Greenville historical timeline

Greenville exists because of a fort, and it matters because of what was signed there.

The Northwest Indian War

After American independence, the United States claimed the territory north-west of the Ohio river, and a confederacy of nations — Shawnee, Miami Nation, Lenape, Wyandot and others — resisted. They destroyed two American armies, including St Clair’s in 1791, which remains the heaviest defeat ever inflicted on the United States Army by Native forces.

Fort Greene Ville

Anthony Wayne built a large fortified camp here in 1793, named for a fellow general, and trained an army through the winter. It defeated the confederacy at Fallen Timbers in 1794.

The treaty

In August 1795, representatives of twelve nations signed the Treaty of Greene Ville at the fort, ceding most of present-day Ohio and part of Indiana. It set a boundary line that was crossed within a decade, and it is a founding document of American settlement in the Midwest and of the dispossession that came with it.

The town

Laid out in 1808 and made the county seat, growing on agriculture and later on tobacco, which Darke County grew in quantity.

Tobacco

Darke County grew burley and cigar-leaf tobacco in quantity from the mid-nineteenth century, and the crop paid for a good deal of the town’s Victorian building. Tobacco sheds with their hinged ventilating boards still stand in the fields, though the crop has almost entirely gone.

Annie Oakley

Born in the county in 1860, she became the most famous markswoman in the world and returned here to be buried in 1926.