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African-American history began in Piqua with the settlement of Arthur Davis in 1818 and expanded with the settlement of the freed Randolph slaves of Virginia in 1846. African-American religious heritage in Piqua began with the Cyrene African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1853 and the Second Baptist Church (Park Avenue) in 1857. Segregated education started in 1854 at the Cyrene Church and ended in 1885 at the Boone Street School. Several Piqua African-American men circumvented Ohio’s early ban against Civil War military service by joining the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments. Following the Civil War an African-American Co-operative Trade Association established Piqua’s first African-American retail store. Continued on/from other side)
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Following the American Revolution, the British Crown sought to retain possession of the Ohio Country by sending chief British Indian Agent Alexander McKee and others to establish trading posts with Native Americans and resist American settlement. In 1786, Colonel Benjamin Logan led an American force against the British posts and tribes. Warned of their approach, McKee and a band of Shawnee, took their possessions, including a large drove of hogs, and fled north from the Mackachack Villages near present-day Bellefontaine. Their route was the Black Swamp Trail, now Napoleon Road. An attempted crossing of the rain-swollen Ottawa River turned disastrous, resulting in the loss of possessions and most of the hogs. The hill upon which the party camped following the failed crossing, located one half mile east of here, became known as McKee’s Hill, and the portion of the Ottawa River east of Lima has since been known as Hog Creek.
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Frederick Rice was born on September 29, 1753, near Bethlehem, Northampton County, Pennsylvania and moved to Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania around 1766. During the American Revolution he served under George Washington at Valley Forge and fought in the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, in which American forces surprised and captured 1,000 Hessian mercenaries. He served for two more years as a spy working against Native American tribes in western Pennsylvania. After his service he married Catherine Lauffer, and they raised eleven children to adulthood. Rice chose this 320-acre site, transferred to him in a deed signed by President James Monroe on May 21, 1821, because it offered excellent springs. He assigned the west half to son Simon and the east half to son Barnhart in 1822. Ownership remained in the Rice family until acquired for the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station in 1891, renamed the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in 1965.
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Native Americans inhabited and used much of the land in the Ohio valley as hunting grounds. As American settlers pushed west, conflicts resulted and attempts at peaceful settlement failed. Under political pressure, President George Washington resolved to subdue Indian resistance to American expansion in the Ohio country and appointed General Arthur St. Clair to lead the expedition. St. Clair’s troops camped on the Wabash River (just east of the Ohio-Indiana state line) after an exhausting two-month trek. The ill-prepared soldiers were no match for the forces of Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware Indians who attacked them at dawn of November 4, 1791. By the day’s end, warriors led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket had killed or wounded nearly three-quarters of the American force-the worst-ever defeat of the U.S. Army by Native Americans in a single battle.
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Mariah Storts Allen was Ohio’s last surviving first generation daughter of a Revolutionary War soldier. She was born August 4, 1842 in Bearfield Township and died May 2, 1933 in New Lexington. Her father, John Jacob Storts, volunteered to fight for American independence at age 13 and camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Allen was a descendant of Ohio’s First Families and an Honorary Member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The DAR refers to first generation daughters as “Real Daughters.”
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A migration of Indians throughout Ohio began due to unstable conditions created by the American Revolution. The massacre of Christian Indians at the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten in 1782 and Colonel William Crawford’s expedition against Wyandot and Delaware towns along the Sandusky fueled insecurities. Delaware, including a small group of Mingo Indians, abandoned the village of Helltown, five miles southwest of this site, and settled Greentown as early as 1783. Greentown, situated on an elevation on the Black Fork beyond the clearing behind this site, was presumably named for British loyalist, Thomas Green. John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) had an amicable relationship with the Delaware, owned land throughout the Black Fork Valley, and was known to visit Greentown on his travels throughout Ohio. Other visitors to the village included the Shawnee Prophet; Munsee Delaware leader, Captain Pipe; and local preacher, James Copus.
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With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, England lost the American Revolution and ceded to its former colonies land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. By this time, pioneer settlers had reached the eastern bank of the Ohio River, but the Ohio Country, located west and north of the river, was still considered Indian Territory. The Indian tribes desperately defended their hold on this land. On August 20, 1794, United States forces led by Major General Anthony Wayne defeated an Indian alliance at the Battle of Fallen Timbers fought near modern-day Toledo. One year later, on August 3, 1795, the largest assemblage of northwestern Indian representatives at a peace settlement signed the Treaty of Greene Ville, which effectively ceded all land south of the Greene Ville Treaty line to the Americans. The Fort Laurens site was a reference point in the Treaty line. The Ohio Country was then rapidly settled, and in 1808, Tuscarawas County was organized.
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One of the most influential icons of American popular culture in the mid-20th century, Roy Rogers was born Leonard Franklin Sly on November 5, 1911 in Cincinnati. He moved to this farm at age 8 from Portsmouth and lived here with his family until the Great Depression. He went to California in 1930, working as a truck driver, fruit picker, and country musician before signing a movie contract with Republic Pictures in 1937. Immediately popular, the clean-cut singing cowboy appeared in more than 100 western films, often making six or more movies a year during the 1940s. With his nearly equally-famous horse Trigger and his wife and partner Dale Evans-“the Queen of the West”-he subsequently starred in more than 100 television episodes of the family-oriented Roy Rogers Show from 1951 to 1957. A perennial hero and “good guy,” Rogers personified the mythical American cowboy who always fought fairly and lived by a strong moral code. He died in California on July 6, 1998.
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