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Charles Glaab: You know, really the central theme of Toledo history from say, 1800 down to the Civil War is the the development of an urban frontier, the development of, or the effort to develop an urban valley.

There are speculators, town promoters here before, there any farmers or anybody else.

The, the town is kind of the nucleus of, the development of the whole region.

So you can't really think of, Toledo growing as a result of the development of an area to the it' a planned kind of development.

And I think we somewhat ignore this notion of the urban frontier.

We think of, the place in its early years as kind of a raw, primitive settlement and a few, trappers and Indians about.

But but actually the first people on the scene were were very urbane, well-to-do, land speculators.

Fred Folger: Much of the early development in Ohio was taking place either along Lake Erie in the Connecticut Western Reserve area or down along the Ohio River, or again up some of the other rivers flowing in to either of these bodies of water.

Chillicoth was the early capital of Ohio, and that really is considered to be in southern Ohio today.

Cincinnati was, of course, established by this time.

Marietta, our first community at the mouth of the Muskingum River along the Ohi River and again up on Lake Erie.

You had Cleveland now in northwest Ohio.

There was no settlement whatsoever.

We had the barrier there of the notorious and infamous Black Swamp.

And not only did we have the Black Swamp, which acted as a barrier to early settlement in this part of the state, at the time of the Treaty of Greenville, which followed the Battle of Fallen Timbers fought here along the Miami River, the Indians were allowed to retain a portion of what is today Ohio, and it seems at that portion they were permitted to retain happened to be largely northwest Ohio.

And consequently, in our part of the state, there was very little except the swamps, the insects, and, of course, scattered Indian villages.

Tana Porter: After the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Treaty of Greenville had, deeded much of the land in northwestern Ohio to the Indians, keeping, I believe there were 16 military reserves where soldiers could stay and where people could go in.

So the American people who settled here came into the, 12 mile square reserve for the most part.

So after the War of 1812, when the British were finally gone, and also Tecumseh died at the end, toward the end of the battles in northwestern Ohio during the War of 1812.

And this sort of ended the Indians conspiracy against the settlers.

And so it was safer to be here.

And, the government decided they didn't really need the fort anymore.

They didn't need the reserve, and they didn't really need Fort Megs anymore.

So they arranged for it to be sold to the public.

And the first land sale was, in the spring of 1817 I believe Ted Ligibel: This is a time you have to imagine when, the largest single, what they called internal improvement is going to be built through this part of the country, Toledo and much of the of the we were known as the West.

Much of the area west of here was built and settled by land speculators who came here to make money.

And when they found out that there was a canal going through here, there were years that were just wild with development.

Land prices soared.

People did make a lot of money.

In those early days, the Cincinnati Martin Bohm came up from his company.

The Port Lions Company came up from Cincinnati.

Jesup Scott was an early land speculator.

Charles Glaab: I think the the most notable figure in the, the early history of, of Toledo is probably Jesup Scott.

He's well enough known.

He's given his name to a high school.

And, is known as the founder of the University of Toledo Scott Park campus.

But I don't think his real role i the city is quite appreciated.

As a representative of this, kind of speculative, activity.

Scott clearly was one of the, the leading promoters.

Tana Porter: In 1832, Jesup Scott was living in the area here in counties in a town named Florence.

And he came to Toledo to look at the land here because he had along, felt that there would be an important city that would grow up at the center place here.

And he was interested in being involved in that.

So he came to take a look at the land, and he purchased 70 acres, which is all he could afford.

You'd like to have bought more, but he didn't have enough money.

And the 70 acres included the sites of the main library and the courthouse.

And I think the south corner, much of th the best part of the downtown.

So he went back an told his wife what he had done, and he said, it won't be worth $20,000 in 20 years.

And she said, sure, and laughed.

And so he began immediately to try to sell the land to other people and make a profit and get back some of his investment.

One of the people that he tried to sell the land to was his brother, and he took his brother on a tour of the property to try to convince him that this really was going to be the center of the developing city.

And as they're jumping from bog to bog in the swamp and it was all grown up, I suppose the grass was tall and the trees and the brush, and it's very marshy and wet.

They were in the vicinity of the courthouse, one which of course wasn't there.

Then, when they suddenly realized they didn't know how they had gotten there, or which way to go to get out or no paths or roads or anything to the swamp.

And so as they're standing there wondering, now what do we do?

Steamer went by on the river about getting ready to dock, and it boats were so.

And they knew the which direction the river was.

So they were able to walk out of the swamp and get on to higher ground and to safety, so that the brother did not buy the property.

But it was worth $20,000 in 20 years.

Ted Ligibel: To sprang up all along, the river banks, most of them on paper, what they call paper towns.

They were actually platted, surveyed, laid out on paper.

But they never really became realities.

Austerlitz.

Marengo, Lucas City, Oregon.

Towns like that that really never materialized.

Fred Folger: Now, meanwhile, Maumee City, Perrysburg, they were actually ports for lake trade.

The waterfronts of both of these communities actually had docks, warehouses and shipyards.

James Walcott, who built the Walcott House which is now a museum in Miami.

He had a shipyard and he had steamboats in regular operation on the river and the lake.

However, there was one thing that would eventually ensure succes for the downriver communities, and that is the fact that about two miles downriver from the Miami Perrysburg Bridge, there is a solid limestone ledge which extends right across the riverbed.

And as your lake vessels began to be designed and built larger, requiring a deeper draft, they began to encounter problems during late summer or in the fall, when the river level would normally drop, and they could not reach those communities.

Charles Glaab: The town efforts are tied consistently to transportation efforts.

Bv Stickney a figure of considerable, local fame or notoriety because of his part in the, the famous border wars and, the the way he named his sons one, two, three, and so on, a rather colorful figure.

But, Stickney was one of these, promoters, who saw the the possibility of canals and if canals could be tied into Lake Erie and there was going to b a commercial center somewhere.

Tana Porter: He had don an Indian agent in Fort Wayne, and he had studied canals and was very much interested in the Erie Canal in New York State.

And he knew that the possibility was was very good that there could be a canal built rather easil from the Miami River to connect with the Wabash River an even to go south to Cincinnati.

And he began looking at the land and studying it, and he decided that Toledo would be the, spot.

It wasn't, of course, Toledo then, but he decided that the cana should start here, to go inland.

Charles Glaab: So he enlisted the support of all kinds of people.

There's some, revealing letter from, DeWitt Clinton to Stickney, not to the effect that, your canal programs in, in Indiana, have shown me the wa to get out of the Great Lakes.

I found the way into the Great Lakes.

You showed me the way to to get out.

Fred Folger And this is an important point when we're talking about the canals, because many of our most influential and successful early pioneer here in Toledo were New Yorkers.

And the fact of the matter is that they had seen the success of the Erie Canal in New York State, and they wanted to get in on the ground floor of the development here on the west end of Lake Erie, because they knew what potentia there would be for the future.

And so our first mayo was John Borden, a New Yorker, Edward Bissell, a New Yorker who was very instrumental in laying out this town of Vistula.

Our first millionaire, Valentine Ketcham, was a New Yorker as well.

Tana Porter: Stickney had purchased land in the Port Lawrence, planning.

And then he had, of course, gotten tired of Port Lawrence and inactivity and decided tha he could do better on his own.

And he owned a large farm jus to the north of Port Lawrence.

So he started his own town called Vistula, Vistula.

Fred Folger: And Port Lawrence.

Still, we're not what you'd call great financial successes.

Both of these villages failed to attract a great deal of commerce from the lake.

The early leaders of these communities were rather downhearted to see many of the vessels from Lake Erie go right on pass, heading upriver from Perrysburg and even the mail delivery to Port Lawrence was rather spott because the regular mail route was from Army City, right along what is now Detroit Avenue to Detroit on a regular basis, and they would drop the mail for Port Lawrence off in this little village of Tremaine Ville, which was where Detroit Avenue crossed the Ottawa River.

And then once a week, they'd they bring the mail in to Port Lawrence along what is now Cherry Street, while the two communities realized that if they were going to survive, they'd better forget their competitive spirit and their rivalry and they'd better join together.

Tana Porter: And in the fall of 1833, the citizens of both towns met in a public meeting, and they agreed that the best thin would be to merge into one town, and neither town was willin to accept the other towns name.

So they had to think of a completely new name for the new town and, at least four theories as to who suggested that the town should be called Toledo.

I think it's it's not, there's no doub that it was from Toledo, Spain, but the question of who suggested it and why, I don't think can ever be answered.

Charles Glaab: My notion is that all the stories are wrong.

You know, all the accepted stories.

And there is one account that says when they were, planning the consolidation of Port Lawrence and Vistula, somebody said, why not name the place Toledo and, oh, natural enough?

Because these kind of promotional sites were named after great cities.

You have all kinds of New Madrid's or I don't know how many New Madrid's, but there is a New Madrid or a New Madrid, as it's called in Missouri.

Ball backs, Palmeiras.

Rome's any number of, you know, ancient and world cities were picked as names.

Toledo was one of the successful ones.

Fred Folger: And the most logical point here is the fact that Washington Irving was the most widely read writer in the United States in that time period, and he had published a few years before his tales of the Alhambra about his visit to Spain.

And, he had been researching the life of Christopher Columbus over in the Spanish archives.

And in this book, of course, there is mention of the very historic and old city of Toledo.

Well, these early pioneers, undoubtedly searching for some unique name, happened upon that, and the name was suggested and that is what we became, Toledo.

Tana Porter When the actual merger occurred, is another thing that I have not really settled satisfactorily for myself.

As late as 1835 the proprietors of the two towns who are still disposing of their interests and dividing up their land, and still referring to the towns as Port Lawrence and the store.

Fred Folger: There is a beautiful old map over in the library's local history collection, which shows a map of Ohio placing Toledo, you might say in Michigan.

And then it says right on at Port Lawrence or Toledo.

In other words, the cartographer isn't quite sure what we want to be called at this point.

And of course, it is a certainty.

By 1835, because the boundary dispute is called the Toledo War.

Ted Ligibel: The infamous Toledo War, which really, really wasn't, a war, per se.

I don't know whether there was certainly any battles, even there were some fisticuffs, I suppose, but it all arose over the discrepancy between the, the two lines that were drawn, the Harris line and the Fulton Line being drawn, basically from the lower part of Lake Michigan, across, to Lake Erie.

And one of the lines, the northern line, had Toledo in Ohio, but the southern line, which basically ran across and ran through about where Southwick Shopping Center i today, had Toledo in Michigan.

So there was a tremendous, rivalry there, particularly when the canals are being talked about.

The terminus, the northern terminus of this great Miami and Erie Canal was to be at Manhattan.

Which or Toledo, which at that time would have been in Michigan.

Tana Porter: The war actually started with the Northwest Ordinance and 1787, the Northwest Ordinance was the law that that governs the formation of states and it set the boundaries in it.

It set out the restrictions and everything was very carefully provide for in the Northwest Ordinance.

However, when they formed the state of Ohio, they departed from the Northwest Ordinance in two ways.

They did not take in Michigan initially, as the ordinance stated they should.

Michigan became a territor separate from the state of Ohio, and they went with the ordinance line.

But they decided themselves that Congress really meant to include the mouth of the Miami River in Ohio.

They just hadn't had the advantage of knowing for sure where that boundary line would be.

Fred Folger: I might add that in a sense, Ohio did have a claim which could be made because in the early determination of th northern boundary line of Ohio, the boundary line was to be drawn from the southern point of Lake Michigan, due east to Lake Erie, as they had anticipated at that early time, that would have placed the entire mouth of the Miami River within the bounds of Ohio.

But they were using faulty maps, and as they later realized, Lake Michigan extended farther south than they really knew it to be at that time.

And as it was they extended the boundary line according to that early description.

And that placed Port Lawrence, or, of course, then Toledo in the Michigan Territory.

Tana Porter: So from 1803 until 1835, Michigan assumed that they owned the Toledo are and jurisdiction was Michigan.

And when Port Lawrence, the second platted, and Port Lawrence was made in 1832, it was entered as a subdivisio or a plan, or however they did.

It was registered, I guess, in Monroe County, Michigan, because Michigan was was assuming, jurisdiction in the Toledo area and Michigan had no taxes, and Ohio did.

So people thought that was fine.

Fred Folger: Until it was announced that the Ohio legislature was going to be extending the Wabash and Erie Canal projec from Indiana to the Miami River.

Now, that caused great alarm among these early pioneers here in the Toledo area, because they realized the state of Ohio was certainly not going to construct the canal at their expense and have that canal end in Michigan to benefit a Michigan community.

Tana Porter: And Stickney had quite a lot at stake.

So according to Stickney himself, he persuaded the Michigan legislature to pass the Pension Penalties Act, which said tha if any Ohio had asserted itself over the territory, and Michigan then responded and said anyone who sympathizes with Ohio, who participates in an Ohio election, who Aids Ohio militia does anything like that can be arrested, and they'll do time at hard labor and and, Stickney had surmised that if Michigan did this, Ohio would then retaliate, bring out the militia, and they would force the issue.

Ted Ligibel: It worked.

Was Governor Lucas that was the governor of Ohio at the time, actually called up a militia, reportedly of 10,000 men, to make sure that the Michiganders did not come and, try to thwart the law.

Fred Folger There were attempts, of course, to rerun the boundary line for Ohio.

And Governo Lucas escorted the line runners up from Columbus.

And the interesting thing is, much of the Ohio Volunteer Force seemed to always stay at Perrysburg at this time.

They would make a lot of noise.

There'd be a lot of, you might say, verbal saber rattlin between Ohio and Michigan, but, they would always use the Miami River as a good barrier.

Tana Porter: The, Michigan militia would net down into Toledo and pick up people who had participated in elections and who were, sympathetic to Ohio.

And then the Ohio militia was in town.

And, it never came to actual warfare.

It was mostly kidnaping prominent citizens.

Fred Folger: This brought the only casualty of the so-called Toledo War, when a deputy sheriff from Monroe was attempting to arrest of Benjamin F Stickney, who was one of the rabbl rousers in the boundary dispute.

His son, two Stickney, pulle a knife and stabbed the deputy.

Fortunately it was not a fatal wound to then beat it across the Miami River and to the safety of Columbus and Governor Lucas.

But the Michigan authorities, they took all of Benjamin F up to, the Monroe County Jail to cool his heels.

And according to one account, he was quite cantankerous along the way attempting to fall off the horse until they tied his ankles together beneath the animal and suggests that if he tried to fall off again, he would have to continue the ride in whatever position he happened to end up in.

Well, of course, governor Mason demanded the extradition of two Stickney to Michigan to stand trial for the assault on the Michigan deputy, and Governor Lucas responded, of course.

How could this be when this alleged attack took place in Ohio?

You see?

So we're right back at square one.

Tana Porter: The Congress was supposedly making a decision, but nothing was coming very quickly.

So, Governor Lucas had had been in contact with President Jackson, and he had agreed not to engage in any more hostilities because there would be a decision coming.

And so he sent a militia home and everything was to become while they waited for the decision.

But they had formed Lucas County in, June, I believe, of 1835.

And as part of the, circumstances of erecting a county, you had to hold common pleas court.

Then the county would look the official and they had directed that Common Pleas Court be opened on the morning of September 7th, 1835, in Toledo, in order to, assert themselves and and secure the position as a new county governor.

Fred Folger: Luca did not wish to have bloodshed because he knew that governor Mason was vowing that there would be no court session.

On behalf of Lucas County, Ohio, held in Toledo.

And so what Governor Luca did was a rather clever stroke.

He ordered that the newly appointed officials for the county hold their legally required meeting in Toledo, but do so in the very, very early hours of that day.

And so the officials then rode in on horseback from Miami, leaving that area probably a little ahead of midnight.

And then or it's estimated perhaps they arrived here in Toledo about 2 a.m. while they held a brief meeting in the schoolhouse in Toledo.

And, the official sat behind the teacher's desk, and they appointed doctor Horacio Konate of Miami as the clerk.

And he quickly wrot down the minutes of the meeting, which I guess lasted for 15 minutes.

And they signed the minutes.

And he tucked the minutes in the band of his enormous top hat which was in style at that time.

And they adjourned.

That was it.

But they had complied with the requirement of the law which had created the county.

They had held the meeting on the soil and in the territory of the new Lucas County.

Then they realized we have n witnesses other than ourselves to the fact that we have been in Toledo to hold this meeting.

So they went from their adjournment over to a nearby tavern, and there they signed the register in the tavern.

And they also celebrated a bi the creation of the new county.

And they rushed in the door and hollered that the Michigan Lions were coming while they all beat it for their horses as fast as possible.

And in this mad dash to get out of Toledo.

These are our early officials of the county.

Please note, and they are quickly retreatin back all the way to Perrysburg to get out of the disputed strip, because they don't want any trouble with the Michigan authorities.

But, in this mad dash to retreat, Doctor Konate's hat was knocked off.

And the precious document with the minutes they happened that happened to be lost.

And so some of them had t go back and retrace their steps until they found the ha and the minutes of the meeting.

And so all was saved.

Tana Porter: But actually, there were no Michigan militia in the area at all.

They were camped, in Monroe, I guess, and they were planning to be here in the morning s that they could stop the court.

So they rode into town first thing in the morning, and they were really disappointed that they didn't find any Ohio soldiers around as they had planned on Michigan.

Man.

So we're going to have a figh today.

This is going to be fun.

And there were no soldiers here, you know, big disappointment.

They gave a warning and nobody came.

So they hung around for about three days drinking and plundering people's gardens and carousing.

And then they went home.

Fred Folger: Congress actually brought an end to the whole affair.

In a sense, it was almost outright political bribery.

The Michigan authorities were told tha if you wish to become a state, you are going to have to forfeit the Toledo Strip as a consolation prize, so to speak.

Michigan was awarded the Uppe Peninsula, by the Congress.

And, so that's how it ended.

Tana Porter: By 1836, they had decided they needed a government up here.

So they petitioned them to have a city governmen and be incorporated as a city.

So, of course, the Ohio legislature passed the act.

Well, the governor signed the act on January 7th, 1837.

And until the old City of.

Government was.

Announcer: The presentation of Toledo stories is made possible in part by KeyBank, celebrating the strength of our region's history and supporting the promise of its future.

KeyBank achieve anything.

And by the generous financial support of viewers like you.

Thank you.