1836 tussle underscores Michigan/Ohio rivalry

Michigan won the only real skirmish with Ohio during “The Toledo War” on April 26, 1836. The Michigan Militia was under the command of Col. William McNair, the undersheriff of Lenawee County. 

McNair mobilized a posse of about 30 men. They marched a distance of 14 miles south from Adrian, the county seat, and encountered an Ohio surveying crew that was working in the rural Michigan countryside. The site was 30 miles west of Toledo. 

Ohio Gov. Robert Lucas had sent his surveyors into the Michigan territory to re-mark the boundary line between Ohio and Michigan, to ensure – by hook or by crook – that the planned Lake Erie port city of Toledo would have an Ohio address (although the land rightfully belonged to Michigan). 

McNair’s men intended to arrest the survey team and its guards for trespassing on the land of Col. Eli Phillips, also an officer in the Michigan Militia. (Phillips had established his home and farm here in 1833 at an intersection of two roads. He was the first settler, so the place was called Phillips Corners.) 

Historians named the confrontation as the “Battle of Phillips Corners.” When McNair’s posse moved in, the surveying party scattered. Nine Ohio guardsmen made a dash for the nearby woods. McNair’s men fired a volley over their heads, wounding none but capturing all. The Ohio guardsmen were bound and carted off to the Lenawee County jail.

 

McNair was hailed as a hero. The press noted that “his posse could have shot all them Ohio boys, had they had a mind to.” 

The boundary dispute was tied to Michigan’s petition for statehood. Ohio had been a state since 1803. Its congressional delegation had enough clout to block Michigan’s request to join the union…until Michigan conceded that the 468-square-mile “Toledo Strip” belonged to Ohio. 

Michigan’s territorial governor Stevens T. Mason complained bitterly. In an attempt to sweeten the pot for Michigan, U.S. President Andrew Johnson and congressional leaders agreed to let Michigan take 9,000 square miles of land on the Upper Peninsula between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior from the Wisconsin Territory. 

Early explorers issued a verdict that the Upper Peninsula was “a sterile region…destined by soil and climate to remain forever a wilderness.” 

Mason finally accepted the terms, as it was deemed to be Michigan’s only path to become the 26th state in 1837. At the time, pundits said Ohio got a “real diamond,” and Michigan got “a box of rocks.”

 Toledo was the planned end point of the Miami and Erie Canal. Construction had begun in 1825 to connect the Ohio River at Cincinnati to Lake Erie at the mouth of the Maumee River, a 274-mile project. Ohio had envisioned that Toledo would rise to become a major metropolis, connected via canals to the Mississippi River.

 That dream fizzled out. The canal system opened in 1845, but the arrival of the railroad era dramatically ate into the amount of freight moving through the canal. The catastrophic Great Dayton Flood of 1913 destroyed much of the canal’s infrastructure along the southern portion of the route, where it paralleled the Great Miami River. After that, the canal was permanently abandoned. 

Not only did Michigan lose Toledo, it lost Philips Corners, which became Seward in Fulton County, Ohio. (Seward was home to Czech Dancers Polka Club and its open-air Czech Hall pavilion.) 

But when Michigan opened that box of Upper Peninsula rocks, out jumped vast deposits of copper and iron ore.