Toledo and Perrysburg

At a glance

The rapids, the swamp and the first peoples

The story of both towns begins with the river. About 14,000 years ago glacial Lake Maumee, the first ancestor of Lake Erie, covered this ground; at its highest it left beaches about 800 feet above sea level, more than 200 feet above today's lake, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. When Lake Maumee broke through the moraine at Fort Wayne, the flood scoured a channel one to two miles wide to the Wabash River. As the water drained away it left a flat, poorly drained plain that became the Great Black Swamp. As late as 1820 a traveler found no road through it from Lower Sandusky to the Maumee, "except a mere trail through the woods," as H. S. Knapp's History of the Maumee Valley (1872) records.

The Maumee runs over a long stretch of rapids above Perrysburg and Maumee, and the point where they end, the "foot of the rapids," became the region's crossing, trading ground and battleground. The name itself is an English spelling of the Ottawa name for the Miami people (ODNR). By the time of the American Revolution the lower Maumee was Odawa (Ottawa) country, with villages at the river's mouth and along its banks.

On August 20, 1794, Anthony Wayne's Legion defeated a Native confederacy of as many as 1,100 warriors among storm-felled trees at Fallen Timbers, in what is now Maumee; Wayne's army had camped at Roche de Boeuf on August 18. When the beaten warriors reached the British Fort Miamis, its commander kept the gates shut. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville then took "one piece twelve miles square at the British fort on the Miami of the lake at the foot of the rapids," the ground Perrysburg and Maumee occupy today, along with a six-mile square at the river's mouth.

Later treaties took the rest of the valley. The 1807 Treaty of Detroit set aside a six-mile square above Roche de Boeuf that included the village of an Odawa leader known as the Dog, and in 1833, at Maumee, the Odawa band on the river reserves ceded their remaining land on both sides of the river (Treaty with the Ottawa, 1833). The Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma records three removal journeys from Ohio, in 1832, 1837 and 1839. On August 4, 1839, the steamboat Bedford landed 108 Ottawa from the Maumee valley at Cincinnati on their way to Kansas; when that land was also taken, they were moved to what is now Oklahoma. The Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma descends from the Maumee River Ottawa.

Fort Meigs and a town named for Perry

The War of 1812 made the foot of the rapids a front line. On February 2, 1813, General William Henry Harrison ordered fortifications built around his camp on the south bank, and named the post for Ohio's governor, Return J. Meigs Jr. (HistoryNet; Niles' Weekly Register). When British guns opened fire from across the river on May 1, 1813, the defenders pulled down a row of tents to reveal a 12-foot earthen wall that absorbed the shot. A garrison order of May 24 promised a soldier one gill of whisky for every cannonball or bomb he found and turned in.

On May 5, about 800 Kentucky militiamen under Col. William Dudley landed across the river and took the British guns, then pursued warriors into the woods and were cut off; of about 650 cut off, nearly 500 surrendered. At the ruins of Fort Miamis, warriors killed unarmed prisoners until Tecumseh rode in and stopped it. A British private, Patrick Russell of the 41st Regiment, was killed trying to protect them; accounts of how many prisoners died range from about a dozen to about forty. The British returned in July 1813 and withdrew again on July 28. On September 10, Oliver Hazard Perry defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie and wrote to Harrison, "We have met the enemy; and they are ours" (Niles' Weekly Register).

Three years later the federal government went into the town business. On April 27, 1816, Congress ordered part of the twelve-mile reserve laid out into town lots, with in-lots to sell for no less than twenty dollars each (3 Stat. 319). Deputy surveyors Joseph Wampler and William Brookfield laid out the town, and the lots were auctioned at the federal land office in Wooster in July 1817 (H. Rept. 23-511). Amos Spafford, the local customs collector, named it Perrysburgh, later shortened to Perrysburg (Ohio historical marker).

A marker and the city's own website once called Perrysburg one of only two towns laid out by the federal government, the other being Washington, D.C. That is a myth. The same day, Congress passed a near-identical act for a town at the lower rapids of the Sandusky River (3 Stat. 308), where Croghansville, now Fremont, was laid out (Peters, Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision). The author of the town's plat plaque later wrote that her sources had been wrong (oldtopographer.net).

Perrysburg had the head start. Maumee, across the river, was Wood County's first seat, but a state commission chose Perrysburg in 1822 (Beers, Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, 1897). By 1833 Perrysburg had "a court house and jail, a school house, two stores, two taverns," about 60 houses and 250 people (Kilbourn, The Ohio Gazetteer, 1833), and its river frontage made it the valley's lake port.

Port Lawrence, Vistula and a war over a strip of swamp

Downriver, near the mouth of Swan Creek, Toledo took longer to arrive. Cincinnati investors laid out Port Lawrence in August 1817, but their company could not meet its payments and the town barely existed for a decade (Scribner, Memoirs of Lucas County, 1910). In 1827 Michigan Territory organized Port Lawrence Township over what is now downtown Toledo. William Oliver revived Port Lawrence in 1832, the same year Benjamin Stickney started the rival town of Vistula just downstream. In 1833 the two merged under the name Toledo (Waggoner, History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County, 1888).

No record from the time says who chose the name. The earliest printed account, in Knapp's 1872 History of the Maumee Valley, credits merchant Willard J. Daniels, who had been reading about the old capital of Spain. Waggoner (1888) prints a competing account crediting James Irvine Browne, and later writers named Two Stickney. The story that Washington Irving suggested the name from Spain does not fit the dates: Irving was back in New York by May 1832 (Washington Irving), though he did buy Toledo lots in 1837.

Toledo's larger problem was that Michigan claimed it. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 drew the line for new states due east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan, but maps of the day, including John Mitchell's of 1755, placed that tip too far north. Drawn from the real tip, the line put the mouth of the Maumee in Michigan. Rival surveys, the Harris Line of 1817 and the Fulton Line of 1818, left a disputed strip that Michigan governed until 1835 (The American Surveyor).

In 1835 both sides raised militia. The "Toledo War" amounted to arrests, a volley fired over surveyors' heads at Phillips Corners, and one stabbing: on July 15, 1835, Two Stickney stabbed a Monroe County deputy sheriff in a Toledo tavern, who recovered. Ohio created Lucas County on June 20, 1835, with Toledo as its seat, and to prove its jurisdiction its judges opened a county court in a Toledo schoolhouse at about 3 a.m. on September 7, 1835 (W. V. Way, The Toledo War of 1835, 1869). Congress settled the dispute in Ohio's favor on June 15, 1836, compensating Michigan with statehood and the western Upper Peninsula. Toledo was incorporated as a city on January 7, 1837 (City of Toledo).

Then came the contest for the canals. In April 1836 Ohio's board of public works chose Manhattan, a rival town just below Toledo, as the canal terminus (Weatherford, Ohio Historical Quarterly, 1956). Manhattan never captured the lake trade, and its plat was vacated in 1848. The Wabash and Erie Canal opened to Toledo in May 1843, and the first boat from Cincinnati on the Miami and Erie arrived on June 27, 1845 (Waggoner 1888).

The 1840 census returns, printed in Jenkins's Ohio Gazetteer of 1841, counted 1,222 people in Toledo, 1,041 in Perrysburg, 840 in Maumee City and 282 in Manhattan. (The gazetteer printed Toledo's total as 1,322, an addition error; its three wards add to 1,222, the figure the Census Bureau uses. The 1,041 is printed for both Perrysburg town and township.) The two towns were nearly even.

Cholera, a lost courthouse and natural gas, 1840-1900

The second half of the century pulled the towns apart. In 1854 cholera struck both. In Toledo it killed 327 people between about June 1 and September 1, in a city of about 8,000, roughly one person in 25; most of the dead were recent immigrants, and 101 of the first 130 were buried in the potter's field (Waggoner 1888). In August 1855 Toledo voters approved $25,000 in bonds to find a public water supply, a movement Waggoner says grew largely from the belief that shallow-well water had worsened the epidemic. In Perrysburg cholera killed at least 141 people in about seven weeks, and more than half the town fled (Beers, Wood County, 1897; Historic Perrysburg). Some contemporaries put the Perrysburg toll above 200.

Perrysburg then lost its courthouse. In 1866 Wood County voted 2,454 to 2,176 to move the county seat to Bowling Green. After court challenges and a recount that confirmed a majority for removal, the county offices moved in April 1870. In 1875 Perrysburg tried to win the seat back, and the count stood 4,826 to 4,555 for moving it, but the votes of Perrysburg town and township were thrown out and Bowling Green kept the courthouse. The 1897 county history calls the struggle the "Ten Years' War" (Beers 1897). Perrysburg's population reached 1,909 in 1880, then fell to 1,747 in 1890 and stood at 1,766 in 1900.

Toledo, meanwhile, became a rail and grain port. The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, formed in 1869, ran its Buffalo-to-Chicago main line through the city, and by 1888 Toledo had 12 grain elevators holding 7,258,000 bushels (Waggoner 1888).

Natural gas brought the industry that would define the city. In August 1884 drillers sinking a water well at the Wood County infirmary struck gas at 242 feet, enough for one stove. In 1886 the Simon well near North Baltimore roared loudly enough to be heard five miles away, and Ohio's state geologist measured it at more than 12 million cubic feet a day (Beers 1897). Free gas briefly made Bowling Green the "Crystal City" of glass factories, but by 1890 the gas was running out (BG Independent Media).

Toledo offered something longer-lasting: gas, railroads and Lake Erie together. In August 1888 a special train brought 50 carloads of glassmaking machinery from Massachusetts, and Edward Drummond Libbey's glassworks made its first Toledo glass that month (Encyclopedia.com, Libbey Inc.; American Cut Glass Association).

The city also produced a nationally known reformer. Samuel M. Jones, an oil man who made sucker rods in Toledo, replaced his factory rulebook with the Golden Rule, paid above the going wage and gave workers an eight-hour day and a paid summer holiday (Crosby, 1906). Elected mayor in 1897, he won re-election as an independent and died in office on July 12, 1904 (Samuel M. Jones). On May 1, 1884, Toledo's catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker became the first openly Black player in major-league baseball (SABR).

By 1900 Toledo had 131,822 people, about 108 times its 1840 count; Perrysburg had fewer people than it had twenty years earlier (Census Bureau; 1910 census, Ohio).

The Glass City and the Jeep, 1900-1945

The young glassblower Libbey recruited from Wheeling in 1888, Michael J. Owens, had gone to work in a glass factory at the age of ten. In Toledo in 1903 he built the first commercially successful fully automatic bottle-making machine. His first commercial machine made about 12 pint bottles a minute, roughly 17,000 a day, where a hand crew of six men and boys made about 2,900 (University of Toledo Canaday Center). His 1912 "AR" machine averaged 50,400 bottles a day. In 1913 the National Child Labor Committee said the machine had done more to eliminate child labor in glass plants than the committee had achieved through legislation (ASME landmark record).

The companies multiplied and merged. In 1929 the Owens Bottle Company bought the Illinois Glass Company to form Owens-Illinois. In 1930 Libbey-Owens merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company of Rossford, across the river from Toledo, to form Libbey-Owens-Ford (Toledo's Attic; Rossford, Ohio). Owens-Illinois bought Libbey Glass in 1935, and Owens-Corning Fiberglas, a joint creation of Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works, was announced in 1938 with headquarters in Toledo (Encyclopedia.com, Owens Corning). By 1945 three major glass corporations were run from Toledo. Libbey had also founded the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901; its Monroe Street building opened in 1912.

Toledo built cars as well. In 1909 John North Willys bought the Pope car factory in Toledo for $400,000, and by 1915 Willys-Overland was the second-largest automaker in the country, behind Ford. In its peak year, 1928, its 23,000 workers built 314,437 cars (Toledo's Attic).

The Depression hit hard. On June 16, 1931, as ordinary depositors lined up to withdraw $679,971 from Toledo's Security-Home Bank, insiders took out more than a million dollars, according to historian Timothy Messer-Kruse (EH.net review). On the night of May 24, 1934, during a strike at the Electric Auto-Lite plant, Ohio National Guardsmen fired into the crowd and killed two onlookers, Frank Hubay and Steve Cyigon. The company agreed to recognize the union, and workers ratified the settlement on June 3 (Ohio historical marker; Auto-Lite strike).

World War II brought the jeep. The first prototype was built in Butler, Pennsylvania, by American Bantam, but during the war Willys-Overland of Toledo built about 360,000 jeeps, Ford about 280,000 and Bantam fewer than 2,700 (ASME; Willys MB). In 1948 the Federal Trade Commission ordered Willys-Overland to stop claiming it had created the jeep, crediting Willys, Bantam, Ford, Spicer and the Army jointly (Time). John Willys did not see it; he died in 1935 (John Willys).

Across the river Perrysburg remained small, a village of 3,182 in 1930 (1930 census) and 3,457 in 1940, reached from Toledo by trolley; the 1908 program for the Fort Meigs monument promised a car from Toledo, "eight miles away," every 30 minutes (Library of Congress).

Highways, a peak and a turning tide, 1945-2000

Toledo's population reached its all-time high in 1970, and that peak masked a decline. The city counted 303,616 in 1950, 318,003 in 1960 and 383,818 in 1970 (1970 census, Ohio). But Toledo had been annexing parts of Washington Township for decades, and the Census Bureau measured the effect: 85,020 of the 1970 residents lived in land annexed during the 1960s, while inside the 1960 city limits the population had fallen by 19,205, or 6 percent (1970 census, U.S. summary). The city lost people at every later census, falling to 313,619 by 2000 (2000 census, Ohio).

Highways reshaped both towns. Ground was broken for the Ohio Turnpike on October 27, 1952, and the 241-mile road was completed on October 1, 1955 (Ohio Turnpike). Interstate 475 opened its first section in 1967, between US 20 near Perrysburg and US 24 near Maumee (I-475). The City of Toledo says building I-75 through the city in the 1960s cut the streets linking the Junction neighborhood to Uptown and downtown from 13 to four (City of Toledo, 2023). By 1970 about a fifth of Toledo's land area had been or was being cleared under urban renewal (Toledo's Attic).

Industry restructured. The Toledo Jeep plant passed to Kaiser in 1953, American Motors in 1970 and Chrysler in 1987 (Jeep). When Owens-Illinois opened its 32-story One SeaGate headquarters downtown (1981 by the University of Toledo's account; other sources say 1982), Toledo was home to seven Fortune 500 companies. Between 1980 and 1983 Owens-Illinois closed 42 plants and cut 17,000 jobs (University of Toledo Canaday Center). Owens-Corning stayed, moving in 1996 to a new riverfront headquarters built on a former industrial site (High Performing Buildings).

Perrysburg grew at every census, from 4,006 people in 1950 to 16,945 in 2000, more than a fourfold increase. Part of that growth also came from annexation: of its 7,693 residents in 1970, 1,516 lived in land annexed during the 1960s, but unlike Toledo, the population inside Perrysburg's older limits grew as well (1970 census, Ohio).

The river turns, 2000 to today

The clearest sign of the reversal came in 2006. Owens-Illinois, the company that grew from Michael Owens's bottle machine, left One SeaGate in downtown Toledo and by the end of that year had moved its world headquarters to its Levis Development Park in Perrysburg (University of Toledo Canaday Center). Its principal office has been One Michael Owens Way, Perrysburg, since then (SEC filing). First Solar, which says it was founded in Ohio, began with a $9.3 million, 74,000-square-foot facility in Perrysburg (First Solar), and commercial production started there in 2002 (First Solar).

Toledo built a new landmark. The Veterans' Glass City Skyway, carrying I-280 over the Maumee, opened to traffic on June 24, 2007, and was then the most expensive single project in the Ohio Department of Transportation's history (Construction Equipment Guide). Its pylon is faced in glass over its top 196 feet and lit by 384 LED fixtures that can show 16.7 million colors (PCI). Four ironworkers died after a construction gantry collapsed on February 16, 2004 (Construction Equipment Guide). Jeep production continued at the Toledo Assembly Complex, where Stellantis announced a $700 million investment for the next Wrangler in 2016 and nearly $400 million for a new midsize truck in October 2025 (Stellantis).

Toledo draws its drinking water from Lake Erie, treated at the Collins Park plant, which the city says serves about 500,000 people in Toledo and parts of Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties and southern Monroe County, Michigan (City of Toledo). On Friday, August 1, 2014, routine testing found the algal toxin microcystin above Ohio's limit of one part per billion, from a bloom around the city's lake intake. At 2 a.m. on Saturday, August 2, the city told customers not to drink the water and not to boil it (Circle of Blue). The advisory covered about 440,000 people in four counties in Ohio and Michigan and was lifted on Monday, August 4 (CDC).

The crisis led to an unusual ballot measure. On February 26, 2019, Toledo voters approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, 9,955 votes to 6,260 (Ballotpedia). On February 27, 2020, U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary struck it down as unconstitutionally vague and beyond municipal power, writing: "Lake Erie is not a pond in Toledo" (court opinion).

Between the 2000 and 2020 censuses Toledo fell from 313,619 to 270,871 people, while Perrysburg grew from 16,945 to 25,041 (Census Bureau). Toledo's 2023 estimate of 265,304 is between its 1920 and 1930 census counts (Census Bureau estimates). Lucas County peaked at 484,370 in 1970 and has shrunk at every census since, while Wood County has grown every decade since 1920 (Census Bureau). Toledo is still the region's city, more than ten times Perrysburg's size, against roughly fifty to one in 1970. It is also reinvesting in its river: Glass City Metropark's main section, with Market Hall and a 1,000-foot skating trail called The Ribbon, opened on June 9, 2023, on former riverfront brownfield (Metroparks Toledo), the first part of a planned riverwalk along both banks.

Sources

• Ohio Coastal Atlas, Chapter 9: Geology (Ohio Department of Natural Resources)
• Maumee River public access guide (Ohio Department of Natural Resources)
• H. S. Knapp, History of the Maumee Valley (1872)
• H. S. Knapp, History of the Maumee Valley (1872), full text
• Battle of Fallen Timbers (Wikipedia)
• Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (GovInfo)
• Treaty of Detroit, November 17, 1807 (Access Genealogy)
• Treaty with the Ottawa, 1833 (Oklahoma State University)
• Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma, Notable Moments in Tribal History
• Cincinnati Parks, 1830s Indian Removal Act in Cincinnati
• HistoryNet, War of 1812: Turning Point at Fort Meigs
• Niles' Weekly Register, vol. 4 (1813)
• Niles' Weekly Register, vol. 5 (1813)
• Ohio historical marker 63-48: Private Patrick Russell, 41st Regiment of Foot
• Ohio historical marker 14-87: Amos Spafford
• Act of April 27, 1816, 3 Stat. 319 (Perrysburg)
• Act of April 27, 1816, 3 Stat. 308 (lower Sandusky, now Fremont)
• House Report 23-511 (1834), Perrysburg lot titles
• Peters, Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision (1918)
• Perrysburg Plat Map (oldtopographer.net)
• Beers, Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County (1897)
• Beers, Wood County history (1897), second scan
• Historic Perrysburg, 500 Block W. Front
• Kilbourn, The Ohio Gazetteer (1833)
• Scribner, Memoirs of Lucas County (1910)
• Waggoner, History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County (1888)
• Waggoner, History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County (1888), full text
• Washington Irving (Wikipedia)
• Northwest Ordinance, 1787 (Avalon Project)
• John Mitchell map, 1755 (Library of Congress)
• The American Surveyor, The Michigan and Ohio State Line
• W. V. Way, The Facts and Historical Events of the Toledo War of 1835 (1869)
• City of Toledo, Single Audit Report 2013
• Weatherford, The Short Life of Manhattan, Ohio, Ohio Historical Quarterly (1956)
• Jenkins, The Ohio Gazetteer (1841)
• 1930 census, Population vol. I, Ohio (Census Bureau)
• Historic Perrysburg, cholera and the railroad
• BG Independent Media, Glass was king in BG during the oil boom
• Encyclopedia.com, Libbey Inc.
• American Cut Glass Association, Libbey Glass: One Hundred Years in Toledo
• Ernest Crosby, Golden Rule Jones, Mayor of Toledo (1906)
• Samuel M. Jones (Wikipedia)
• SABR, Fleet Walker
• Census Bureau, Population of the 100 largest cities, 1900
• 1910 census, vol. 3, Ohio (Census Bureau)
• University of Toledo Canaday Center, Michael J. Owens (ASME brochure)
• ASME Landmark: Owens AR Bottle Machine (ETHW)
• Toledo's Attic, Toledo timeline
• Rossford, Ohio (Wikipedia)
• Encyclopedia.com, Owens Corning
• Toledo Museum of Art (Wikipedia)
• Toledo Zoo, anniversary history
• EH.net review of Messer-Kruse, Banksters, Bosses, and Smart Money
• Electric Auto-Lite strike marker (HMDB)
• Auto-Lite strike (Wikipedia)
• ASME, Willys-Overland jeep landmark brochure
• Willys MB (Wikipedia)
• Time, Facts and Figures, March 22, 1948
• John Willys (Wikipedia)
• Dedication of Fort Meigs monument program, 1908 (Library of Congress)
• 1970 census, Population vol. 1, Ohio (Census Bureau)
• 1970 census, Population vol. 1, U.S. summary (Census Bureau)
• 2000 census, PHC-3-37 Ohio (Census Bureau)
• Ohio Turnpike history
• Interstate 475 (Ohio) (Wikipedia)
• City of Toledo, 2023 RAISE grant application
• Jeep (Wikipedia)
• University of Toledo Canaday Center, O-I Today and Tomorrow
• High Performing Buildings, Owens Corning World Headquarters
• Perrysburg, Ohio (Wikipedia)
• Owens-Illinois Form 10-K, 2006 (SEC)
• First Solar, Manufacturing
• First Solar (Wikipedia)
• Construction Equipment Guide, Veterans' Glass City Skyway opens
• PCI, Toledo's I-280 Veterans' Glass City Skyway
• Construction Equipment Guide, Ohio crane collapse kills four
• Stellantis, Toledo Assembly Complex
• City of Toledo, Water Treatment
• Circle of Blue, Toledo issues emergency warning (2014)
• CDC, MMWR 65(35), Toledo drinking water advisory (2016)
• Ballotpedia, Toledo Lake Erie Bill of Rights (February 2019)
• Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo, opinion (2020)
• Census Bureau, 2020 census count, Perrysburg
• Census Bureau, city population estimates 2020-2023, Ohio
• Census Bureau, Ohio county population 1900-1990
• Metroparks Toledo, Glass City Metropark opens