Trumbull County, Ohio: History
No Native American settlements have ever formally been identified in Trumbull County. Early settlers did believe they noted an ancient village site in Kinsman Township, a more contemporary site in Hartford Township, and several strange stone constructions were noted in the Black Ash Swamp by early Bristol residents, now known as the Grand River Preserve. Many presumably different groups of Native Americans were still frequenting camps in the vicinity of Newton Falls and near the Champion Township–Warren Township border when U.S. settlers first began to settle there. Several of the names of specific Native persons are echoed across most of these early residents' histories, namely Cadashaway, Paqua and Kiogg. A memorial stone piles believed to have been Native in origin was situated on the west bank of the Mahoning River, but was later removed for construction purposes.
Before 1600, the area was ambiguously between the territories of the Erie people to the east and the Whittlesey culture to the west. It is unknown precisely where one tribe's territory ended and the other began. After the Beaver Wars, the area was frequented by traveling Lenape, Wyandot, Ottawa, Shawnee and Seneca, who all had settlements nearby for a time and shared the valley's animal, food and medicinal resources. They also regularly panned for salt in the marshes. The Natives collectively used this area as a shared hunting ground, but had to give up ownership of the region for settlement as punishment for participating in the Northwest Indian War.
In the early years of the European discovery and exploration of the New World, the land that became Trumbull County was originally claimed by French explorers as part of colonial New France. Their settlements had some fur traders who interacted with Native American tribes in this area. After losing the Seven Years' War to Great Britain, France ceded the territory in 1763, which became the Province of Quebec.
Following the United States' victory in the American Revolutionary War, the British ceded the land including modern Trumbull County. It was part of the Connecticut Western Reserve, a region claimed by the Connecticut Colony and later state of Connecticut. As first organized, Trumbull County consisted of the entire area of the Connecticut Western Reserve before population increased, and it was divided into smaller counties. The county's largest city, Warren, was originally founded as the capitol of the Western Reserve territory. Connecticut relinquished its claim to some of the lands in 1786, but retained ownership of the eastern portion south of Lake Erie. It sold much of the Western Reserve in 1795 to a group of speculators who operated as the Connecticut Land Company; they sold it in portions for development by new settlers.
Early residents reported that Native Americans still frequented the area until roughly 1811. Some of the final Native residents were camped along the Grand River in Mespotamia Township during the war, leading to an upsetting altercation in which the locals found and ransacked their camp and, as a warning to leave, carved an image of a Native man into a tree and shot it. The Natives responded by carving a white man into a tree without a mark on it, but seem to have later felt it was unsafe to stay and left. …