The Toledo War

At a glance

A line drawn from a bad map (1755-1834)

The Toledo War grew out of a geographic mistake written into federal law. The Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787, allowed new states in the Old Northwest to be formed north of "an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan." The maps of the day, John Mitchell's 1755 map of North America among them, put that southern tip at roughly 42 degrees 10 minutes north. It is really near 41 degrees 37 minutes. A line drawn due east from the true tip strikes Lake Erie south of the mouth of the Maumee River - leaving the best natural harbor on Ohio's lakeshore on the far side of the line.

Ohio's framers saw the problem coming. The Ohio Constitution of 1802 (Article VII, section 6) added a proviso: if the Ordinance line met Lake Erie south of the Maumee, Ohio's border would run instead to "the most northerly cape of the Miami Bay," keeping the river mouth in Ohio. Congress admitted Ohio in 1803 without ever ruling on that proviso. Two years later it created Michigan Territory on the plain wording of the Ordinance.

Ohio also pointed to precedent. Congress moved Indiana's northern line ten miles north in 1816, and Illinois's about 51 miles north in 1818, to give both states frontage on Lake Michigan. Ohio argued it deserved the same treatment on Lake Erie.

Two surveys, two lines

The dispute became physical in 1817. Surveyor General Edward Tiffin, Ohio's first governor, had William Harris run Ohio's constitutional line; the Harris Line put the Maumee's mouth in Ohio. Michigan's territorial governor Lewis Cass protested, and in 1818 John A. Fulton ran the Ordinance line due east; the Fulton Line left the river mouth in Michigan. The two lines sat about 5 miles apart at the Indiana border and about 8 miles apart at Maumee Bay, according to The American Surveyor. A neutral federal survey under Capt. Andrew Talcott, ordered in 1832 and reported in 1834, placed Lake Michigan's tip where Fulton had, strengthening Michigan's legal case. Lt. Robert E. Lee joined Talcott's survey work on the line in the summer of 1835.

The size of the strip between the lines varies by source. About 468 square miles is the most common figure; 450 and 400 also appear in print, and Tod B. Galloway's 1895 study in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly gives 360.

Michigan governs, Toledo forms

For years Michigan held the ground. In 1827 Michigan Territory organized the strip's east end as Port Lawrence Township of Monroe County, and the western strip fell under Lenawee County townships. At the mouth of Swan Creek, Cincinnati investors platted Port Lawrence in 1817; the venture failed. In 1832 Maj. Benjamin F. Stickney and Lockport, New York, investors platted Vistula nearby. In 1833 the two towns merged as Toledo to compete for the terminus of the Wabash and Erie Canal. Why the name Toledo was chosen is unsettled: three competing stories, crediting Willard J. Daniels, Washington Irving or Two Stickney, all appear only in later histories (Knapp 1872, Slocum 1905, The Ohio Guide 1940).

Politics favored Ohio. Former president John Quincy Adams, then in the House, conceded that the law favored Michigan and the votes favored Ohio: Michigan was a territory with no vote in Congress, facing Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. When a 1834 Michigan census counted 85,856 people, well past the 60,000 needed for statehood, acting governor Stevens T. Mason called a constitutional convention in January 1835 without waiting for Congress.

The war of laws and arrests (February to August 1835)

The Toledo War was fought mostly with statutes, warrants and arrests. On February 12, 1835, Michigan passed its Pains and Penalties Act, making it a crime, punishable by up to $1,000 and five years at hard labor, to exercise Ohio authority inside the strip. Ohio answered on February 23 by extending Wood, Henry and Williams counties north to the Harris Line. Both dates and the full Michigan act appear in W. V. Way's The Facts and Historical Events of the Toledo War of 1835 (1869), written by a Perrysburg man who was there; some summaries give February 6 for Ohio's act, the date Governor Robert Lucas asked for it.

On March 31, 1835, Lucas and Ohio's boundary commissioners reached Perrysburg. Ohio militia gathered at the old Fort Miami site near Maumee, building to about 600 men - Col. Mathias Vanfleet's regiment of about 300 plus detachments from Sandusky, Seneca and Hancock counties. Way put Michigan's strength under Gen. Joseph W. Brown at a "variously estimated" 800 to 1,200. The same day, U.S. Attorney General Benjamin F. Butler advised President Andrew Jackson that until Congress acted, the strip was legally Michigan's and its penalties act was valid, an opinion printed in the Senate documents and cited in Annah May Soule's 1896 study in the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections. Lucas dismissed it.

Jackson sent peace commissioners Richard Rush and Benjamin Chew Howard. On April 7 they proposed a truce under which Ohio could re-mark the Harris Line and residents could choose which government to follow until Congress decided. According to the Timeline of the Toledo Strip, Lucas accepted and Mason refused. The next night, April 8, a Monroe County posse raided Maj. Stickney's house in Toledo and carried Ohio partisans off to Monroe.

Phillips Corners, April 26, 1835

The only exchange of gunfire came on Sunday, April 26, 1835, on the Phillips farm in what is now Royalton Township, Fulton County, near Lyons. A Michigan party carrying a warrant from a Tecumseh justice overtook Ohio's survey crew re-marking the Harris Line. By the arresting officer's account, some of the Ohio men armed themselves, others barricaded in a log house and then broke for the woods, and "a few muskets were then fired over their heads." Nine men were arrested and taken to Tecumseh, Michigan. No one was hit. A widely repeated story that a surveyor's coat was shot through was denied by the arresting officer, and the Phillips Corners historical marker (Remarkable Ohio 2-26, near Seward) itself calls the claim unproven.

Sources disagree on who the Michigan party were. The Lenawee County under-sheriff, in a June 17, 1835, letter to Governor Mason reprinted by Way, described a civil posse of about thirty men he had raised in Adrian, and wrote that Gen. Brown "accompanied me as a citizen" with no official station. Ohio's boundary commissioners - Jonathan Taylor, John Patterson and Uri Seeley - reported on May 1, 1835, in a document quoted by Galloway, that the force acted "under the command of General Brown, of Michigan." Later retellings, including the Toledo War summary on Wikipedia, give 50 to 60 Michigan militia.

Lucas County and the stabbing

Ohio's legislature, meeting in special session, created Lucas County on June 20, 1835, named it for the governor, made Toledo its seat and ordered its first court to sit on the first Monday of September, according to an early Lucas County history. The session also made it a crime to abduct an Ohioan and appropriated $300,000.

The war's only bloodshed followed on July 15, 1835. Monroe County deputy sheriff Joseph Wood tried to arrest Two Stickney - Maj. Stickney's son, whose older brother was named One - at J. Baron Davis's tavern in Toledo. Stickney stabbed Wood and escaped. The weapon was a dirk, according to constable Lyman Hurd's sworn affidavit, printed in Clark Waggoner's 1888 History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County (pp. 300-301), and Michigan's indictment. Way described Wood as "very little hurt," and he recovered. Lucas refused Michigan's demand to give Stickney up.

The midnight court (September 1835)

Ohio's most famous move of the war was a court session held at about 3 a.m. Jackson removed Mason as acting territorial governor on August 29, 1835, and sent John S. Horner to replace him, but Mason still led Michigan militia into Toledo on September 6 to stop the Lucas County court from sitting.

Ohio got there first. Around 1 a.m. on September 7, Col. Vanfleet rode from Maumee with an escort of 20 men guarding the judges; a document Way reprints puts the escort at "not exceeding fifteen." At about 3 a.m. the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas opened in the Toledo schoolhouse near Washington Street and the canal. Associate judges Jonathan H. Jerome, Baxter Bowman and William Wilson sat, with Horatio Conant as clerk, and appointed John Baldwin, Robert Gower and Cyrus Holloway as county commissioners. The presiding judge, David Higgins, did not come. The record of the session is printed verbatim in Way's 1869 account.

Afterward the officials stopped at Munson H. Daniels's tavern, where a prankster shouted that Michigan troops were coming. They rode for Maumee with the court minutes in the clerk's hat and the bar bill unpaid.

How many Michigan men were in Toledo that day is unresolved. Sources disagree: Way gives 1,200, the number Mason is reported to have called out, while the later Timeline of the Toledo Strip says about 250 actually turned up.

"Woolverines" in print

The episode produced one of the earliest dated uses of Michigan's nickname. A Detroit paper of September 10, 1835, reprinted in Niles' Register on September 19, 1835, mocked the court for adjourning at "the fearful sound of the Woolverines," adding that this is what the people of Michigan were called. It shows the name was in use in 1835; it does not prove the war coined it.

Settlement: statehood and the Upper Peninsula (1835-1837)

Congress settled the dispute in Ohio's favor and paid Michigan with land elsewhere. In October 1835 Michigan voters approved a state constitution and elected Mason governor, but Congress refused to seat Michigan's delegation. The first issue of the Toledo Blade appeared on December 19, 1835.

The act of June 15, 1836 (5 Stat. 49) fixed Ohio's northern border on the Harris Line and offered Michigan statehood plus the western Upper Peninsula, on condition that a Michigan convention consent. The first Convention of Assent, meeting in Ann Arbor in late September 1836, rejected the terms.

A second convention, called without the legislature's sanction and boycotted by Whigs, met in Ann Arbor on December 14-15, 1836, in bitter cold and accepted the deal. It is remembered as the Frostbitten Convention. Michigan was short of money after paying for its militia and was being shut out of a federal surplus distribution. Sources disagree on the date: nearly every account gives December 14, while Galloway's 1895 study gives December 6. Michigan was admitted as the 26th state on January 26, 1837, without Toledo and with the Upper Peninsula. In 2018 the Michigan House declared December 14 "Frostbitten Convention Day."

The bills that came due

Ohio voted Maj. Stickney $300 for damages to his person and property. In 1846 Michigan paid Lewis E. Bailey $50 and interest for a horse lost in the conflict, as recorded by Galloway (p. 229), quoting Campbell's Outlines of the Political History of Michigan.

The people at the center

Robert Lucas (1781-1853) was Ohio's governor from 1832 to 1836. He marched to Perrysburg, created and named Lucas County, and refused to surrender Two Stickney. He later became the first governor of Iowa Territory, where he faced Missouri in a border quarrel known as the Honey War, and died in Iowa City on February 7, 1853, according to his Wikipedia biography.

Stevens T. Mason (1811-1843), the "Boy Governor," became Michigan's territorial secretary at 19 and acting governor at 22, was 23 for most of 1835, was elected the state's first governor at 23 in October 1835, and took office at 24. He died in New York on January 4, 1843, at 31, and was reburied in Detroit's Capitol Park in 1905 and again in 2010, as Michiganology records.

Maj. Benjamin F. Stickney, Vistula's founder and Ohio's most vocal partisan in the strip, named his sons One (born 1803) and Two (born 1810) and a daughter Indiana. Joseph Wood, the Monroe County deputy sheriff Two Stickney stabbed, was the war's only wounded man; little else is known of him.

Others with key roles: Andrew Jackson, who needed Ohio's votes in the 1836 election, sent Rush and Howard, removed Mason and signed the settlement; his attorney general Benjamin F. Butler advised that the law favored Michigan; Gen. Joseph W. Brown commanded Michigan militia, and Gen. John Bell and Col. Mathias Vanfleet led Ohio's; and surveyors William Harris and John A. Fulton gave their names to the two lines. Washington Irving, sometimes credited with naming Toledo, did have a stake in it: according to Waggoner, he and his brother Ebenezer bought $15,000 of Vistula lots from their nephew Pierre M. Irving, a Toledo resident, in April 1837. That purchase does not show that Irving named the city.

After the war: copper, a port and a remarked line

Michigan's consolation prize paid off first. Geologist Douglass Houghton reported rich copper on the Keweenaw Peninsula in 1841, iron was found at Teal Lake in 1844 on what became the Marquette Iron Range, and the first Soo Locks opened in 1855. By the 1860s the Upper Peninsula mined about 90% of U.S. copper, and by the 1890s it was the nation's largest source of iron ore. The frequently repeated line that the peninsula's minerals were worth more than the California gold rush circulates without dollar figures behind it.

Toledo became Ohio's Lake Erie port. It incorporated as a city in 1837, the canals reached it in 1843, and Edward Libbey brought glassmaking there in 1888. Its population was 1,222 in 1840 and 13,768 in 1860, and it peaked in 1970; the 2020 Census counted 270,871. The Lucas County seat moved from Toledo to Maumee in 1840 and returned to Toledo in 1852.

Marking the line for good

The 1836 line was never well marked on the ground. Andrew Porter's 1837 resurvey used wooden posts that rotted away. In 1915 the two states jointly funded a definitive resurvey under U.S. Geological Survey surveyor Samuel S. Gannett. Crews worked from July to October 1915 along the line's 69.92 miles and set granite monuments quarried at Mount Airy, North Carolina, and carved in Toledo. Sources disagree on the count: The American Surveyor says 72, Wikipedia's Toledo War article says 71. On November 24, 1915, Ohio Governor Frank B. Willis and Michigan Governor Woodbridge N. Ferris shook hands at the line. Most of the monuments still stand; Monument 70 on the Lost Peninsula was struck by a vehicle in October 2011 and reset. The resurvey is commemorated by Remarkable Ohio marker 4-26 on US 127 near Fayette.

The lake boundary, 1973

The water boundary took longer. In Michigan v. Ohio, 410 U.S. 420, decided February 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court fixed the Lake Erie line on Ohio's angle of N45 degrees E. The line runs through Turtle Island, splitting the roughly 1.5-acre island between the states; Ohio holds the part with the ruins of its 1866 lighthouse.

Where the strip is today

The former strip now includes most of Toledo and all or part of Sylvania, Ottawa Hills, Oregon, Harbor View, Holland, Metamora, Lyons, Fayette, Berkey and Pioneer, along with the northern-tier townships of Lucas, Fulton and Williams counties.

Myths and folklore

Several popular claims about the Toledo War do not hold up against the record.

• "A pig was the only casualty." False. The pig belongs to the 1859 Pig War in the San Juan Islands. The Toledo War's documented animal loss was Lewis E. Bailey's horse, for which Michigan paid $50 in 1846.
• "A surveyor's coat was shot through at Phillips Corners." Denied by the arresting under-sheriff, and called unproven on the site's own marker.
• "Gen. Brown's militia fought at Phillips Corners." Disputed. Michigan's under-sheriff called it a civil posse with Brown along as a private citizen; Ohio's commissioners said it acted under Brown's command.
• "Zachary Taylor's soldiers camped at West Unity in 1835." Very unlikely. The claim comes from an 1882 Williams County history, but Taylor commanded Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, throughout 1835 and 1836.
• "The Toledo Mud Hens are named for the war's militia." False. The Mud Hens name comes from the 1896 ball club's marshy park and its coots.
• "Ohio became the Buckeye State because of the war." False. The nickname predates the war and spread with William Henry Harrison's 1840 campaign.
• "Ohioans coined 'Wolverines' in 1835." Unproven. The name was in print as "Woolverines" by September 10, 1835, but no source shows the war created it.
• "The Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry started with the Toledo War." Folklore. The first game was played in 1897.
• "The Upper Peninsula's minerals outvalued the California gold rush." Unsourced. The copper record is documented; the comparison has no figures behind it.

Sources

• W. V. Way, The Facts and Historical Events of the Toledo War of 1835 (1869), Internet Archive
• Tod B. Galloway, "The Ohio-Michigan Boundary Line Dispute," Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. 4 (1895)
• Clark Waggoner, History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County (1888)
• Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, vol. 27 (Soule, 1896)
• Niles' Register, September 19, 1835
• Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Mitchell Map of North America (1755), Library of Congress
• Ohio Constitution of 1802, Wikisource
• Michigan Territory, Wikipedia
• Indiana's Northern Boundary Line, Indiana Historical Bureau marker
• The American Surveyor, "Unsung Hero: The Michigan and Ohio State Line" (2020)
• Act of June 15, 1836, 5 Stat. 49, GovInfo
• Michiganology, Steps to Statehood for Michigan
• Michiganology, The Boy Governor Comes Home
• Toledo War, Wikipedia
• Timeline of the Toledo Strip, Wikipedia
• Frostbitten Convention, Wikipedia
• Stevens T. Mason, Wikipedia
• Robert Lucas (governor), Wikipedia
• Toledo, Ohio, Wikipedia
• Vistula Historic District, Wikipedia
• The Blade (Toledo, Ohio), Wikipedia
• Early history of Lucas County, Genealogy Trails
• Michigan House Resolution 216 (2018), Frostbitten Convention Day
• Douglass Houghton, Wikipedia
• Marquette Iron Range, Wikipedia
• Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wikipedia
• Michigan v. Ohio, 410 U.S. 420 (1973), FindLaw
• Turtle Island (Lake Erie), Wikipedia
• The Ohio Michigan Boundary War / Battle of Phillips Corners marker, HMdb
• 1815 Michigan Meridian / 1915 Ohio Michigan State Line Survey, Remarkable Ohio marker 4-26
• Fort Crawford, Wikipedia
• Toledo Mud Hens, Wikipedia
• WOSU, Buckeye nickname origin story called into question
• American Battlefield Trust, The War That Sparked a Sports Rivalry