Latecomers

In the last post I wondered why some of the land patents for some of the places just outside the Wapakoneta Reservation were issued a couple of years after those for the lands inside.

The above photo is of some more of those lands outside. It was taken as I rode south from the old boundary towards the Auglaize-Shelby county line, which is where the road in the photo ends. I had to jog to the east to go south into Shelby county.

This scene is in Jackson County Township, about a mile south of the county line.

In re-reading some of the history of Shelby County, I came to realize I should not have been surprised by the sequence of Issue Dates on the land patents. This part of Shelby County, just north of the Greenville Treaty Line, was not settled until the 1830s. Settlement proceeded mostly from the south to the north, and this was north — about the last part of Shelby county to be settled.

In a way that seems strange. Settlement of southern Michigan was well underway by that time — the very best lands were already taken, and there was a fairly sizeable population by the time the Black Hawk war broke out in 1832. Much of Ohio had been settled a generation earlier. Not far from here were places that already had settlers by the time of the War of 1812. But this part of Ohio around Wapakoneta did not get settled until the 1830s — relatively late in Ohio settlement history.

So it’s not the case that the land around the reservation had all been sold and settled, after which pressure was put on the Shawnee people to sell out and leave. Something like that is what happened to the Wyandot reserve around Upper Sandusky, but it was not the pattern that was followed here.

Why that is, I haven’t yet learned. Did it have to do with geography and the suitability of the land for farming? Or were there political considerations that kept this land off the market until the early 1830s? For now I’ll have to put it in the “wish I knew” category.