OHOhio History

The state Congress forgot to admit

In 1953, while preparing for a sesquicentennial, researchers noticed that Congress had never passed a resolution admitting Ohio to the Union. It had approved an enabling act in 1802, accepted the constitution written at Chillicothe, and simply started treating Ohio as a state on 1 March 1803 without ever saying so. Congressman George Bender introduced a bill to fix it, and Dwight Eisenhower signed the admission on 7 August 1953, backdated a hundred and fifty years. Ohio had been electing senators, casting electoral votes and sending presidents to Washington the entire time.

Earthworks aligned to the moon

Long before any of that, the Ohio valley held the densest concentration of monumental earthwork building in North America. Adena people raised conical burial mounds from around 800 BCE. Their Hopewell successors, between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE, built geometric enclosures of a precision that took surveyors with instruments to appreciate: circles, squares and octagons covering tens of acres, laid out to a repeated unit of measure and linked by walled avenues. The Octagon Earthworks at Newark are aligned to the northernmost rise of the moon, an event that recurs on a cycle of 18.6 years. Their builders imported obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, mica from the southern Appalachians and shark teeth from the Gulf. Eight of these sites were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023.

By the time Europeans came through, the Beaver Wars of the mid seventeenth century had emptied much of the Ohio country, and it refilled with Shawnee, Lenape pushed west out of the Delaware valley, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa and Mingo.

Three empires and a survey grid

France claimed the Ohio country through its river system and lost it to Britain in 1763, whereupon a royal proclamation forbade colonists to cross the mountains, an order nobody obeyed. Britain ceded it to the United States in 1783, and Congress then did something with lasting consequences: the Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed a rectangular survey of six-mile townships, first run in the Seven Ranges of eastern Ohio, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 promised eventual statehood on equal terms and banned slavery north of the Ohio River. That last clause fixed the border that fugitives would later cross.

Settlement arrived in blocks with different owners. The Ohio Company of Associates, mostly New England officers paid in worthless certificates, founded Marietta on 7 April 1788. Connecticut kept a Western Reserve along Lake Erie, and its land company sent Moses Cleaveland to lay out a town at the mouth of the Cuyahoga in 1796. The nations already living there fought back hard: on 4 November 1791 Arthur St. Clair's army was destroyed near the Wabash headwaters with around six hundred and thirty soldiers killed, the heaviest defeat United States forces ever suffered in an Indian war. Anthony Wayne won at Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794, and the Treaty of Greenville the next year opened most of the future state.

Canals, Porkopolis, and a war over Toledo

Ohio's canals were finished between 1832 and 1845, one line from Cleveland to Portsmouth and another from Toledo to Cincinnati, and they turned the state into a corridor between the lake and the river. Cincinnati became the largest pork-packing city in the country, so completely that it was called Porkopolis, and its packers worked out overhead rails and division of labour that Henry Ford later cited as the ancestor of the assembly line.

In 1835 Ohio and the Territory of Michigan both claimed a strip of land at the western end of Lake Erie containing Toledo, called out militia, and glared at each other across the Maumee without managing to kill anyone. Congress awarded the Toledo Strip to Ohio and handed Michigan the Upper Peninsula in compensation, which looked at the time like a poor trade and stopped looking that way once the iron and copper were found.

Because the Ohio River was the line between slavery and freedom, the river towns became crossing points. John Rankin kept a lamp burning at his house on the bluff above Ripley, and John Parker, who had bought his own freedom, rowed people over from Kentucky.

Grant's state, Rockefeller's state

The Civil War barely touched Ohio soil. John Hunt Morgan's cavalry raid crossed the river in July 1863 and was run down near Salineville, the farthest north Confederate troops ever reached, and that was essentially it. What Ohio supplied was command: Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, Philip Sheridan and George Custer all came from the state, as did the Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, who was arrested for a speech in 1863, banished to the Confederacy, and ran for governor from exile in Canada. Seven presidents were born in Ohio, six of them between 1869 and 1923.

Industry followed the war. John D. Rockefeller consolidated Cleveland's refineries into Standard Oil in 1870. Akron turned into the rubber capital of the world on the strength of Goodrich, Goodyear and Firestone. Dayton produced the cash register, the electric self-starter, and a pair of bicycle mechanics who solved powered flight. In March 1913 the Great Miami flooded Dayton to the second storey and killed more than four hundred people statewide. The legislature answered with a conservancy act, and the Miami Conservancy District built five dry dams, the first large flood-control system in the country.

A burning river and Black Monday

The Cuyahoga River had caught fire at least a dozen times before, but the fire on 22 June 1969 was photographed and written up nationally, and it became shorthand for what industry had done to American water. The Environmental Protection Agency followed in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. Politics in the same years was raw: Carl Stokes had been elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967, the first Black mayor of a major American city, and on 4 May 1970 National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State.

Then the steel went. On 19 September 1977, remembered locally as Black Monday, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the closure of its Campbell Works and roughly five thousand jobs vanished at once, the opening act of a collapse that took most of the Mahoning valley's mills within a decade and put the term Rust Belt into circulation. Replacement came from an unexpected direction. Honda opened a motorcycle plant at Marysville in 1979 and began building Accords there in 1982, the first Japanese car assembly in the United States, and Ohio is now second only to Michigan in vehicle production.

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