Fort Harmar Resources

Congress authorized it, Major General Richard Butler picked the site, Josiah Harmar gave the order, Major John Doughty designed it, and the men under his command and the commands of Captain Jonathan Heart, Lieutenant James Bradford, and Lieutenant Ebenezer Frothingham built the fort.

On October 25, 1785, Captain Doughty and his company, along with Heart, Bradford, and Frothingham and their commands, left Fort McIntosh for the Muskingum. The 150 men arrived on November 5 and began construction of pentagonal Fort Harmar on the west side of the mouth of the river. Although the first regular detachment moved into their new quarters on November 30, the fort was not completed until spring 1786.

The fort was one of the first built by the U.S. military and site of the first U.S. artillery brought into Ohio. Perhaps unique in U.S. frontier history, one of the original purposes of the fort was to forcibly evict settlers already living north of the Ohio, derided as “squatters,” not to protect them from Indians. Congress mandated their eviction because they lacked government-issued land titles. Another purpose of the fort was to protect federal survey crews charged with gridding the Seven Ranges in southeastern Ohio for sale at public auction.

The fort was unusual in other ways. Its log walls were laid up horizontally rather than stuck vertically into the ground; it had five sides rather than the usual four; and for three years, 1786-9, it served as U.S. Army field headquarters for the entire western frontier. Ultimate military command, however, rested with Secretary at War Henry Knox in New York City.

Fort Harmar also was distinctive due to its extensive gardens and orchards west and northwest of the fort. For their own use, officers and soldiers planted beans, peas, squashes, and melons which, given the rich river bottom soil surrounding the fort, grew in abundance. They also planted a peach orchard, a variety of which came to be known as the Doughty peach.

On April 7, 1788, a vanguard of 48 Ohio Company settlers, led by Rufus Putnam, arrived from New England to establish a town, first called Adelphia, across the Muskingum from the fort. In July Northwest Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair and Territorial Secretary Winthrop Sargent arrived at Adelphia — the name soon changed to Marietta — to establish civil government and federal control of the territory.

A pressing task of the federal officials was to conduct a treaty with discontented Indian tribes in order to satisfy their grievances, including land claims. After an initial attempt to treat with select tribes at the falls of the Muskingum (present Philo) failed in summer 1788 (due to a surprise attack by renegade Chippewa), St. Clair rescheduled the treaty for late fall and, for protection, relocated it to the vicinity of Fort Harmar. The sessions began December 13, 1788, and ended one month later. On January 9, 1789, two separate treaties were signed near Fort Harmar. However, these treaties failed to prevent increasingly frequent raids by both whites and Indians along the Ohio frontier, especially to and from Kentucky. As immigrants flooded downriver in search of land, so did the location and intensity of violence. To protect those settlers, in early 1789 the government decided to relocate both its territorial capital and its military headquarters from Marietta to Losantiville (Cincinnati). In December 1789 St. Clair and Harmar left Fort Harmar for the new headquarters at newly constructed Fort Washington. By January 1790, and throughout the year, only a few soldiers were stationed at Fort Harmar. In their stead, local militia provided defense for Marietta and the Company’s nascent perimeter settlements at Belpre and Waterford.

Although used for various purposes for short times, the neglected fort decayed, became more or less derelict, and was finally demolished in the summer 1791. A plaque near Harmar Elementary School marks its approximate location. The precise location of the fort cannot be determined. As the large influx of settlers in the early 1800s cleared more and more fields and forests in the Muskingum valley, the river became increasingly muddy, filling its bottom with silt and sediment. The increased side pressure eroded its banks and broadened the river, encroaching upon the site and carrying it away piecemeal. By 1850 more than half of the original ground enclosed by the fort, including remnants of the stone well which had stood in its center, had slipped over the bank of the Muskingum. Later dam construction on the Ohio likely further inundated the site, leaving most of it under the Muskingum at its mouth, extending out into the Ohio.

From Richard Walker, Ph.D., The Theft of Ohio: Treaty of Fort Harmar 1789. (MSS., 2009).