An Indigenous History of Wayne County, Ohio

For thousands of years, different cultures have called Wayne County home.

While Wayne County has many inhabitants who trace their ancestry back to Europe, the earliest Wayne County residents were indigenous to North America. Because many of the records we have were written by white Americans, information about Indigenous people in Wayne County is rare and often biased. This exhibit pulls together information from Wayne County and other places in Ohio to fill in the gaps and put local stories into broader context. In Wayne County and Ohio, Indigenous people lived, hunted, traded, farmed, and died on this land, long before it was named Wayne County. Today, the descendants of Ohio’s Indigenous inhabitants work to preserve their histories and cultures.

Land is very important to Indigenous people, including those who lived in our area. Land is not just a place: it is connected to Indigenous identities, cultures, survival, and their ability to have self-determination.¹ Mucher, 14. Removal meant risking all of these things.

This exhibit will take you through the Pre-Contact Period, or Wayne County before the arrival of Europeans, and the Contact Period, after European settlers arrived in Ohio, up through today.

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