Where Is Ohio?

Where Is Ohio?


In the fall of 1770, George Washington took a trip down the Ohio River with a friend and some other men. They started at Fort Pitt, near what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and went by canoe, a lightweight boat useful for steering through river waters. In some places, the Ohio River ran quickly, making it tricky to cross. Other times it flowed gently.

Washington watched the land go by from his canoe. Deer nibbled among beech and sycamore trees growing along the riverbanks. Wild geese and ducks swam nearby. Washington and his men caught catfish and hunted turkeys. They camped on shore during the night. Each day he wrote in his journal. The whole trip would take nine weeks, ending in what is now Kentucky.

On October 27, Washington’s canoe passed the mouth of the Muskingum River. He looked out over the land and thought it would be good for farming. Years later, in 1788, Washington wrote to a friend about a new settlement near the Muskingum River. He said if he were a young man just starting out, there was no place he’d rather live than that area.

The settlement Washington wrote about was a town named Marietta. It was the first American town in the land that would become Ohio.


Chapter 1
The Great State of Ohio


Ohio’s story begins with water. Indigenous people have made their homes in the land between Lake Erie and the Ohio River for more than fourteen thousand years. The Ohio River starts in Pennsylvania and ends in Illinois. Along the way, it runs through 451 miles of Ohio and makes up the state’s southern boundary. Kentucky and West Virginia sit to Ohio’s south and southeast. To the north, the state is bordered by Lake Erie, the fourth-largest Great Lake in North America. The state also neighbors Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

Ohio has a humid, continental climate. That means its four seasons have different temperatures and bring plenty of rain and snow. Summers are hot, with highs in the mid-eighties to nineties. Winters are cold, and the temperature sometimes drops below freezing. The state is almost the same length north to south as it is east to west—about two hundred miles. Altogether, Ohio covers 44,825 square miles, making it the thirty-fourth-largest US state by area. The water that shaped all those miles—and formed the Ohio River and Lake Erie—arrived as ice!

The Pleistocene Epoch (say: ply-sto-seen Ep-ock) was a period from 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago. During that time, glaciers (huge areas of ice that stay frozen for hundreds or even thousands of years) moved in and out of what would become Ohio. One massive ice sheet covered two-thirds of the state. It was thousands of feet thick in some places! As the glaciers’ heavy weight caused them to slide forward, they flattened the land almost everywhere. That’s why plains (large areas of flat land) are the most common landform found in Ohio and cover nearly all of the state’s western side. The glaciers stopped before they reached all of the Appalachian Plateau (a raised area of land that’s flat on top) in the east and southeast, so that region kept some of its hills and valleys. Thanks to the glaciers, Ohio’s average elevation is only 850 feet. Its highest point is the 1,550-foot-tall Campbell Hill in Logan County.

In the northwest, water left behind by the melting glaciers eventually became a huge swamp. The Great Black Swamp was 40 miles wide and 120 miles long. That’s almost as big as the entire state of Connecticut! Beech, maple, and other trees grew in its murky water and created gloomy forests. Clouds of disease-carrying mosquitoes filled the swamp, often sickening those who tried to cross it.

In the 1850s, Ohioans worked to drain the Great Black Swamp. They cut down its trees and dug ditches that drew off water to dry it up. By the end of the nineteenth century, the swamp was gone. The soil that had been underwater was rich in nutrients and perfect for growing crops. What was once swamp became valuable farmland.

Draining the Great Black Swamp also meant that Ohio’s largest natural wetland was gone. Ohio lost 90 percent of its wetlands when the swamp was destroyed. Today, people recognize that wetlands are a vital habitat for plants and animals that also help clean water that’s held by the soil and rock underground, called groundwater. Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources is now working to restore some of the state’s wetlands.

Slow-moving glaciers also helped create the Ohio River, one of the state’s most important ecosystems. (An ecosystem consists of the living and nonliving things in one area.) More than 160 species of fish are found in its waters, including bass, walleye, and catfish. Paddlefish also live there. This unique fish can weigh almost two hundred pounds and first appeared fifty million years before the dinosaurs! Fish from the Ohio River become food for animals like otters and bald eagles. Migrating birds stop to rest along the river’s banks. Its water provides for plants and animals as well as for millions of people.

The Ohio River isn’t the state’s only waterway. Ohio has more than sixty thousand streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes. In the north, glaciers carved out a basin (a bowl-shaped dip in Earth’s surface) that filled with water and became Lake Erie. Ohio has about three hundred miles of shoreline on this Great Lake. Lake Erie is home to thousands of plant and animal species and is a source of valuable rocks and minerals like sandstone and salt. It also supplies water to millions of people. Lake Erie is an important natural resource for Ohio and has been for thousands of years.

The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks

Hopewell Culture is the term used to describe groups of people who lived in Ohio and eastern North America during the Middle Woodland Period (200 BCE–500 CE). We don’t know what they called themselves, but they were probably made up of many nations. The Hopewell Culture built a series of enormous earthworks (piled-up banks of earth) in what is now southern and central Ohio between 1,600 and 2,000 years ago. These earthworks can still be seen today. The ring of soil called the Great Circle is so large that Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza could sit inside it. Another, called Mound City, is made up of twenty-five mounds and stretches the length of ten football fields.

The earthworks were sacred gathering places, though we aren’t sure what exactly went on there. We do know that peoples from across North America traveled there to be together for ceremonies. They left artifacts made from mica, copper, and seashells.

In 2023, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were named a UNESCO World Heritage site. UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Its goal is to protect important cultural places. The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are the first World Heritage site in Ohio.

Shawnee, Miami, Lenape (say: la-NAH-pay), Ottawa, Wyandot (say: WHY-uhn-dot), and other Indigenous nations made their homes in Ohio. They hunted white-tailed deer, bison, elk, beavers, and more. (Today, bison and elk are no longer found in Ohio, but the white-tailed deer is the state mammal.) The animals were used for food and clothing, and also for trade. Ohio’s forests provided wood to build their homes. They grew corn, squash, beans, fruit, and other crops, fished the rivers and streams, and built villages near the water.

Pickawillany (say: pick-uh-WILL-uh-nee) was one of those villages. In 1747, some members of the Miami Nation settled near the Great Miami River. They supplied English traders with furs. By 1750, about twelve hundred Miami people lived in Pickawillany. French traders were not happy that the villagers were working with the English instead of with them. In 1752, French soldiers, helped by a group of Ottawa, attacked the village. Pickawillany’s leader was killed, and the rest of the villagers scattered.

It wouldn’t be the last time the Miami and other Indigenous nations were chased out of their Ohio homes by Europeans.