place where the Little Miami empties into the Ohio River. And now we are getting very close indeed to what was really to be the first settlement of the Miami country. But we have not reached it yet.
Under Symmes plan, the only reward for his efforts was to be the privilege of himself buying 40,000 acres of land and selling the tract off at a profit to individual purchasers. His personal prestige was enhanced, very soon, by his appointment Feb. 19, 1788 , as judge of the Northwest Territory. With two other members of this tribunal, he would sit with Governor Arthur St. Clair and administer the laws of the whole territory. Well, it was certainly time to go westward ho. So Symmes left to Boudinot and Dayton the final straightening out with the Board of the Treasury of the status of their land company and started for the “Miami Purchase.”
Anna Symmes seems to have accompanied her father as far as Ft. Harmar on this trip, from which Dayton and Boudinot tried to recall Symmes because of a bad hitch that their negotiations soon reached in Congress. But Symmes was not a turn backer. He took a flat boat at Pittsburgh, went to Ft. Harmar, where the Ohio Company was now establishing the town of Marietta and then on down the river to Limestone, where he was met by Denman, Stites, Patterson, Filson and Israel Ludlow, the chief surveyor of the party.
This meeting was important, for it was then and there that the leaders decided what was what — or what they thought was what —and how it should be divided.
They agreed that Stites was to take over the region about the Little Miami, Denman, Patterson and Filson the middle portion, just opposite the mouth of the Licking and Symmes himself the region around the Great Miami — what is now approximately North Bend.
The men set to work immediately, collecting their little groups.
Benjamin Stites and his party had even decided on the name of their settlement — Columbia. They reached the location they had selected, just below the mouth of the Little Miami, on Nov. 18, 1788. They were the first actual settlers to arrive in the Miami region and therefore are credited with the very first settlement of the Miami Purchase.
Nearly a century later, in 1873, Columbia, which is five miles east of the heart of Cincinnati, became a part of that city. So we may accept the proud claim of the descendants of Benjamin Stites and the other settlers of this first boatload, that they were the earliest residents of what later became and remained for many years, the metropolis of the middle west.
There were 26 persons— men, women and children, in this historic boatload. We know their names, for these are inscribed on a monument erected, in 1899, on a knoll whereon once stood the first Protestant church of the Miami Purchase — the old Baptist Church, established in 1790 by Dr. Stephen Gano and erected in 1792. The knoll contains two acres of ground, deeded
