Fort Harmar: Gateway to the Northwest Territory

Where the Muskingum River meets the Ohio, near what is now Marietta, stood the first United States military post in what would become the Northwest Territory. Fort Harmar was built in seventeen eighty-five under Major John Doughty, a pentagonal log structure designed to guard the confluence and signal American intent to settle the lands north of the Ohio.

The fort's presence was the decisive factor in the founding of Marietta in seventeen eighty-eight, the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. When the flatboat carrying the Ohio Company's settlers overshot the mouth of the Muskingum on a rainy April morning, it was the soldiers from Fort Harmar who hauled the boat back upstream. That small act of assistance launched what would become the state of Ohio.

The fort's most consequential moment came on January ninth, seventeen eighty-nine, when Governor Arthur St. Clair hosted a treaty conference here. Representatives of the Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, and Sauk nations arrived hoping to establish a recognized reservation north of the Ohio and west of the Muskingum. What they received was the Treaty of Fort Harmar, which largely confirmed the earlier, disputed Treaty of Fort Stanwix and forced additional land cessions. Most tribal leaders had not authorized the representatives who signed, and the treaty collapsed almost immediately. Two years later, St. Clair suffered the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Army by Native Americans, losing nine hundred men to a Miami-led confederacy in the forests of what is now Indiana.

Fort Harmar itself was abandoned in seventeen ninety and torn down the following year, its mission completed or failed depending on your perspective. The site is now absorbed into modern Marietta, but the treaty signed here set in motion the chain of events that opened the Ohio frontier.