Fayette County, Indiana: History
The county and its seat Connersville rose from unincorporated territory surrounding an isolated trading post on the Whitewater River to the principal conduit for settlement of northern and central Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois during the early 19th century, to an automotive manufacturing powerhouse in the first half of the 20th century, suffered recession and post-war industrial revival before declining to one of the poorest counties in Indiana and the central midwest. After early settlement, during industrial growth, the county's population concentrated in the town of Connersville. In 1841, Connersville became the first, and remains the only, incorporated town (chartered as a city in 1869) in the county.
The oldest civilizations in the Fayette County area, known as Mound Builders, occupied the area between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. They are known for their distinctive earthen mounds which can be found throughout the area, as well as a variety of metal and pottery artifacts left behind in those mounds across Indiana and Ohio.
Nomadic Miami, Shawnee, and Potawatomi peoples inhabited the area when European explorers arrived and began to form settlements, between the 1670s and early 1800s, and were in the area for at least two hundred years prior to the earliest European explorers. The Delaware Indians, displaced from their ancestral homelands in the east, would later migrate to the Whitewater Valley.
At the organization of the Indiana Territory from the Northwest Territory in 1800, the Northwest Territory including present day Indiana was divided between Knox County (seat Vincennes) in the south, and Wayne County, including northern Ohio (seat Detroit) north of Fort Wayne in the north. By the Ohio Enabling Act of 1802 settlers in the Whitewater valley became citizens of the Indiana Territory and residents of Clark county, which had been organized from the eastern part of Knox in 1801, with the county seat at Falls of the Ohio, later called Clarksville.
On September 30, 1809, the United States, on behalf of the Northwest Territory and Governor William Henry Harrison, concluded the Treaty of Fort Wayne, part of whose terms included the purchase from the Indians of a strip of land locally called "The 12 Mile Purchase" parallel to and west of "The Gore", enclosing the Whitewater Valley and comprising the largest portion of the future county. Conclusion of the treaty essentially ended Indian occupation of the county and cleared the way for settlement.
In southeastern Indiana, a part of the Northwest Territory nicknamed "The Gore" was ceded from Ohio to Indiana in 1803 and became Dearborn County. Wayne and Franklin counties were carved from Dearborn and Clark counties in 1811. At that time much of southeastern Indiana was divided between the two latter counties. …