The grassy field beside a two-lane highway near Loudonville in north central Ohio is nothing special.
In the distance, an American flag fluttered outside an old, wooden barn. A disc golf basket stood solitary in the sun.
“We're at the Ashland-Knox County line on State Route 3. You can see the county signs there,” Ashland County Engineer Ed Meixner pointed out.
A few feet away, he bent down, brushing grass out of the way to reveal a flat marker about the size of a small dinner plate.
“Greenville Treaty Line 1795,” it reads.
This month marks 230 years since the United States and the Northwestern Confederacy — an alliance of indigenous nations — signed the Treaty of Greenville.
It split the state of Ohio in two, drawing a line from the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in the east to Fort Recovery on the Indiana border in the west. The deal gave the United States the legal title to the land below the line, and reserved everything north of it for the Native Americans who had long called the region home.
Now county engineers in north central Ohio, like Meixner, are re-surveying the historic line, placing plaques like this one to mark its path.
What is the Treaty of Greenville?
For years, indigenous nations like the Shawnee and Miami held off land-seeking American militias, famously defeating them in battles like St. Clair’s Defeat in 1791.
But a few years later, the tide turned.
George Ironstrack works with the Myaamia Center at Miami University and is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
“In 1794, [my people] were defeated in a couple of different battles by the U.S. Army and were left basically with their villages in ruins and their cornfields in flames,” he said. “They were living to some degree as refugees in their own homelands, struggling to survive.”
With about a dozen other indigenous nations, the Miami Tribe spent months negotiating the Treaty of Greenville with the United States.
“While we didn't want to cede our lands, we recognized that to achieve peace, this was going to be the exchange,” Ironstrack said.
“The Treaty of Greenville is one of 13 treaties that we signed with the U.S. that involve land in one way or another. And those treaties, beginning with the Treaty of Greenville, for our people is how the United States came to have legal title to the land. As some historians will say, we're all treaty people.”
Ultimately, the arrangement struck by the Treaty of Greenville was short-lived: It didn’t take long before the U.S. government forced indigenous people further west.
But even so, the deal left an impact that can still be felt today.
Lasting impacts of the treaty
Before the Treaty of Greenville, Ironstrack said indigenous leaders weren’t always present at negotiations that involved their homelands. But this time, Miami leaders were at the table.
“It wasn't other people ceding our lands on our behalf, but our community making the decision to cede our homelands,” he said. “So you have the beginning, then, of a government to government relationship between what ended up becoming the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the United States that endures to this day.”
"As some historians say, we're all treaty people. The United States comes to exist, in large part, through treaties."George Ironstrack
Knox County Engineer Cameron Keaton says, in many ways, the treaty line shaped Ohio’s current geography too.
The original surveyor marked the line in the late 1700s by planting wooden stakes and blazing trees.
“Then, once this [line] was established and it was laid out and people recognized it, people would, as they came about and divided up land, they would always reference back to that point,” Keaton said. “Even still today, if someone does a survey up against this line, they will probably reference that Greenville Treaty Line.”
Today, county and township lines, roadways, even fences bordering private property closely follow the treaty line.
“If you're awake and aware as you're driving around, you'll pass Treaty Line Road, so there are some subtle signs of this history,” Ironstrack said. “But mostly, I think it's fair to say it's forgotten in the area.”
Marking the Greenville Treaty line, he said, is one way to understand not just the state’s history, but how that history informs the present.
“The Treaty of Greenville is a really important treaty to both the U.S. and to our nation,” Ironstrack said. “To commemorate the way it divided the land — and the moment it created where maybe we could have lived like neighbors in perpetuity within our homelands — is an important thing to do.”
