scattering the contemporary inhabitants of the region. During the Beaver Wars in the
1650s, the Iroquois nearly destroyed the Erie along the shore of Lake Erie. Overall, they
managed to expand their territory through the North shore of Lakes Ontario and Erie,
throughout Ohio, Indiana and southern Michigan and south from their original Homeland
in New York, all the way to the James River in Virginia when the war seems to have
officially ended in 1701, but the French began aiding other native people's who had fled
west and took nearly all of that land for themselves, naming it the Illinois Colony.
During the war, the Sauk and Fox tribe, who were Algonquian people's displaced from
the Ottawa River valley in Canada, migrated into Ohio and Michigan before the Iroquois
quickly drove them all the way to Minnesota. After the war, Ohio mainly belonged to
only Iroquoians and Algonquians- the Mingo/ Seneca, the Shawnee, the Lenape/
Delaware, the Miami, the Ottawa/ Mississauga/ Chippewa (not to be confused with the
Ottawa who were still a part of the Anishinaabeg of Lake Superior, or the Algonquians
of the Ottawa River), the Wyandot and the Guyandotte/ Little Mingo. The Shawnee
migrated from the southeast and were sometimes known as the Savannah, the Lenape
had relocated from New Jersey and the Ottawa and Wyandot seem to have been
formed from Algonquian, Huron and Anishinaabeg captured by the Iroquois during the
war, who broke free of their control. The Guyandotte may have been related to a small
Iroquoian tribe called the Petun, which had also been destroyed in the war.
From the time of the Hopewells until sometime in the 14th century, the Native peoples
of the Eastern United States had seemingly domesticated and traded several food crops
amongst themselves in what is referred to as the Eastern Agricultural Complex, but
once corn arrived and for reasons unknown, the peoples of the east allowed several of
these domesticated and/ or semi-domesticated species to go extinct, and, to our
knowledge, never ate even the wild versions of these plants ever again. This, despite
Quinoa still being farmed in South America and wild Buckwheat still being commonly
harvested on the west coast. The main plants were Beans, Squash and
Pumpkin, Quinoa, Little Barley Grass, Buckwheat and Sunflower, domesticated from
plants available in the Ohio River Valley, while some others, like White Alder Grass and
Maygrass originated from Missouri and the Deep South, respectively. Some of the wild
varieties of these plants were very different, such as Wild Kidney Bean and a rare
variant of Cucurbita Pepo, Ozarkana, which grows at the confluence of the Ohio &
Mississippi Rivers.[5] Squash and Pumpkins may be the oldest domesticated crop,
having been grown by the Indian Knoll People of western Kentucky, who formed a
complex society as far back as 8000 years ago. [6][7]
Wild native plants that Native Americans were known to, or may have likely, utilized for
food are as follows: Acorn*, American Lotus, American Lovage, Atlantic
Camas Root, Bamboo, Bearberry, Beech Nut*, Bergamot, Black Cherry, Black
Chokeberry, Black nightshade*, Black Raspberry, Black Walnut, Blueberry, Bog
Rosemary*, Butternut, Calamint, Cattail, Chestnut*, Chokecherry, Common
Milkweed, Cow Parsnip Root*, Crabapple, Cranberry, Creek Plum, Cucumber
Magnolia fruit, Dandelion, Deerberry, Dewberry, Downy Wood Mint, Eastern
Hemlock and other pine species (pine nuts, nettles as spice, cuttings for spruce tea/
beer, sap as chewing gum ingredient and spruce tips for jelly), Eastern Redbud, Eastern
Red Columbine Nectar*, Eastern Yampah, Elderberry*, False Solomon's
Seal, Filé (Sassafras), Gaylussacias, German
Rampion, Ginger, Goldenrod Shoots, Gooseberry, Greenbriar, Groundcherry*, Hackberr
y, Haw, Hazelnut, Hickory Nut, Hogpeanut, Honewort, Honey locust, Indian
Cucumber, Indian Potato, Jack in the Pulpit Root*, Jerusalem artichoke, Juniper
berry*, Kentucky coffeetree*, Ferns* (including Lady Fern and Cinnamon Fern), Lake
cress, Leatherleaf*, Licorice Root, Lily Bulbs, Maple (syrup and
sugar), Mayapple*, Milkvetch root*, Morning Glory Root*, Northern
Bayberry, Papaw, Partridgeberry, Pepperweed, Persimmon, Pincherry, Pokeweed*, Pra
irie Tea* Red Currant, Red Mulberry, Rock Cress, Rowan Berry, Samphire
Greens, Sand Cherry, Serviceberry, Solomon's Seal*, Sourwood flowers, Spicebush
Laurel*, Spikenard*, Strawberry, Strawberry Blite, Sumac, Sweet
Anise, Sweetflag*, Toothwort, Tuckahoe, Tupelo fruit, Viburnum Berries
(including American Cranberrybush, Nannyberry and Blackhaw), Virginian Dwarf
Plantain, Virginian Sweetspire seeds, Wapato, Water Horehound, Waterleaf, Water
Parsnip*, Wild Carrot, Wild Chervil*, Wild Grape (juice only), Wild Green Bean, Wild
Onion (including Nodding Onion, Ramps and Meadow Garlic), Wild Peas*, Wild
Plum, Wild rice, Wild Rose
(Illinois and Swamp roses), Wintercress, Wintergreen (berries and leaves), Wood
Sorrel* and Yellow Buckeye*

 Asterisks follow if potential risk of poison, or easy confusion for poisonous lookalike.
Beaver Wars[edit]
Main article: Beaver Wars
In 1608, French explorer and founder of Quebec City Samuel Champlain sided with the
Ottawa River Algonquian, Huron and surviving Saint Lawrence Iroquoian peoples living
along the St. Lawrence River against the Iroquois Confederacy ("Five Nations") living in
what is now upper and western New York state in what was known as the Ticonderoga
War. The result was a lasting enmity by the Iroquois Confederacy towards the French,
which caused them to side with the Dutch fur traders coming up the Hudson River in
about 1626.[8] But, as the Dutch feared giving the Iroquois firearms, they later found new
allies- presumably the English, 30 years before the English had formally claimed
Iroquois lands.

Engraving based on a drawing by Champlain of his 1609 voyage, depicting a battle

between Iroquois and Algonquian tribes near Lake Champlain

With these more sophisticated weapons, the Five Nations nearly exterminated [citation
needed]
 the Huron and all of the other Native Americans living immediately to their west in
the Ohio country during the Beaver Wars, beginning in 1632. The Five Nations's use of
modern weapons caused the wars to become deadlier. Historians consider the Beaver
Wars to have been one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of North America.
About 1664, the Five Nations officially became trading partners with the British, who
conquered the New Netherlands (renamed New York) from the Dutch.
The Five Nations enlarged their territory by right of conquest. The number of tribes
paying tribute to them realigned the tribal map of eastern North America. Several
large confederacies were destroyed or relocated, including
the Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock, Miami, Weskerini Algonquian, Kichesipirini
Algonquian, Mascouten, Fox, Sauk, Petun, Manahoac and Saponi-Tutelo. The Five
Nations pushed several eastern tribes to and even across the Mississippi River, as well
as south, into the Carolinas. After the Five Nations' warriors were defeated between
1670 and 1701, the French and their allies took control, but the French-Indian Wars
between England, France and all their remaining native allies, began just a few years
later. Several small wars between the two countries in Europe spilled over into the
Americas and were used as an excuse to try to seize more territory. By the late 1750s,
all of the former Illinois Colony had been conquered and renamed the Ohio Country. [9][10]
Dunmore's War[edit]
After the French-Indian Wars, one final war occurred immediately before the
Revolutionary War. Dunmore's War was fought between the English and Shawnee
roughly between Yellow Creek in Columbiana County and the West Virginia- Kentucky
border. The English locals claimed that the Shawnee had been rustling cattle, but it was
later concluded that they had lied to facilitate a war. Of the two Shawnee chiefs who
fought in the war, Chief Logan's family were all hunted down and assassinated and
Chief Cornstalk was said to have cursed the land where his village had once stood. [11]
Among the Mingo Seneca, the brother of Chief Cornplanter, a high ranking False Face
(Iroquois Shaman) reworked the old Iroquois religion into the Longhouse Church when
in Ohio. This version of Iroquois religion took on various Christian elements (belief in
hell, downgrading of all deities aside the Creator to something akin to angels/ demons
and regular Church meetings) while keeping alive most of the old holidays and
ceremonies and is still practiced by most members of the Iroquois Confederacy today. [12]

European colonization[edit]
Main article: Ohio Country
New France[edit]

A map of the original Ohio Country

In the 17th century, the French were the first modern Europeans to explore what
became known as Ohio Country.[13] In 1663, it became part of New France, a royal
province of French Empire, and northeastern Ohio was further explored by Robert La
Salle in 1669.[14]
During the 18th century, the French set up a system of trading posts to control the fur
trade in the region, linked to their settlements in present-day Canada and what they
called the Illinois Country along the Mississippi River. Fort Miami on the site of present-
day St. Joseph, Michigan was constructed in 1680 by New France Governor-
General Louis de Buade de Frontenac.[15] They built Fort Sandoské by 1750 (and
perhaps a fortified trading post at Junundat in 1754).[15]
By the 1730s, population pressure from expanding European colonies on the Atlantic
coast compelled several groups of Native Americans to relocate to the Ohio Country.
From the east, the Delaware and Shawnee arrived, and Wyandot and Ottawa from the
north. The Miami lived in what is now western Ohio. The Mingo formed out of Iroquois
who migrated west into the Ohio lands, as well as some refugee remnants of other
tribes.
Christopher Gist was one of the first English-speaking explorers to travel through and
write about the Ohio Country in 1749. When British traders such as George
Croghan started to do business in the Ohio Country, the French and their northern
Indian allies drove them out. In 1752 the French raided the Miami Indian town
of Pickawillany (modern Piqua, Ohio). The French began military occupation of the Ohio
Valley in 1753.
French and Indian War[edit]
By the mid-18th century, British traders were rivaling French traders in the area. [16] They
had occupied a trading post called Loramie's Fort, which the French attacked from
Canada in 1752, renaming it for a Frenchman named Loramie and establishing a
trading post there. In the early 1750s George Washington was sent to the Ohio Country
by the Ohio Company to survey, and the fight for control of the territory would spark
the French and Indian War. It was in the Ohio Country where George Washington lost
the Battle of Fort Necessity to Louis Coulon de Villiers in 1754, and the
subsequent Battle of the Monongahela to Charles Michel de Langlade and Jean-Daniel
Dumas to retake the country 1755. The Treaty of Paris ceded the country to Great
Britain in 1763. During this period the country was routinely engaged in turmoil, with
massacres and battles occurring among the tribes.
British Empire[edit]
Prior to the American Revolution, Britain thinly exercised sovereignty over Ohio Country
by lackadaisical garrisoning of the French forts. [17] Just beyond Ohio Country was the
great Miami capital of Kekionga which became the center of British trade and influence
in Ohio Country and throughout the future Northwest Territory. By the Royal
Proclamation of 1763, British lands west of Appalachia were forbidden to settlement by
colonists. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 explicitly reserved lands north and west of
the Ohio as Indian lands. British military occupation in the region contributed to the
outbreak of Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763. Ohio Indians participated in that war until an
armed expedition in Ohio led by Colonel Henry Bouquet brought about a truce. Another
colonial military expedition into the Ohio Country in 1774 brought Lord Dunmore's
War to a conclusion. Lord Dunmore constructed Fort Gower on the Hocking River in
1774. In 1774, Britain passed the Quebec Act that formally annexed Ohio and other
western lands to the Province of Quebec in order to provide a civil government and to
centralize British administration of the Montreal-based fur trade. The prohibition of
settlement west of the Appalachians remained, contributing to the American Revolution.
[15]

American Revolution[edit]
As a result of the exploits of George Rogers Clark in 1778, Ohio Country (including the
territory of the future state of Ohio) as well as eastern Illinois Country, became Illinois
County, Virginia by claim of conquest under the Virginia Colony charter. The county was
dissolved in 1782 and ceded to the United States.

Monument commemorating the Moravian Christian Indian Martyrs who were massacred in 1782 at the mission
settlement of Gnadenhutten.[18]

Early in the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress signed the Treaty of
Fort Pitt with the Lenape people, which should have guaranteed that all Native lands of
Ohio, excepting the Western Reserve, would become a state explicitly under control of
the Native peoples who inhabited it in return for their supporting the patriot cause,
however a breakdown in communication led to the Ohio Natives' not properly
responding and the Continental Congress's assumption that they wanted no part in the
union, but to maintain their own sovereignty, therefore the treaty was never fulfilled and
many of Ohio's Native peoples were left in confusion as to who to support during the
war, leading to their people's being regularly victimized by both sides. [2] For example,
the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket and the Delaware leader Buckongahelas sided with
the British. Cornstalk (Shawnee) and White Eyes (Delaware) sought to remain friendly
with the rebellious colonists. There was major fighting in 1782. [19] American colonial
frontiersmen often did not differentiate between friendly and hostile Indians, however.
Cornstalk was killed by American militiamen, and White Eyes may have been. One of
the most tragic incidents of the war—the killing of 96 Christian Munsee and Christian
Mahicans by U.S. militiamen from Pennsylvania on March 8, 1782 at the Moravian
Christian missionary village of Gnadenhutten, known as the Gnadenhutten massacre—
took place in northeast Ohio.[20][21] In May of that year, George Washington's close
friend William Crawford was captured while leading an expedition against Lenape at
Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Though Crawford was not at Gnadenhutten, in revenge, he was
tortured for hours then burned at the stake.
With the American victory in the Revolutionary War, the British ceded Ohio and its
territory in the West as far as the Mississippi River to the new nation. Between 1784 and
1789, the states of Virginia, Massachusetts and Connecticut ceded their earlier land
claims in Ohio Country to Congress, but Virginia and Connecticut maintained reserves.
[22]
 These areas were known as the Virginia Military District and Connecticut Western
Reserve.[23][24]