Fort Meigs

At a glance

Overview

Fort Meigs was a United States Army post built from February 1813 on the bluff above the foot of the Maumee River rapids, where Perrysburg now stands, after the loss of Detroit and the defeat at Frenchtown left northwest Ohio open to invasion. Engineer Captain Eleazer Wood laid out a stockade of about 10 acres with seven blockhouses, and General William Henry Harrison named it for Ohio Governor Return J. Meigs Jr. British troops under Henry Procter and a Native confederacy led by Tecumseh besieged it twice in 1813, from late April to May 9 and again in late July, and failed both times, though the May 5 relief attempt known as Dudley's Defeat cost the Kentucky militia hundreds of men killed and captured. The post was cut down to a small supply stockade after Perry's victory on Lake Erie, the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed there in 1817, and the grounds went back to farmland. Ohio bought the site in 1907 and raised an 82-foot granite obelisk in 1908; the Ohio Historical Society reconstructed the fort in the late 1960s and opened it in 1974, and it is now a National Historic Landmark run by the Ohio History Connection.

The name

Harrison named the fort for Return Jonathan Meigs Jr., governor of Ohio, who supplied his army with militia and provisions for a line of forts across Ohio and Indiana Territory. (source)

Native American history

No pre-contact (Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland or Late Prehistoric) site is recorded in published sources for the fort grounds themselves. The historic record is thick. James Averill's 1886 history says the Wyandot called the Maumee 'Cagh-a-ren-du-te' (Standing Rock river), the Shawnee called it the Ottawa river, and Ottawa towns stood on the rapids above Fort Meigs and along Maumee Bay as late as 1812. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville reserved a tract for the United States centered on Fort Miamis at the foot of the rapids, and Fort Meigs was later built almost at the center of that Twelve Mile Square Reservation. In 1813 about 1,200 Wyandot, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe warriors under Tecumseh and the Wyandot leader Roundhead joined the British siege. On September 29, 1817, the Treaty of Fort Meigs (Treaty of the Foot of the Rapids) was signed here, in which Wyandot, Seneca, Lenape, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe leaders ceded about 4.6 million acres of northwest Ohio; the Spafford marker says this treaty extinguished the Native claim to the ground around the fort.

• Ottawa towns on the Maumee rapids: village, On the rapids above Fort Meigs and along Maumee Bay, to about 1812
• Twelve Mile Square Reservation at the foot of the rapids (Treaty of Greenville): treaty, Centered on Fort Miamis; Fort Meigs sits almost at its center, 1795
• Treaty of Fort Meigs (Treaty of the Foot of the Rapids): treaty, Signed at Fort Meigs, September 29, 1817
• Tecumseh's confederacy at the first siege: battle, Around the fort and on the north bank of the Maumee, April 28 - May 9, 1813

Stories

The grand traverse and a gill of whiskey

Captain Eleazer Wood's men dug through the rain in late April 1813, hiding the work behind a line of tents. When the British opened fire on May 1, the tents came down to reveal what Harrison called a grand traverse: an earthen bank about 12 feet high on a 20-foot base, running the length of the fort parallel to the British guns. The shot sank into the mud. The fort was short of ammunition, so Harrison offered a gill of whiskey for every usable British cannonball turned in, and the garrison recovered more than 1,000 rounds for reuse. With the well unfinished and warriors guarding the river, many men drank rainwater skimmed from puddles. (source)

Dudley's Defeat

Before dawn on May 5, 1813, about 1,200 Kentucky militia under Gen. Green Clay came down the Maumee in flatboats. Harrison's plan sent some 800 of them under Col. William Dudley to land on the north bank, spike the British guns and return to the boats. They took the batteries, but the iron spikes were on another boat, and when scouts came under fire in the woods, most of the men chased the warriors deeper into the forest. Dudley was killed and his command surrounded; of 866 officers and men only about 150 reached the fort, and the rest were killed or captured. The fight became known as Dudley's Massacre or Dudley's Defeat. The British, for their part, called the May 5 fighting the Battle of the Miami, after the old name of the river, and the 41st Regiment of Foot carried 'Miami' as a battle honor. (source)

The killing of the prisoners at Fort Miami

The Americans captured in Dudley's Defeat on May 5, 1813, were taken to the site of the British encampment by the ruins of Fort Miami. A state historical marker there says the unarmed prisoners faced escalating violence from Native warriors allied to Britain, who shot, tomahawked and scalped them. Private Patrick Russell of the British 41st Regiment of Foot tried to intervene and was shot and killed. When it was over, the marker says, about 40 Americans and Russell lay dead. The same marker lists nine privates of the 41st killed in action that day. Wikipedia's account of the siege, citing John Sugden's 1999 biography of Tecumseh, gives a lower eyewitness count of 12 to 14 prisoners killed and credits Tecumseh and Matthew Elliott of the British Indian Department with stopping the killing. (source)

The flagpole in the well

In June 1840 William Henry Harrison, now the Whig candidate for president, came back to Fort Meigs for a rally that the 1908 dedication booklet put at 35,000 to 40,000 people, camped in tents across the hills and plains. The night before the celebration, the booklet says, young men of Perrysburg 'of the Democratic persuasion' took the flagpole, about 60 feet long, that was to be raised the next morning and plunged it into the garrison's old well. The well had been dug during the siege, about 60 feet deep, so the fort would not have to haul water from the river under fire. In 1908 the top of that pole still marked the well, where it had stood for more than 68 years. (source)

A monument for the unmarked dead

For most of the 1800s the fort's outline and its burial grounds lay in pasture: the Kentucky dead of Dudley's command on a hill east of the fort, the Pittsburgh Blues south of the road, and the garrison cemetery at the west end. The Maumee Valley Pioneer and Historical Association bought the Kentucky burial ground and lobbied for a memorial. In March 1906 the General Assembly authorized $25,000, and on June 12, 1907, the state bought 36 acres from the Hayes heirs for $10,800. The monument contract, let in September 1907 at $14,000, produced a granite shaft 81 feet 8 inches high on a 34-foot-square base. It was dedicated on September 1, 1908, and the booklet noted that the commission had not overspent its appropriation. (source)

Timeline

• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville reserved a tract for the United States centered on the British Fort Miamis at the foot of the Maumee rapids, and early traders settled on it. (source)
• 1810: Major Amos Spafford, the surveyor who had drawn Cleveland's first map, arrived as customs collector and postmaster for the new port of Miami of Lake Erie at the foot of the rapids. (source)
• 1812: On August 16 Brig. Gen. William Hull surrendered Detroit to the British. (source)
• 1813: On January 22 the American column at Frenchtown on the River Raisin was destroyed, and Harrison fell back to high ground on the south bank of the Maumee. (source)
• 1813: On February 2 Harrison ordered fortifications built around his Maumee camp, and Capt. Eleazer Wood took charge of construction because Capt. Charles Gratiot was ill. (source)
• 1813: On March 2 a raiding party of about 170 men on sleighs set out across frozen Lake Erie to burn British ships at Amherstburg, but found the ice broken up and turned back. (source)
• 1813: Virginia and Pennsylvania militia marched home on April 2 when their enlistments ran out, leaving about 500 men under Maj. Amos Stoddard until Harrison returned on April 12. (source)
• 1813: Procter's troops, landed on Maumee Bay two days earlier, marched ahead on April 28 to bivouac at the ruins of the old British Fort Miami, two miles from Fort Meigs. (source)
• 1813: At 11 a.m. on May 1 the British batteries on the north bank opened fire, and the Americans pulled down a row of tents to reveal the grand traverse that absorbed the shot. (source)
• 1813: Harrison refused Procter's surrender demand, saying that if the fort were taken it would be under circumstances doing Procter more honor than a thousand surrenders. (source)
• 1813: On May 5 Col. William Dudley's Kentuckians spiked the British guns on the north bank but were drawn into the woods and cut to pieces; only about 150 of 866 reached the fort. (source)
• 1813: The same day Col. John Miller's regulars and militia overran the British battery east of the fort and brought back 41 prisoners. (source)
• 1813: Procter abandoned the first siege on May 9 after most of his Native allies and Canadian militia had left. (source)
• 1813: Procter and Tecumseh returned on July 21 with a larger force, staged a sham battle to lure the garrison out, and gave up the second siege on July 28. (source)
• 1813: On August 1 and 2 the British attacked Fort Stephenson on the Sandusky River and were driven off with nearly 100 casualties. (source)
• 1813: After Perry's Lake Erie victory on September 10, Harrison had Fort Meigs dismantled, leaving a small square stockade with 100 men as a supply base. (source)
• 1815: The 1908 dedication booklet says the government removed the ordnance and stores and abandoned the post in 1815; Wikipedia gives 1817 for the abandonment. (source)
• 1816: The federal government platted a new town on the bluff, and Amos Spafford named it Perrysburg for Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. (source)
• 1817: On September 29 Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur signed the Treaty of Fort Meigs with seven nations, taking about 4.6 million acres of northwest Ohio. (source)
• 1840: In June, with Harrison as the Whig candidate for president, an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people rallied on the fort grounds to hear him speak. (source)
• 1906: In March the General Assembly authorized $25,000 to buy the fort grounds and build a monument, under a commission named by Governor Andrew L. Harris. (source)
• 1907: On June 12 the state bought 36 acres on River Tracts 65 and 66 from the Hayes heirs for $10,800. (source)
• 1908: On September 1 the granite obelisk, built for $14,000, was dedicated before Ohio's governor, Kentucky's governor and Senator Joseph B. Foraker. (source)
• 1969: Fort Meigs was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark on August 4. (source)
• 1974: The Ohio Historical Society opened the fort, reconstructed on its original ground from the late 1960s as a bicentennial project, and its museum to the public. (source)
• 2000: The Ohio Historical Society tore down the aging stockade and began rebuilding it with new hand-hewn timbers and repairing the seven blockhouses. (source)
• 2003: The $6.2 million restoration, including a 14,000-square-foot Museum and Education Center, was marked complete on May 3. (source)
• 2021: In September the Surveyors Historical Society and the University of Akron scanned the grounds with ground-penetrating radar for unmarked graves; results in the wet clay were mostly inconclusive. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Fort Meigs
• en.wikipedia.org: Siege of Fort Meigs
• en.wikipedia.org: Treaty of Fort Meigs
• historynet.com: war of 1812 turning point at fort meigs
• fortmeigs.org: reconstructing the past
• ohiohistory.org: fort meigs
• amerisurv.com: surveying at fort meigs
• archive.org: fortmeigscondens02aver djvu.txt
• archive.org: dedicationoffort01ever djvu.txt
• remarkableohio.org: 14 87 amos spafford
• remarkableohio.org: 63 48 41st regiment of foot war of 1812 private patrick russell
• nps.gov: Fallen Timbers gmp 31 may 06 internet
• commons.wikimedia.org: Category:Fort Meigs