The New International Encyclopædia/Ohio Company

OHIO COMPANY. In American history, the name applied to two companies organized for the purpose of exploiting and making settlements in the Ohio Valley. The first was an association of prominent Virginia planters and some London merchants, and was organized in 1749. It received from George II. a grant of 500,000 acres of land lying chiefly south of the Ohio River, in what is now West Virginia. Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia Council, was the originator of the scheme, and Lawrence Washington, a brother of George Washington, was one of the leading members. In 1772 the Walpole Company secured from the King a grant of the whole territory southeast of the Ohio from the Pennsylvania boundary to a point opposite the mouth of the Scioto. The Ohio Company now became merged in the Walpole Company. A second company, known as the ‘Ohio Company of Associates,’ was formed at Boston in March, 1786, by officers and soldiers, chiefly of the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island lines, for the purchase and settlement of Western lands. Gen. Rufus Putnam, Samuel H. Parsons, and Manasseh Cutler were chosen as directors, and the lands selected for purchase lay along the Ohio River on both sides of the Muskingum. After considerable delay the company secured a grant upon favorable terms from Congress and the contract was formally signed in October, 1787, by the Treasury Board of Congress and by Dr. Cutler and Winthrop Sargent, acting as agents of the Ohio Company. In December, several companies of surveyors, carpenters, smiths, farmers, and others, under the leadership of General Putnam, emigrated to the new territory, arriving in April, 1788. Opposite Fort Harmer they laid out a town which was named Marietta in honor of the French Queen, Marie Antoinette. Consult: King, History of Ohio (Boston, 1888); and McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol i. (New York, 1883). See Ohio.