Category:Frontier Ohio

Europeans viewed Ohio as the frontier even before they began to explore the area in the seventeenth century. The first explorers were French, but British ones soon followed their earlier counterparts. By the mid eighteenth century, French and British traders arrived in the region, trading for furs with the local American Indian populace. Tensions quickly erupted between the French and the British, resulting in the French and Indian War. The British won this war, driving the French from the Ohio Country and the rest of North America.

British settlers soon moved into the Ohio Country, despite British attempts to prevent this from occurring. Following Great Britain's defeat in the American Revolution, the newly independent American states controlled what is now Ohio. The Confederation Congress and, then, the United States government arranged for the surveying and sale of this land. Tensions between whites and American Indians quickly erupted as more and more whites entered the region. Relatively quickly, the federal government, through warfare and treaties, secured the land for the whites. During the first years of the nineteenth century, a sufficient number of whites lived in what is now Ohio for the region to become a state. When Ohio was admitted to the Union, a sizable portion of the state remained unsettled by whites. Settlers continued to move into these areas for the next forty years, slowly bringing schools, businesses, and new transportation networks into the state. By the late 1840s, the federal government had removed the last sizable group of American Indians from Ohio, and whites now occupied all parts of the state. The frontier had now moved further west.

To learn more about this topic in Ohio's history, please browse these entries at your leisure.