Harmar: Ohio's First Military Post

Across the Muskingum from Marietta sits a neighborhood called Harmar, named for the pentagonal log fort built here in seventeen eighty-five. It was the first United States military installation in the Northwest Territory, planted at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers to hold a vast unorganized frontier. Three years later, the Ohio Company of Associates landed just across the river to found Marietta, the first permanent American settlement in the territory.

The fort was gone within a generation, but the village of Harmar grew up on the western bank, incorporated separately in eighteen thirty-seven, and was eventually absorbed back into Marietta in eighteen ninety. Today the area is a walkable historic neighborhood, its streets laid out on the original plan, close enough to the original landing site that history here is almost geological.