OHIO

See also:

• COMPANY

COMPANY  , a name of two 18th century companies. organized for the colonization of the Ohio Valley . The first Ohio Company was organized in 1749, partly to aid in securing for the English control of the valley, then in dispute between England and France, and partly as a commercial project for tirade with the Indians . The company was composed of Virginians, including Thomas Lee (d . 1750) and the two brothers of George Washington, Lawrence (who succeeded to the management upon the death of Lee) and Augustine; and of Englishmen, including John Hanbury, a wealthy London merchant . George II. sanctioned a grant to the company of 500,000 acres generally N.W. of the Ohio, and to the eastward, between the Monongahela and the Kanawha rivers, but the grant was never actually issued . In 1750-1751 Christopher Gist, a skilful woodsman and surveyor, explored for the company the Ohio Valley as far as the mouth of the Scioto river . In 1752 the company had a pathway blazed between the small fortified posts at Will's Creek (Cumberland), Maryland, and at Redstone Creek (Brownsville), Pennsylvania, which it had established in 1750; but it was finally merged in the Walpole Company (an organization in which Benjamin Franklin was interested), which in 1772 had received from the British government a grant of a large tract lying along the southern bank of the Ohio as far west as the mouth of the Scioto river . The War of Independence interrupted colonization and nothing was accomplished . The second company, the Ohio Company of Associates, was formed at Boston on the 3rd of March 1786., The leaders in the movement were General Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper (1738-1792), Samuel Holden Parsons (1737-1789) and Manasseh Cutler . Dr Cutler was selected tonegotiate with Congress, and seems to have helped to secure the incorporation in the Ordinance for the government of the North-West Territory of the paragraphs which prohibited slavery and provided for public education and for the support of the ministry . Cutler's original intention was to buy for the Ohio Company only about 1,500,000 acres, but on the 27th of July Congress authorized a grant of about 5,000,000 acres of land for $3,500,000; a reduction of one-third was allowed for bad tracts, and it was also provided that the lands could be paid for in United States securities .