Ohio Company granted royal charter, May 19, 1749

On May 19, 1749, George II granted a charter to the Ohio Company to settle the Ohio Valley. From the article:

"Ohio Company granted royal charter, May 19, 1749
By ANDREW GLASS

On this day in 1749, England’s King George II granted the Ohio Company of Virginia a charter of 200,000 acres that stretched out from the forks of the Ohio River on the present site of Pittsburgh.

The royal charter stipulated that the company build a fort to protect the settlers and that it move at least 100 families into the area. In founding the company in 1747, wealthy Virginia planters challenged century-old French claims to the entire Ohio River Valley.

As people began to settle in the frontier, it moved farther west. By the middle of the 1700s, British fur traders had crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio River Valley into land that was claimed by both Great Britain and France.

The French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had laid claim to a huge land area called New France. It stretched from the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Great Lakes in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. But there were only a few French farmers living in New France; most French men were fur traders.

When British fur traders began to move into the Ohio River Valley, they took business away from the French. The British offered the Indians more goods for fewer furs. In time, the French lost most of their fur trading business to the British.

In promoting the settlement of American colonists in a region west of the Appalachians then thinly populated by Indian tribes, the Ohio Company helped provoke the seven-year French and Indian War. Native Americans fought on both sides of the conflict but were mostly allied with the French. The Iroquois, however, sided with the American colonists and Britain.

The war began in 1754, when George Washington, then a 21-year-old major, sought to confront the French at Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh). Washington’s Virginia-based force fought a skirmish in which a French officer was killed before reaching the fort. A strong French response compelled Washington to withdraw.

With the defeat of the French in 1763, the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes became part of British Canada. The Ohio Company merged with another land company to further exploit the region.

Settlers for the most part resented these arrangements and, in time, joined the Patriots in their struggle against the British in the American Revolution — with Washington serving as the Patriots’ commander in chief. In 1783, Britain ceded Ohio to the United States under the Treaty of Paris.

In 1788, Marietta became the first permanent American settlement in what was then known as the Old Northwest. During the ensuing decade, Indians and British traders were pushed out. Ohio entered the Union in 1803 as the 17th state."