‘Toledo War’ is one of U.S. history’s most bizarre conflicts

Michigan missed out on getting “Frogtown,” but it was the price that the territory had to pay to Ohio in order to attain statehood in 1837. 

This is the story of the “Toledo War,” which almost reached the boiling point in 1835-6. It was a heated dispute over the Ohio-Michigan boundary line. 

There were no fatalities, so it’s a skirmish that Michicologists don’t mind including in the middle elementary grades’ curriculum, as an example of political shenanigans. 

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that the vast territory surrounding the Great Lakes could be carved into a handful of new states. This land would become Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

The law stated that the border separating Indiana and Ohio from Michigan was to run on “a west to east line” drawn from the southern-most point of Lake Michigan until it intersected with Lake Erie. 

However, the best available maps depicted Lake Michigan’s southern tip as being several miles north of its true location. As a result, the mouth of the Maumee River and the future city of Toledo ended up in northern Ohio, rather than in southern Michigan where it belonged. 

The boundary discrepancy became a heated debate after Ohio was admitted to the union in 1803. Ohio claimed it owned all the land around the Maumee River.

Michigan was still just a territory at the time, but officials contended that a 468-square-mile slice of land rightfully belonged to Michigan. This piece of geography later became known as the “Toledo Strip.” 

The Ohio-Michigan border is about 8 miles out of whack at the point today where I-75 crosses from one state into the other. Most all of Toledo, north of its Rossford suburb, could and should be part of Michigan, historians say. 

Back in the early 1800s, the Maumee River basin was called the Great Black Swamp, and the village that sprung up there was originally known as Frogtown, because of all the croaking frogs that inhabited the swamp. 

(Frogtown became Toledo…apparently for no good reason other than that Toledo sounded better to attract industrial development.) 

When Michigan sought admission to the union in 1833, Ohio’s congressmen said the only way Michigan would be voted in as a state was for it to back down on its claim for ownership of the “Toledo Strip.” 

At the time, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams supported Michigan, saying, “Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right is so clearly on one side and all the power is so overwhelmingly on the other.”

Stevens T. Mason, who was the territorial governor of Michigan, wasn’t about to cede the “Toledo Strip” to Ohio. Ohio’s governor Robert Lucas appealed to President Andrew Jackson, who had succeeded Adams, to step in and validate Ohio’s preferred boundary line. 

Robert Lucas

The situation was a hot potato. Jackson didn’t want to lose any political points in Ohio, but his Attorney General Benjamin Butler said that “until Congress dictated otherwise, the territory of Michigan has the legitimate legal claim to the land.” 

Hence, Jackson implored Congress to approve the North Ohio Boundary Bill of 1836. Ohio got the Toledo Strip. Michigan got the “Upper Peninsula,” which was fondly referred to as “a region of perpetual snows.” 

The deal included the guarantee that Michigan would be inducted as the nation’s 26th state on Jan. 27, 1837.