Fort Recovery, OH History Walk - Camping & History

Hi and welcome to Histories of Blast as we continue our September 2020 Glamping Through History tour of northwestern Ohio. Today we're going to move from the lake shore down to the old frontier along the Wabash River near the Indiana state line. We're going to reopen a long dormant history hike series and we invite you to come along as we take a history walk around the area of Fort Recovery which was an important spot in the warfare between the new federal government and a confederation of Native American nations that allied themselves against the westward expansion of the United States in the 1790s. Ironically I'm recording this in December from the top of Kittatinny Mountain overlooking the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania which was the subject of a couple of Frontier Franklin County videos that I made last year so I invite you to check those out if you're interested in frontier warfare. Avoiding interstates and other high-speed roads we drove cross-country through the town of Fremont home of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Museums and Library which will be the subject of an upcoming video. Heading southwest we added the first of several railroad stations to our collection on this trip at Ottawa on a roundabout way to our destination Grand Lake St. Mary's State Park. We stayed three nights in the campground there which gave us time to cover the historical sites in the surrounding area pretty well but limited opening times mostly due to volunteer staff schedules meant there will be more to see on a longer return trip someday. One of those places is the museum at Fort Recovery where at least the outdoor displays are open all year round so off we went. Approaching the town of Fort Recovery from the north on State Route 49 we noticed a small railroad station on the west side of the road. This well-preserved structure was once a stop on the New York Chicago and St. Louis Railroad popularly known as the Nickel Plate Road. It seems to have been moved a short distance from its original location next to the track and is now home to the local scout troop. The Fort Recovery Museum Park is on the northwestern edge of downtown near the Wabash River which this close to its source is really more of a creek. This is the Fort Recovery historical site. There's a reconstruction of the fort near its original site as I believe I've read. Not open at the time. Its hours are very limited due to the fact that it's run by the local historical society and compounded by the restrictions on things due to the COVID outbreak. It says here that in 1793 General Matt Anthony Wayne, the Pennsylvanian, led the third expedition against the Indians. The first two having been unsuccessful and having been defeated with much slaughter by the Indian coalition resisting the expansion of American white settlement. And here's the actually the front side of this sign which talks about the major defeat preceding and leading to Anthony Wayne being given his commission to come out here with the Legion of the United States, the first professional army of the new Constitutional Federal Republic of the United States. And there's the map of his campaign. See General Harmer was defeated in 1790. General St. Clair, famous St. Clair's defeat in 1791. And finally at the Battle of Fallen Timbers very near Toledo in 1793-94. The battle was fought in 94. Paved the way after the final defeat of the Indians in the Great Lakes area to opening up the Northwest Territory to white settlement. Fort Recovery was the site of one of the bases for that expedition. Statue to a woman called Red-Headed Nance who clung her baby tight and ferociously wielded her frying pan holding off the brutal Indian attackers during St. Clair's defeat. A lot of civilians, women and children, were killed during that fight. We'll go through the gate into the historical park. There's the North Block House. This is the site near the North Block House of one of the original surveyor stakes that was found. Marked the western terminus of the part of the Greenville Treaty Line. Greenville Treaty 1797-1799. That treaty line was surveyed after the Greenville Treaty which brought to an end the conflict between the Native American tribes in the Northwest Territory and the United States. Here's the visitor information for the Fort Recovery Museum and Monument. You'll see here that they really are only open in May and September on weekends from noon to five. We're not here on a weekend unfortunately so we won't be able to go in and see the museum. Look at this. The building next to the Fort Reconstruction was actually erected by the Works Progress Administration in 1938. There's a nice walking tour of the Fort Recovery battlefield area. This was the site of the Blair's defeat, St. Clair's defeat excuse me, the Battle of the Wabash in 1791 and the Battle of Fort Recovery in 1794. The trail starts going down that way. Here's the map of Ohio present day and you can see the Greenville Treaty Line running through the middle of it. Less than two months after the Battle of Fort Recovery, the American Indians' loss in that battle led to the negotiation of the Treaty of Greenville. The Treaty Line was meant to serve as a boundary between American Indian and Euro-American settlement but was essentially ignored by settlers and the U.S. government. Ohio became a state in 1803, only eight years after the treaty. And then it goes on to talk about 1830 and President Andrew Jackson's infamous Indian Removal Act resulting in forced removal often by marching with armed escorts of tribes in the southern United States. Marched to locations west of the Mississippi. This is why today Ohio is home to no federally recognized tribes. Tribes who once called Ohio home now have their governmental headquarters in Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states. Not a period of American history or episode in American history that is often talked about today except in terms of stolen land. Not talked about in terms of conflicted land where both sides fought each other. And although ultimately the government of the United States won, that was not always the case during the various Indian Wars that characterized the settlement of the western United States from the 1790s right up to the 1890s, almost a century. We'll start our walk. This is a one and a half mile trail which hopefully returns to its point of origin. And there's, I'm not going to read all these signs as we go along the way, but there's a, it's chronological that starts off with the prologue to 1791. And you can see here 1791 being the third year of the new federal government, one year after the census, the first census of 1790. And we'll follow this trail on around and stop and take a look at some of the signs, placards, but we won't go into great detail. Blacksmith shop and tool shed, another sign about the Greenville Treaty. This is a very nice way of interpreting the history of this little area with a nice shaded winding walkway that connects the public use parks. There's a, looks like a softball and little league size field back there. It might be a full-size field, I don't know. Here's a next, the next interpretive sign about the Battle of the Wabash for Arthur St. Clair, a Revolutionary War veteran, although not a very successful one. Another Pennsylvanian, actually an Englishman or a Scotsman, who settled in western Pennsylvania after the war, before the war, during the French, after the French and Indian War as a matter of fact, was defeated here at the Battle of the Wabash. A very embarrassing episode for the new government and one that brought home the fallacy of depending on militia for national defense, leading to the creation of the first, although short-lived, professional army in the United States. I mentioned earlier the Legion of the United States, not to be confused with the organization known as the American Legion. Another interpretive sign with a little map of the ambush that led to the slaughter of Americans by the Indian coalition, Battle of the Wabash. This battle had worldwide repercussions that led to the first congressional investigation in the nation's history. Oh boy. Here's a placard about natural history. 14,000 years ago, the last glacier receded from this area and the ancestors of American Indians arrived in Ohio during this time. The depression in the land before us right here, this little depression, see the embankment from the fort? This is the original bed of the Wabash River. It was rerouted in the 1900s to its present location. This is interesting. It talks about the American Indian tribes living in this region at the time of the Indian Wars were not originally from the area. They were Delaware and pushed westward, really out of eastern Pennsylvania, out of present-day eastern Pennsylvania. The Ottawa, the Potawatomi, and the Wyandotte had moved southward into Ohio. Miami entered from the west and the Shawnee moved in from the south. Most of that was from, except from the west, would have been due to white pressure from European settlement. The Delaware, of course, were in the Pittsburgh, present-day area in the 1750s, and they had been pushed out of that area by the Anglo-French conflicts. This is the site of the, apparently, this is the site of the battle of Wabash. Yeah, the Battle of the Wabash. Here's St. Clair's Retreat in yellow. There's a map here. You can come here and see it for yourselves, I hope, someday. Looking back up the, through the woods there, the wooded pathway, I should say, up toward the Fort Replica from the distance behind the scoreboard. And the interpreted pathway continues past this little picnic and playground area. Yeah, the pathway continues on across these fields. I can see other signs out in the distance, so I'll stop the documentary here. We'll move on to other subjects, but it's a great little one-and-a-half-mile trail that I recommend to anybody. It's a great place to come and stretch your legs when you're on a trip through otherwise rolling open agricultural land here in far western central Ohio, right on the cusp of the Indiana-Ohio line. Here's a placard talking about Indian skill and their strategy of using the landscape in a way that the whites did not understand. So this is the turnaround point on the trail, so we will walk back along the banks of the Wabash. Join us next time for another history hike. I really didn't do my homework for this visit, so it was a surprise to see an obelisk above the treetops as we drove through the south side of town on our way out. This is the Fort Recovery Monument Park, dedicated in 1913 on the burial site of some 900 European Americans, including women and children, killed in the Battle of the Wabash in 1791 and during the Battle of Fort Recovery two years later. On the east side of the park, there's a new memorial dedicated to veterans from all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces that was added to the park in 2016. The names of several hundred servicemen and women are engraved on stainless steel plates. The obelisk dates to 1913, and the words of dedication on a large bronze plaque referring to, quote, the savage foe, unquote, is in keeping with the national attitude of that time, but is in contrast with the modern-day ballast interpretation we experienced on the historical walk across town. There is a bit of inadvertent humor, however, in this archaic, but somehow pertinent to recent events, engraving. That's it for this time. I hope you enjoyed this video and will take time to view some of our other ones. Thanks for watching. Please click the thumbs up icon to like the video and share with your friends via email or social media. 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