Ashtabula County, Ohio: History
At the time of contact, Ashtabula County appears to have been divided between the Erie people in the east and the Whittlesey culture in the west. The Erie were an Iroquoian people, who were organized like the Iroquois, believed in a similar religion and lived in longhouses in palisaded villages and may have had a burial ground at what is now Erie, PA, whereas the uncontacted Whittlesey are mostly believed to have been Algonquians, who also lived in longhouses at the time of contact (after having gone through prior periods of living in wigwams and Fort Ancient style houses) in villages surrounded by earthen berm walls and had smaller, local burial grounds near each settlement. The French were the first to explore the Great Lakes by ship and, having never met the inhabitants, saw the continuation of longhouses and mistakenly assumed the entire region had belonged to the Erie. Both tribes were likely eradicated by the Iroquois Confederacy during the Beaver Wars (approx. 1630–1701), which later bled into the first of the myriad conflicts collectively called the French-Indian Wars, probably specifically some time during the 1650s. The Jesuit Relations claim rumors of infighting between the Erie and an unknown nation to the west of them who were similar to other Algonquian peoples the French had already encountered in the years prior to both tribes' eradication. Three known village sites have been documented by archaeologists from this period in Windsor (located inside what is now a private children's Summer Camp) and two at Conneaut. Following the Beaver Wars, and the first conflict of the French-Indian Wars coming to an end in 1701, an official border between England and France was established at what is now the Ohio-PA border, leading to English forts being erected all along the Pennsylvania side that became crucial in the later conflicts of the French-Indian Wars over the next 50 years.
After Europeans arrived in the Americas, the land that became Ashtabula County was originally part of the French colony of Illinois Country, which was ceded in 1764 to Great Britain, along with the rest of Canada (New France) and incorporated into the Province of Quebec, though generally came to be referred to as Ohio Country. The Iroquois placed a vassal tribe of mostly captured Hurons in the region, who later broke free of their control when the French pushed Iroquois and English influence from the area in the 1690s. This group, known as the Wyandot, later ceded settlement of most of the territory roughly between what is now Cleveland, Akron, the Mahoning River and the Ohio-PA border to be a common hunting ground, shared by themselves, the Seneca, Shawnee, Lenape and even the Ottawa, or Mississauga, who lived at the western end of Lake Erie, at the time. The Ottawa were the only residents, who maintained two known hunting camps in Ashtabula County- one at Conneaut, and the other at Andover. The Lenape maintained a handful of villages in western Pennsylvania and one at Youngstown, in Mahoning County. After the end of the Northwest Indian War, (a conflict which erupted shortly after the American Revolution between the fledgling United States and all the remaining tribes of the Great Lakes region in territory the US claimed) in the 1790s, the Natives were made to turn over ownership of the area to the US via the Treaty of Greenville, and the remaining Ottawa residents were evicted. …