Ohio's name means good river, and its mound builders traded across a continent
Long before Ohio produced seven presidents and the Wright brothers' first plane, its valley held villagers who raised the Great Serpent Mound and traders whose network reached across a third of North America. The state still takes its name from a Seneca word for the river on its southern edge.
Spear points of the Folsom and Clovis styles show nomadic hunters in the Ohio Valley as early as 13,000 BC. By around 1,000 to 800 BC the Adena culture had settled into semi-permanent villages, supported by domesticated sunflowers and squash, and left behind the serpent-shaped earthwork in Adams County. Around 100 BC the Adena gave way to the Hopewell tradition, whose large, carefully engineered mounds survive at Marietta, Newark and Circleville. The Hopewell vanished from the valley about 600 AD.
Later centuries brought upheaval. After the Beaver Wars of the mid-1600s, the Iroquois Confederation claimed the region as trapping ground, and Algonquian peoples, many of them mixed communities rebuilt after epidemics and conflict, gradually repopulated it. France built fur-trading posts, then lost the territory to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Britain's attempt to keep colonists west of the Appalachians helped fuel the American Revolution, and in 1783 the new United States received the land.
Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, slavery was barred from the territory. Revolutionary War veterans in the Ohio Company of Associates founded Marietta as the first settlement, and in 1803 Ohio became a state, the first admitted under that ordinance and the first post-colonial free state. Native nations were steadily pushed out, and by 1842 the last remaining communities had been expelled.
The landscape splits between glaciated plains over most of the state, rugged hills in the southeastern Allegheny Plateau and a Lake Erie shoreline in the north. Ohio covers 44,825 square miles and holds nearly 11.9 million people, with Columbus as capital and largest city. Once the core of American industry, it still ranks third for manufacturing and second for car production, and its nickname, the Buckeye State, comes from a native tree.
Source: Ohio
