Michigan-Ohio border

This photo was taken the day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, back in 2005. It was on day two of a bike ride to Logan County, Ohio, where I crossed the border south of Hillsdale, MI.

I’m not sure why it’s in sepia monochrome. Maybe I was playing with features on my new Canon G60 Powershot camera, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to which buttons I had pushed.

The boundary marks the place where things change. Here I have to get out different maps. The history resources change. It’s a transition to a place where the county histories are not all available online, and to a place for which I cannot download pre-settlement vegetation data.

This particular border was a contested one back in the 1830s, at the time of the Toledo War, so called. Many histories treat it as a kind of joke — a big fuss over something that didn’t amount to much in the end, especially given that Toledo didn’t amount to as much as people had once expected. The comedy aspects are emphasized — the brothers One Stickney and Two Stickney, so named by their father, and the swap of the Toledo Strip for part of the Upper Peninsula. Here is an example from Professional Surveyor Magazine of the tone of the writing one can easily find:

In response to Ohio’s actions, Michigan troops retaliated by raiding the home of Major Stickney and a few other residents, killing some hogs and fowl, and destroying some gardens and orchards. By September 10, 1835, the militia units from both sides had disbanded and returned home. The heaviest casualties of this little war were probably two noble horses, one on each side.

I’ve often joked about it myself, pointing out that Ohio cheated Michigan out of the land and still hasn’t forgiven us for it, which is why we have continued hostilities in the form of Ohio State vs University of Michigan football.

The story does have its amusing elements, but two recent authors point out that the conflict was a lot more significant than the question of who got the better deal, the state that got the Toledo Strip or the one that got the Upper Peninsula.

The Spring 2008 issue of Michigan Historical Review has an article by Susan E. Gray titled, “Writing Michigan History from a Transborder Perspective” in which she explains some of the constitutional issues that were decided here. She also cites Peter Onuf, who wrote about this at greater length in his book, Statehood and Union : A history of the Northwest Ordinance (1987). Here is part of what she writes:

[R]esolution of the Michigan-Ohio border crisis made it clear that Congress was the ultimate arbiter of whwen and how territories would become states. State boundaries, therefore, would also be politically determined, and in that sense, arbitrary.