Ohio History Journal

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edited by

edited by

JOSEPH E. WALKER

 

Plowshares and Pruning Hooks

for the Miami and Potawatomi:

The Journal of Gerard T. Hopkins, 1804

 

 

Post-Revolutionary War Americans saw in the lands west of the

Appalachian Mountains the means to redress the economic ills inherited

from the war and its interruptions of trade. Settlement west of Pittsburgh

was handicapped during much of the 1790s by the hostility and military

success of the midwestern Indian tribes. Yet, as Curtis P. Nettels wrote, in

that decade as many people migrated from the states of Connecticut,

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland as to

represent one person in four counted in those states in the census of 1790.1

In the opening years of the nineteenth century, the admission of Ohio to

the Union as a new state provided a power to pull settlers west to

complement the economic push from the east. Ohioans wished their state

to grow in population to match the older coastal states. Knowing the

dangers and difficulties of travel on the paths and "roads" across the

Appalachian ridges, they asked Congress to set aside a portion of the net

proceeds from the sale of Ohio land to finance the building of roads in and

to the new state. The result was a law passed in 1803 to appropriate 5

percent of the land purchase money for road construction. Three-fifths of

this fund was returned to Ohio to pay for roads within the state, and the

remainder was to be used by the national government to build a highway to

 

 

 

Joseph E. Walker is Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville State College,

Millersville, Pennsylvania. He wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the Historical Society

of Pennsylvania for permission to publish this manuscript and Nicholas B. Wainwright, John

D. Kilbourne, and Conrad Wilson of the Society's staff; the Economic History Association

and the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation and its director, Richmond D. Williams, for

research grants; and George Rogers Taylor, Norman B. Wilkinson,and Richard C. Knopffor

reading the manuscript and making many valuable suggestions.

 

 

 

1. Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775-1815(New York, 1962),

131.