Ohio Territory

The Ohio Country (sometimes called the Ohio Territory or Ohio Valley by the French) was the name used in the 18th century for the regions of North America west of the Appalachian Mountains and in the region of the upper Ohio River south of Lake Erie. This area was disputed in the mid-18th century by France and Great Britain. The eponymous name is based on a 1740 act of the colonial Virginia legislature when the colony claimed many of the trans-Allegheny territories and monied interests actively tried to encourage settlement west of the Ohio River hoping to gain that Ohio River watershed with enabling legislation forming the Ohio Company.

One of the first frontier regions of the United States, the area encompassed roughly all of present-day Ohio, northwestern West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and eastern Indiana. An area sometimes referred to as the near-west in news accounts, historians believe that the issue of Anglo-American settlement in the region was a primary cause of the French and Indian War and a contributing factor to the American Revolutionary War.

These Virginia colonial property claims led to the employment of many, including George Washington as a surveyor, his career as a militia officer and frictions with the French, various rival native Amerindian nations (the Iroquois, Miami, and Shawnee) and disputes with properties claims by other Colonies, which in part the act was trying to minimize. Virginia retained a claim to those territories into the American Revolutionary years, one less well publicized cause of which was the British Crown's attempt to hold in check emigration and settlement to the west of the Appalachians, while proof of its importance at the end of the colonial era is amply given in that the Virginia Colony formally declared war in 1774 on the region's Shawnee Nation, soon after winning Lord Dunmore's War gaining rights by treaty to settle the east bank Ohio Valley; results adverse to official British Crown policy.

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