Treaty of Logstown, 1752

Shawnee people settled it around 1725 to 1730, and Lenape, Cayuga, Seneca, and more Shawnee families joined them after a smallpox epidemic in 1733 and a drought in 1741, making it a multi-ethnic town.

In 1747 the Six Nations sent two headmen to oversee their allies there, the Seneca Tanacharison, called the Half King, and the Oneida Scarouady. In 1749 the Crown had granted the Ohio Company 500,000 acres between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers, on condition that it settle 100 families within seven years.

From June 1 to 13, 1752, Virginia commissioners Joshua Fry, James Patton, and Lunsford Lomax, with Christopher Gist, William Trent, and William Beverley for the Ohio Company, met representatives of the Six Nations and of the Lenape and Shawnee at Logstown. Virginia wanted the Six Nations to confirm the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, which it read as a cession of land along the southeast side of the Ohio, and the company wanted leave to build a fort at the Forks.

Tanacharison at first said the Lancaster sale reached no farther west than the Alleghenies, but he gave way, agreed to a fort at the mouth of the Monongahela, and promised that settlements southeast of the Ohio “shall be unmolested by us.” His word did not bind the Onondaga Council, and the Ohio peoples never agreed to English settlement; Scarouady warned, “we intend to keep our country clear of settlements.” France answered with a chain of new forts.

For Kentucky, Logstown was an early paper claim to land south of the Ohio; Gist had already crossed into Kentucky on his Ohio Company survey in 1751. Scarouady burned the town in 1754, the French began rebuilding it in 1755, and by late 1758 its people had left for new towns on the Scioto. Logstown is in Pennsylvania, so this story has no map pin.