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 »