Col. Crawford Burn Site Monument

In rural Wyandot County, a sandstone monument cut in the shape of a cannon marks one of the most harrowing episodes of the Revolutionary War frontier. In June seventeen eighty-two, Colonel William Crawford led a Virginia regiment into Ohio in retaliation for Native attacks, but the expedition went badly wrong. After a skirmish near the Sandusky River, the Americans retreated. Crawford was captured.

On June eleventh, seventeen eighty-two, Crawford was burned at the stake on the banks of Tymochtee Creek, in retribution for the Gnadenhutten Massacre earlier that year, in which American militiamen had murdered nearly a hundred peaceful Christian Delaware Indians. The monument, erected in eighteen seventy-seven and added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two, marks the site where the boundary between frontier war and atrocity collapsed entirely.