Erie County: The Battle on the Lake and the Keystone Port

Erie County, Pennsylvania owns thirty-five miles of Lake Erie shoreline, the only Great Lakes frontage in the state. That narrow strip of lakefront has, at various points in American history, been a military theater, a commercial gateway, and a strategic chokepoint that shaped the outcome of a war.

On September tenth, eighteen thirteen, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry led a small American fleet out of Presque Isle Bay, across the western end of Lake Erie, and into an engagement with a British squadron that held control of the lake. The Battle of Lake Erie lasted about three hours. Perry's flagship, the Lawrence, was shot to pieces around him. He transferred his command flag to another vessel, the Niagara, broke through the British line, and won a complete victory. His dispatch to General William Harrison, We have met the enemy and they are ours, became one of the most famous sentences in American military history. The victory gave the United States control of Lake Erie, secured the Northwest Territory, and made Perry a national hero at the age of twenty-eight.

The city of Erie grew around Presque Isle Bay, which offered one of the few natural harbors on the American side of Lake Erie. Through the nineteenth century it became a manufacturing and shipping center: locomotives, boilers, steam engines, and later plastics and insurance. Hammermill Paper, General Electric, and Lord Corporation all built major operations here.

Deindustrialization hit Erie hard after the nineteen seventies as manufacturing contracted across the Great Lakes region. The city has spent decades working to reinvent its economy around healthcare, education, and tourism centered on Presque Isle State Park, the sand-spit peninsula that Perry sailed out from in eighteen thirteen, which draws millions of visitors a year to its beaches, birding sites, and clear lake water.