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.
Precontact Indigenous history
Prehistory through the 15th century 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. 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.
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. 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.Nash, Gary B. Red, White and Black. Los Angeles 2015. Chapter 1, p. 6 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. The tribes we know by name were the Erie in the extreme Northeast corner, the Whittlesey culture is culturally unidentifiable and is found along the lake shore from Geauga County to Sandusky, 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 peoples who had fled west and took nearly all of that land for themselves, naming it the Illinois Colony.
During the war, the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes, who were Algonquian peoples 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 Anishinaabe 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 Anishinaabe 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 and Mississippi Rivers. 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.Smith, Bruce D.; Yarnell, Richard A. (2009). "Initial formation of an indigenous crop complex in eastern North America". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 106 (16): 6561–6566.Fagan, Brian (2005). Ancient North America. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. pp. 410–417.
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. But, as the Dutch feared giving the Iroquois firearms, they later found new allies in the English colonies.