The manuscript collections of the New England Historic Genealogical Society contain two narrow hand-sewn books, titled Book of numbers of the city lots, drawn on the east bank of Muskingum, July 1, 1788 and the Draught of the several lots drawn for the proprietors of the Ohio Company. Both books record essentially the same information in neat flowing script: the name and residence of each of the one thousand would-be emigrants belonging to the Ohio Company of Associates. The majority of the subscribers intended to move to new territory in Ohio and leave New England permanently. They hailed from all over New England - from the cities of Boston, Providence, and Hartford, as well as from rural towns such as Durham, New Hampshire, Sanford, Maine, and Hebron, Connecticut. By July of 1788 many subscribers could already list their place of residence as Ohio.

The groundwork for westward migration out of New England — and the entire Eastern Seaboard — was laid when the Continental Congress of the United States passed the Northwest Ordinance in July of 1787. The Ordinance established the Northwest Territory, which included the land west of Pennsylvania between the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers — the area that later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. This land had been officially ceded to the United States as part of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and was first made available for settlement through the Northwest Ordinance. The Northwest Ordinance also established policies for the sale of land, formation of government, advancement of education, the preservation of civil liberties, and the exclusion of slavery. These policies set precedents for new settlement throughout the United States. Above all, the Northwest Ordinance encouraged and accelerated westward expansion.

In March of 1786, a group of New England Revolutionary War veterans banded together in Boston to form the Ohio Company of Associates. Under the leadership of Generals Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, the group sought to purchase promising lands along the Ohio River, in present-day southeastern Ohio. Those lands were unavailable for sale at that time, but the Company anticipated that Congress would permit sales in the near future. With this in mind, the Associates organized a joint-stock company, sold shares to one thousand subscribers, and pooled their continental certificates and military bounties. They vigorously lobbied Congress, describing themselves in one of their petitions as “the most robust and industrious people in America.” Pressure from the Ohio Company, as well as from other settlers and land speculators, prompted the Continental Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance the following year.

In October of 1787, three months after the Northwest Ordinance was passed, Congress allowed the Ohio Company to purchase 964,225 acres of land by using their continental certificates and military bounties. The land was purchased for about eight and a half cents per acre. Upon completion of this major transaction, the Ohio Company became the first group to purchase land and establish an organized settlement in the Northwest Territory. The land purchase also made the individual subscribers significant landholders, each owning far more than could be cultivated by a single family. There was plenty of acreage to resell at a profit, as well as ample land for settlement.

The Ohio Company had very specific ideas about the type of settlement they intended for this new territory. As noted in the 1881 History of Washington County, Ohio, the Associates intended “not only to form the first settlement [in the Northwest Territory] but to plant New England morals, law, and institutions upon this vast inland domain of the nation.” Like their forebears 150 years earlier, these New Englanders intended to establish a model community that would serve as an example to others. Manasseh Cutler, one of the leaders of the group, wrote that their new settlement would “serve as a wise model for the future settlement of all the federal lands. The opportunity to begin anew and to establish an orderly and judicious government in a new territory appealed to the members of the Ohio Company. Not only were they experiencing the “pull” of new lands and new opportunities, they also felt a “push” to leave Massachusetts and the other New England states. They felt threatened by the social dislocation of the post-Revolutionary period, which found expression in incidents like Shays’ Rebellion. Manasseh Cutler expressed his view about life in Massachusetts in a letter to one of his fellow Associates, asking the question, “Who would wish to live under a Government subject to such tumults and confusions?” For Cutler, and many others like him, an uncertain future in the Northwest Territory was preferable to remaining in New England. When Cutler sought recruits for the initial trip west, he received three times as many applicants as he needed and those not chosen “almost refused to take a denial.”

The advance party of Ohio Company men left from Danvers, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1787, and another group followed from Hartford, Connecticut, on January 1, 1788. This combined group of forty-eight men consisted of surveyors, boat builders, carpenters, and a blacksmith, as well as common laborers. Both parties encountered severe winter weather and snow depths of three feet, which forced them to abandon their wagons and construct sledges to transport their goods over the Allegheny Mountains. The two groups met up at the end of January and spent the next six weeks constructing a flotilla of flatboats to carry them down the Ohio River to the mouth of the Muskingum River, their final destination. In keeping with the spirit of their enterprise, they christened the largest of the flatboats the Mayflower.

On April 7, 1788, after a six-day river journey, the group reached the site of their future settlement near the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Wasting no time, the group began surveying the land and constructing a settlement, with log cabins and a stockade being the first priority. After a month devoted to communal efforts, individuals were granted permission to plant corn, and 130 acres were soon under cultivation. The settlers were encouraged by the promise of their new land, prompting one to write “This country, for fertility of soil and pleasantness of situation, not only exceeds my expectations, but exceeds any part of Europe or America I was ever in.” Even George Washington, writing from Mount Vernon in June of 1788, added his praises, “No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum.”

The new city, the first legal settlement in Ohio under the government of the United States, was initially named Adelphia, meaning brotherhood. But at the first company meeting in Ohio on July 2, 1788, they chose a different name — Marietta. The new name was a tribute to Marie Antoinette (or as the settlers referred to her, Marie Antonetta), “queen of the powerful and enlightened kingdom of France,” who had recently provided assistance during the American Revolution. Despite the French-influenced name, Marietta was founded very much as an enlightened New England town. Marietta was laid out in the New England pattern with a town common. Each settler received lots in town for a house and barn and lots out of town for a farm. The company employed a Boston minister, Daniel Story, the first ordained minister in the Northwest Territory, and a Congregational church was formed at once. By the time of the first harvest, women and children had arrived and a school and library were quickly established. Plans were soon underway for a state university. Marietta was the seat of government for the new Northwest Territory and its first governor, Arthur St. Clair, arrived to take up his duties in July of 1788. The townspeople celebrated the nation’s twelfth Independence Day, Fourth of July in 1788 with a rousing celebration. In true New England fashion, the settlers of Marietta persuaded the new governor to name December 25 not as Christmas but as Thanksgiving Day.

Naturally, as time passed, Marietta developed its own distinctive culture and the settlers also found, much to their chagrin, that some of the social tensions that had pushed them out of New England were recreated in Ohio. (The arrival of back-country settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia was a source of great dismay and incursions by local Indian tribes provided a more tangible threat.) But to hark back to the prose of the 1881 History of Washington County, Ohio, “Marietta was the first flower put forth in the west by a great plant firmly rooted and nurtured in New England soil.” The settlement of Marietta certainly represents the beginning of a great westward migration by New Englanders. Rufus Putnam and his Ohio Company of Associates were at the vanguard of that migration. Stewart H. Holbrook, author of Yankee Exodus, writes “It was this group more than any other that set the Yankees on the move into foreign parts.”

We see the effects of these moves every day here at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Today less than one third of our membership lives in New England and, in fact, California has the fourth highest number of members for any state. A good many of those intrepid people with New England roots continued moving across the continent until they could go no further. I suspect their forbears would be proud of their descendants’ “robust and industrious” character.

New England Historic Genealogical Society

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