![]() Twenty years later, just 265 people lived in the new city of Bryan, the county seat. He used this sole white outpost as a base from which to annihilate Native American villages for fifty miles around.īy 1830, twenty-seven years after Ohio became a state, there were still only 387 people in Williams County. General “Mad” Anthony Wayne had the fort built in 1794. Fort Defiance was there, in what is now Defiance County. ![]() So, while the southern parts of Ohio were growing cities and towns, the northwest was still a wilderness. The Great Black Swamp covered much of northwest Ohio, including Williams County, making it so boggy that trails simply disappeared. Pancake-flat land, out of the way-tucked under Michigan, spooning against Indiana-at first it was such hard work just traveling across it that white settlers didn’t bother. Williams County was a place of hard work. People in Bryan, Ohio, have been telling that story for generations. So them old fellas worked twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day, and you never heard ’em complain. It was like they couldn’t be sure the factory would last, and they wanted to hang on to the farm, just in case-because a farm is forever, you know. ![]() ![]() Them old Dutchmen, them old Germans-they’d work all day in a factory in Bryan, then head home to work on the farm. ![]()
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