Ohio is the 17th state of the United States of America. We in Ohio think of our state as a "Midwestern" state. People who live on the east coast of the U.S. describe Ohio as a western state, but people who live west of the Mississippi River think of Ohio as an eastern state.
Residents of Georgia or Florida say Ohio is a northern state. However, if you lived in Michigan or Wisconsin, Ohio would be south of you.
What does all this mean? Only that Ohio is a lot of different things to different people. Long ago the Iroquois people named the river that forms the southern and eastern boundaries of our state.
They called the river a word that sounded like "O-Y-O," meaning "great water." When Europeans heard the word "O-Y-O," they turned it into the word we used today: Ohio. Soon the entire area north and west of the Ohio River was known as Ohio Country.
Our state is an important one in this nation. As you will learn, most of the land areas that became states of the U.S. were patterned after Ohio.
