Ohio River Valley

Field of Corpses: Arthur St. Clair & the Death of an American Army

March 9, 2023 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

November 4th, 1791 was a black day in American history. General Arthur St. Clair’s army encountered an Indigenous military force in what is now western Ohio.

In just three hours at what is known as St. Clair’s defeat, the Battle of the Wabash, or the Battle of a Thousand Slain, St. Clair’s force sustained the greatest loss ever inflicted on the United States Army by Native Americans — a total nearly three times larger than that incurred in the more famous Custer fight of 1876. [Read more…] about Field of Corpses: Arthur St. Clair & the Death of an American Army

Calvin Fairbank: Imprisoned 17 Years For Helping Enslaved People to Freedom

August 9, 2022 by Editorial Staff 2 Comments

Rev. Calvin Cornelius Fairbank was born November 3, 1816 in Pike, Wyoming County, NY. He began his academic studies at a seminary in Lima, Livingston County, NY, and became a licensed preacher in 1840. In 1842 he was ordained an elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and he graduated Oberlin College in Ohio two years later. At Oberlin he met John Mifflin Brown (1817-1893), a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and an Underground Railroad activist.

Fairbank was a radical abolitionist who not only spoke out against slavery, but actively worked to free as many enslaved people as he could. [Read more…] about Calvin Fairbank: Imprisoned 17 Years For Helping Enslaved People to Freedom

Native American History: The Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes Region

February 6, 2019 by Liz Covart Leave a Comment

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ohio River Valley proved to be a rich Agrarian region. Many different Native American peoples prospered from its land both in terms of the land’s ability to produce a wide variety of crops and its support of a wide variety of small fur-bearing animals for the fur trade.

In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History Susan Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and author of Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women and the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018), helps us explore this unique region and the important roles it played in the early American past. [Read more…] about Native American History: The Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes Region