Two boys swimming in 1798 discovered a relic that recalled a time not long past when two countries contended for ownership of the Ohio country. The boys, swimming and playing at the mouth of the Muskingum River where it enters the Ohio at Marietta, found a lead plate projecting from an eroded bank. They took it home and had melted some of it down to make bullets before a local historian heard about the find and rescued what remained. That plate is now in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society
The lead plate had been buried in 1749 by Frenchmen under the leadership of Capt. Pierre Joseph de Céloron de Blainville. The Marquis de la Galissoniere, governor-general of New France, commissioned Blainville to lead an expedition to the Ohio Valley, burying along the way engraved lead plates reaffirming French ownership of the entire Ohio River drainage and ordering English traders to leave French soil. The plates included blank places to be engraved in the field with the date and location. The plate buried at the mouth of the Muskingum River, on the downstream point of land at the river’s mouth, was the fifth plate buried by the expedition. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago last Friday we got a drenching of sorely needed rain that was weeks overdue. The evening before I helped my wife plant our sunflower shoots, and the normally rich dirt was dusty and powdery, reminiscent of a desert. Grass has been so brown the yards look like August landscapes, so I was glad to see the rain. But as usual, the rain hit hardest when I drove on the expressway during my daily work trip to Alliance. This was to be expected, of course, because the rain was simply conforming to the Rain Act of 1990 and was not in the least to blame.
The Rain Act was passed when I worked in Akron and stipulates that the hardest rain falls during morning and afternoon rush hours. It can be blazing hot all day while I’m at work, but get on the freeway and, as if on cue, the sky opens up, pelting all those sorry drivers with every bit of rain it’s held back for oh too long. So I’m stuck in heavy traffic, hunched forward, squinting through my windshield with wipers on high, glad for the rain but wishing I were at home enjoying it. (I love rain showers in warm weather.) Read the rest of this entry »

Ohio was, in the 18th century, the American West, and it changed flags, at least on paper, many times while whites argued with words and guns over its ownership, disregarding, of course, the fact that many Indian tribes called the land west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River home and believed the land could not be owned but was granted them for their careful use by the Great Spirit, Moneto. Ohio was claimed by both England and France but for a short time was, on British Crown documents, a part of Canada under a parliamentary act that was one of several acts designed to punish the intractable colonists.
The acts were Britain’s response to the damage inflicted by the Boston Tea Party, when Massachusetts men thinly disguised as Indians on Dec. 16, 1773, broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor in a response to Britain’s granting of a tea monopoly to the East India Co. Those laws became known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts. Read the rest of this entry »