1784 June 2. Congress passed a resolution disbanding the last remnants of the Continental Army.
1784 June 3. Congress passed a resolution establishing a peacetime regiment of 700 men, to be furnished by four states. These men were to occupy posts vacated by the British on the northwest boundaries of the United States and to discourage settlers or “squatters” from moving into the Ohio country.
1784 Col. Josiah Harmar, a Revolutionary War veteran who was now 30 years old, assumed command of the First American Regiment.
1785 The Land Ordinance of 1785 set forth the first rectangular system of land survey for the area north and west of the Ohio River. It also specified the division and sale of the land. Although Congress authorized the survey of 13 ranges, threats by Indians, the difficulty and seasonality of the work, the cost of military protection, and the lackluster sales of the first five ranges at auction in New York caused the scope of the project to be reduced from 13 to 7 ranges. That portion, beginning near present-day East Liverpool, Ohio, became known as the Seven Ranges. The newly formed army protected the surveyors from Indians and settlers.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=1472
1785 November. Fort Harmar was built in the fall 1785 at the mouth of the Muskingum River and garrisoned by one battalion of the regiment under Major John Doughty.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=708
1786 February 8. According to one officer (name unknown), Fort Harmar was“ very commodious and completely finished – the gates are all shut at night, and we rest secure. If no hostilities should commence we shall have an agreeable tour in this part of the world.”
1786 March 3. Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Holden Parsons and Manasseh Cutler met in Boston to form the Ohio Company of Associates, the purpose of which was to purchase, settle and sell land in present-day southeastern Ohio. The Ohio Company bought 1.5 million acres from Congress.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=945
1786 July 23. Colonel Josiah Harmar arrived and assumed command of Fort Harmar. He was now 32 years old and Harmar’s wife accompanied him and lived at the fort.
1787 July 13. Congress passed The Northwest Ordinance, creating the Northwest Territory – the region south of the Great Lakes, north of the Ohio River, west of Pennsylvania, and east of the Mississippi River – with the intention of creating future states.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Ordinance
1787 December 25. According to Joseph Buell, “we had a poor Christmas – little or nothing to eat or drink” at Fort Harmar.
1788 April 7. Rufus Putnam and 47 other Ohio Company stockholders landed at the mouth of the Muskingum River and established Marietta, one of the earliest settlesments in the Northwest Territory.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=749
1788 July. Colonel Josiah Harmar charged Lewis Wetzel with the murder of George Washington, a Delaware Indian, loyal to the United States. Wetzel short Washington while the Indian was hunting on the Muskingum. Wetzel was arrested and jailed at Marietta, but escaped before his trial. He eventually moved to New Orleans, where he spent several years in prison for counterfeiting.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=405
1789 January. The two Treaties of Fort Harmar were signed near Fort Harmar. One treaty was with representatives of the Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, and Sac (Sauk); the other with the Six Nations (except the Mohawk who did not attend). Territorial Governor St. Clair, the only U.S. commissioner at the treaty, signed both treaties. All other whites present were observers or interpreters. In September the former treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate and proclaimed by President Washington, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty with the Six Nations and it was never proclaimed. The treaties were ineffectual in bringing peace.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=451
1789 March 4. The 1st Constitutional Congress held its initial session in New York City.
1789 April 30. George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States on the balcony of the Federal Hall, located on Wall Street in New York City.
1789 December. Colonel Josiah Harmar and 300 men left Fort Harmar, relocating military headquarters to Fort Washington ( Cincinnati). He left 21 soldiers at the fort.
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http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=719
1790 April 14. Ebenezer Denny noted that Fort Harmar was “in a manner deserted.”
1790 October. To end Indian raids into Kentucky, Secretary of War Knox authorized Harmar to chastise Shawnee and outcast Cherokee banditti headquartered at Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne). Harmar marched from Fort Washington with 320 regular soldiers and 1,100 militia, mostly Kentuckians, to destroy the villages at Kekionga. By October 22, a confederated army of Indians, led by Miami Chief Little Turtle, routed Harmar’s forces – 183 men killed or missing and 31 wounded in what became known at Harmar’s Defeat.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmar's_Defeat
1790 December. Captain David Zeigler commanded sparsely manned dilapidated Fort Harmar. Virtually all of the 20 or so soldiers at the fort were wounded or ill. There was no artillery and little equipment at the fort.
1791 January 2. A party of 25 Delaware and Wyandot Indians massacred 12 Ohio Company settlers at Big Bottom, located on the Muskingum River approximately 30 miles northwest of Marietta. Five males were taken hostage and two settlers escaped. One Indian was seriously wounded, but eventually recovered.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bottom_massacre
1791 January 5. Rufus Putnam and the Ohio Company directors petitioned Captain Zeigler for protection, noting “…from the present state of Fort Harmar very little can be expected for defending our out settlements.”
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http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/FH7&CISOPTR=19008
1791 April. Zeigler built a blockhouse in the center of the decayed Fort Harmar to house the 45 soldiers stationed there. St. Clair, selected to lead the next expedition against the Indians, ordered Zeigler to leave Fort Harmar with his men in time to join him at Fort Washington by July 15. Zeigler left the fort in late June, leaving a sergeant and 12 men – those too ill to travel or fight – at the blockhouse.
1791 May 1. Major General Arthur St. Clair wrote to Henry Knox, the Secretary of War, that Fort Harmar was in a “very ruinous situation. The pickets are very much decayed and thebarracks very rotten…” He suggested to Knox that perhaps parts of the old fort be torn down and other parts inhabited by locals.
1791 July 6. At Fort Washington, St. Clair wrote to Colonel Ebenezer Sproat in Marietta that the local militia used for the defense of Washington County (except Gallipolis) should be discharged unless the local population paid the cost of their own protection.
1791 July 8. The Ohio Company directors, “Resolved that the price of Rails which wer[e] taken for the fortifications from Fences, be set at $ 0.83 per hun’d. And that Rails taken when not in fence[s] be set at $ 0.50 [per hundred].” Inasmuch as the record identifies neither sellers nor buyers, whether some or all of these rails were stripped from the derelict fort is unknown.
1791 July 21. Captain Joseph Shaylor and his company arrived from Fort Pitt to perform garrison duty at Marietta. They left in early September to join St. Clair’s expedition against the western tribes headquartered at Kekionga.
1791 Sepember 14. An unidentified person in Marietta wrote to a friend in Boston, “ Fort Harmer is demolished, and nothing left but one block-house.” Although the fort ceased to exist sometime that summer, no U.S. military order authorizing or ordering a final disposition of the fort has be found. Succumbing neither to fire or flood, it simply rotted, crumbled, and was demolished. Perhaps the scrap lumber was sold for fence rails, as noted above. From its construction in late 1785 to its demise in summer 1791, Fort Harmar was never attacked.
1791 October 13. Josiah Harmar, who served as senior officer of the army from 1784 – 1791, resigned from the army effective January 1, 1792. In route home to Philadelphia, he stopped at Marietta to visit friends, but an account of his visit has not been found. He later served as Adjutant General of Pennsylvania from 1793 – 1799. He died on August 20, 1813.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Harmar
1791 October. As St. Clair prepared for the upcoming battle with the Indians, he found that many of his men were militia and six-month recruits who were not trained for the task at hand. Capt. John Armstrong said they were “the worst and most dissatisfied troops I ever served with.”
1791 November 4. The Indians defeat of St. Clair’s army at present-day Fort Recovery was, in proportion to the number engaged, the most severe defeat ever suffered by the United States army. St. Clair led 1,000 men into battle, of whom 630 men, including 37 officers, were killed. As a result of the defeat, Mariettans improved several of their old defenses. As well, Judge Joseph Gilman and his son, Benjamin I. Gilman, built a new blockhouse on the bank of the Muskingum near the site of old Harmar. The fate of the blockhouse built earlier by Zeigler is unknown.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Clair%27s_Defeat
1791 November. At Fort Washington, St. Clair instructed Ensign John Tillinghast to “proceed to Marietta … with the detachment under your command, and there take post for the protection of the settlement… There is a block-house where Fort Harmar stood, but which will be too small for your party…”
1791 References to Fort Harmar after summer 1791 — and there were many — were likely general references to the area, such as the site where the fort had stood or, more generally, the lower west side of the Muskingum, which later came to be called Point Harmar and is still known as Harmar.
1794 August 20. General Anthony Wayne’s success at the Battle of Fallen Timbers wrested final control of Ohio country from the Indians. It led to the signing of the Treaty of Greenville of 1795, in which the Indians ceded most of present-day Ohio, opening most of Ohio to a rapid influx of immigrants.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fallen_Timbers
From: Richard Walker, Ph.D., the author of The Theft of Ohio: Treaty of Fort Harmar 1789. (MSS., 2009); Ohio History Central: An Online Encyclopedia of Ohio History; and Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. |