History of Ohio

The history of Ohio includes many thousands of years of human activity. What is now Ohio was probably first settled by Paleo-Indian people, who lived in the area as early as 13,000 B.C. A fossil dated between 11,727 and 11,424 B.C. indicates they hunted large animals, including Jefferson's ground sloth, using stone tools. Later ancestors of Native Americans were known as the Archaic peoples. Sophisticated successive cultures of precolonial peoples indigenous peoples, such as the Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian, built monumental earthworks as part of their religious and political expression: mounds and walled enclosures, some of which have survived to the present.

By the mid-18th century, a few American and French fur traders engaged historic Native American tribes in present-day Ohio in the fur trade. American settlement in the Ohio territory came after the American Revolutionary War. The Congress prohibited slavery in the Ohio Territory. Ohio's population increased rapidly, chiefly by migrants from New England, New York and Pennsylvania. Southerners settled along the southern part of the territory, as they traveled mostly by the Ohio River. Yankees, especially in the "Western reserve" (near Cleveland) supported modernization, public education and anti-slavery policies. The state supported the Union in the American Civil War, although antiwar Copperhead sentiment was strong in Southern settlements.

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