Geography of Ohio and the United States
The Colonization of the Cities of Ohio
Thomas Humphrey
Overview
In both of the last two chapters, we saw how geography shaped people’s history, their actions, and continues to shape our community. In this chapter, please remember that most European colonists moved to the Ohio region to find animals for fur, before the Revolution, and to farm land, after 1800. Both groups needed to transport their goods to markets, and water was the easiest, fastest method of transportation. Use the following map to describe the attributes that you think attracted European colonists to regions that became cities such as Marietta (founded in 1788) Cincinnati (1788), and Cleveland (1796). This website also includes several other nineteenth-century maps of Ohio. If you’re having trouble figuring out why these cities became important, please also look at Mitchell’s 1880 map of Cincinnati to see how people organized themselves into towns and communities around a region’s natural resources.
Reading
https://mapgeeks.org/ohio/#Careys_1814_State_Map_of_Ohio
Cayton, “Land, Power, and Reputation,” http://www.jstor.com/stable/2938021.
Map of Cincinnati: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4084c.ct001308/
Lab Questions
- What geographic physical features drew European colonists?
- How did geographic features shape community development in Cincinnati?
- Andrew Cayton writes about the colonization of Cincinnati in the reading. How did people’s cultural background shape the kinds of communities they built on the banks of the Ohio River?
- Specifically, how did the lives of Arthur St. Clair and Winthrop Sargent shape the kind of city Cincinnati became?
- Bonus: where did the name “Cincinnati” come from?
- Bonus: for people who can connect Marietta, Ohio, to Lin-Manuel Miranda!
