History of Ohio

The history of Ohio includes many thousands of years of human activity. What is now Ohio was probably first settled by Paleo-Indian people, who lived in the area as early as 13,000 B.C.E. A fossil dated between 11,727 and 11,424 B.C.E. indicates they hunted large game including Jefferson's ground sloth using stone tools. Later ancestors of Native Americans were known as the Archaic peoples. Sophisticated successive cultures of precolonial peoples indigenous peoples, such as the Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian, built monumental earthworks as part of their religious and political expression: mounds and walled enclosures, some of which have survived to the present.

While by the mid-18th century, Europeans engaged historic Native American tribes in present-day Ohio in the fur trade, European-American settlement in the Ohio territory did not expand until after the American Revolutionary War. The United States Congress prohibited slavery in the Ohio Territory. Ohio's population increased rapidly, chiefly by migrants from the Northern Tier of New England and New York. Southerners settled along the southern part of the territory, as they traveled mostly by the Ohio River. After Ohio became a state, citizens still prohibited slavery and some supported the Underground Railroad, as well as establishing colleges that admitted blacks and women. Its citizens' support of public education and political action also reflected New England/Northern Tier values. The state supported the Union in the American Civil War, and more of its people volunteered as soldiers per capita than any other state.

After the Civil War, Ohio became one of the major industrial states in the northern tier, connected to the Great Lakes area, from where it received raw commodities, and able to transport its products of manufacturing and farming to New York and the East Coast via railroads. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its growing industries attracted thousands of new people for the expanding number of jobs, both blacks from the South, in the Great Migration, and immigrants from Europe. As a result, the cultures of its major cities and later suburbs became much more diverse with the traditions, cultures, foods and music of the new arrivals. Its industries were integral to US power during and after World War II. Economic restructuring in steel and other manufacturing cost the state many jobs in the later 20th century as heavy industry declined. New economic models have led to different kinds of development in the late 20th and 21st centuries.