Ohio historical timeline

Ohio's history is the American sequence in miniature -- native civilisation, imperial contest, frontier, canal, railroad, factory, decline and reinvention -- and it left more standing than most states: the mounds are still on the ground, the canal towpaths are national park trails, the front porches of two presidents are museums, and the Wright brothers' bicycle shop is a national park.

Chronology

1. 300 BC – AD 600 The Adena build the Great Serpent Mound, 1,348 feet long, dated by radiocarbon to 300 BC, and the Hopewell who follow them raise the geometric earthworks of the Scioto and Licking valleys between AD 1 and 400 -- the largest earthen enclosures in the world at Newark, aligned to the 18.6-year cycle of the moon -- before vanishing from the valley about 600; southern Ohio alone holds 10,000 burial mounds.
2. 1669 La Salle explores north-eastern Ohio for New France; Britain takes the Ohio Country in the 1763 treaty and closes it to settlers, then annexes it to Quebec in 1774; the new United States wins it in 1783 and organises it under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which bans slavery; the Ohio Company founds the first permanent American settlement in the territory at the mouth of the Muskingum River on 7 April 1788.
3. 1794 Anthony Wayne breaks the Western Confederacy at Fallen Timbers on the Maumee River, and the Treaty of Greenville of 1795 cedes most of Ohio; on 1 March 1803 Ohio becomes the 17th state, the first from the territory and the first free state admitted after independence, with Chillicothe its capital until Columbus is laid out in 1812 and takes over in 1816.
4. 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry defeats the Royal Navy at the Battle of Lake Erie off Put-in-Bay on 10 September; the Ohio and Erie Canal, begun on 4 July 1825, joins Akron to Cleveland in 1827 and the Ohio River in 1832, and the National Road reaches Columbus in 1834; the Toledo War of 1835 with Michigan is fought without a death.
5. 1850 Ohio is the northern bank of the "River Jordan" of the Underground Railroad, with Levi Coffin at Cincinnati, Oberlin's college town rescuing fugitives in 1858 and boats from Sandusky to Canada; the first Ohio State Fair opens at Cincinnati in 1850; Cleveland is the third-largest iron and steel producer by 1853, and Rockefeller founds Standard Oil there.
6. 1869 Cincinnati's Red Stockings become baseball's first professional team; the Roebling bridge, the longest suspension span in the world when it opened in 1867, joins the Queen City to Kentucky; Akron's rubber companies begin with Goodrich in 1869 and the Maumee River port's glassmakers arrive in the 1880s; by 1892 Ohio is the second steel state, and seven Ohioans reach the White House between Ulysses Grant and Warren Harding.
7. 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright, Dayton bicycle-makers, fly at Kitty Hawk on 17 December and perfect the aeroplane at Huffman Prairie in 1904–05; the Great Flood of March 1913 kills at least 428 Ohioans, the state's worst disaster; the National Football League is founded at Canton on 17 September 1920; Cleveland is the fifth-largest city in the nation with 796,841 people and 30 per cent foreign-born.
8. 1952 Alan Freed stages the first rock and roll concert in Cleveland; John Glenn orbits the earth in 1962 and Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta walks on the Moon in 1969; the Cuyahoga River burns on 22 June 1969 and helps create the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Guard kills four students at Kent State on 4 May 1970; the Blizzard of January 1978 kills 51.
9. 1974 Cuyahoga Valley is protected and becomes a national park in 2000; the steel and rubber jobs go -- 300,000 manufacturing jobs lost between 1990 and 2019, a million others gained -- and Youngstown becomes the emblem of the Rust Belt; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opens in 1995, the year the Dayton Agreement ends the Bosnian war at Wright-Patterson; the 2003 blackout starts at an Ohio power plant.
10. 2023 UNESCO inscribes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks as the country's 25th World Heritage Site on 19 September; the golf course leaves the Newark Octagon on 1 January 2025; the buckeye becomes the official state candy; Ohio is again the third manufacturing state and the seventh economy.

What survived, and how

The mounds survived because they were too big to plough entirely and, at Serpent Mound, because the land was bought for preservation in 1886; the Octagon survived as a golf course. The canal survived as a towpath because the national park took it in. The Wright Cycle Company survived because a Dayton preservationist spent decades buying the buildings. The Rust Belt cities survived on hospitals, universities and insurance: the Cleveland Clinic records sixteen million patient visits a year. What did not survive was the industry itself, and the Cuyahoga's fish are back in its place.