Ohio Lands
Ohio occupies a unique place in the development of the public lands of the United States. No other state experienced so many different systems of original land survey.
As the first state formed out of the public domain, Ohio was the social laboratory in which Congress worked out not only the basic Federal Rectangular Survey System, but also first applied the basic elements for moving a portion of the public domain from wilderness to statehood.
Central to the statehood-making process was the rational system of land division worked out in Ohio, and it is the story of that development that we turn to in these pages. In any story about the land, it is important to know the people who inhabited it, and so we turn first to Ohio’s earliest inhabitants.
