Newcomerstown, Ohio

Long before Ohio was a state, the Tuscarawas River valley was home to a thriving Lenape community called Gekelmukpechunk, meaning the water that is always still. The Delaware leader Netawatwees, known to colonists as Newcomer, built a village here no later than the seventeen sixties. By seventeen seventy-one it counted more than one hundred dwellings, and by seventeen seventy-six more than seven hundred people called it home.

It was among the largest Lenape towns west of the Allegheny Mountains and a principal council seat of the Lenape. When European settlers arrived after the Revolutionary War, they kept the English nickname: Newcomerstown. The name on the map today is a quiet monument to the man who built a nation here before the United States existed.