The Toledo War, Statehood, a Bloodless Border, and a Strip of Land

In the spring of eighteen thirty-five, the future state of Michigan and the state of Ohio came as close to actual war as two American jurisdictions have ever come without anyone dying. The cause was a strip of land roughly five to eight miles wide and about forty-seven miles long running along their common border, anchored at its western end by the mouth of the Maumee River, a settlement called Toledo. The dispute went back to a surveying error.

When Ohio entered the Union in eighteen three, its northern boundary was drawn with a line that conflicted with the boundary Congress had promised Michigan when it was organized as a territory. Toledo sat in the contested zone. Both states claimed it.

Both sent militias to enforce the claim. Ohio's Governor Robert Lucas and Michigan's twenty-three-year-old acting governor Stevens T. Mason, called Boy Governor by the press, each passed laws making it a crime to cooperate with the other state's authorities inside the disputed strip.

Shots were very nearly fired on at least two occasions. In the end, the most dramatic casualty of the Toledo War was a Michigan man who was stabbed in the leg with a jackknife by an Ohio partisan. He recovered.

A Michigan militia officer sent to arrest Ohio surveyors found himself arrested by Ohio sheriffs instead. Courts on both sides issued competing rulings. Congress finally intervened.

The settlement was lopsided. Michigan relinquished its claim to the Toledo strip in exchange for most of the Upper Peninsula, land that Michigan partisans at the time considered a worthless frozen wilderness. Within two decades, prospectors discovered copper and iron deposits in that wilderness on a scale that would make the Upper Peninsula one of the richest mineral regions in American history.

Michigan entered the Union on January twenty-sixth, eighteen thirty-seven, the twenty-sixth state. Ohio kept Toledo. Michigan got the better deal.