Category:Exploration To Statehood

European exploration of the area that is now Ohio began in the seventeenth century. The first explorers were French, but British ones soon followed their earlier counterparts. By the mid eighteenth century, French and British traders arrived in the region, trading for furs with the local American Indian populace. Tensions quickly erupted between the French and the British, resulting in the French and Indian War. The British won this war, driving the French from the Ohio Country and the rest of North America.

British settlers soon moved into the Ohio Country, despite British attempts to prevent this from occurring. Following Great Britain's defeat in the American Revolution, the newly independent American states controlled what is now Ohio. The Confederation Congress and, then, the United States government arranged for the surveying and sale of land in what is now Ohio. Tensions between whites and American Indians quickly erupted as more and more whites entered the region. Relatively quickly, the federal government, through warfare and treaties, secured the land for the whites. During the first years of the nineteenth century, a sufficient number of whites lived in what is now Ohio for the region to become a state.

To learn more about this pivotal era in Ohio's history, please browse these entries at your leisure.