Greenville is a city in Darke County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is near Ohio’s western edge, about 33 miles (53 km) northwest of Dayton. The population was 12,786 at the 2020 census.
At a Glance
- County: Darke County
- County seat of Darke County
- State: Ohio
History of Greenville
Indigenous tribes in the region included the Wyandot, the Delaware, the Shawnee, the Ottawa, the Chippewa, the Pottawatomi, the Miami, the Wea, the Kickapoo, the Piankasha, the Kaskaskia and the Eel River. These participated in the Northwest Indian War, their effort to repel European Americans from the Northwest Territory.
Greenville is the historic location of Fort Greene Ville, built in November 1793 by General Anthony Wayne’s Legion of the United States during the Northwest Indian War. Named for Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene, its defenses covered about 55 acres (220,000 m), making it North America’s largest wooden fort. It was a training ground and base of operations for the approximately 3,000 soldiers of the Legion and Kentucky Militia before their August 1794 march northward to the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The Treaty of Greenville was signed at the fort on August 3, 1795, with chiefs of the tribes that had confronted the U.S. This brought an end to the Indian wars in the area and opened the Northwest Territory for European American settlement.
In 1805 or 1806, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa established an illegal settlement in Greenville. In peaceful protest of the boundary line of the Treaty of Greenville, their group occupied the confluence of Mud Creek and Greenville Creek until 1808. Under pressure from Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison and the burgeoning population of settlers, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, and their followers relocated to Prophetstown, Indiana, near which the intertribal confederacy was shattered at the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tenskwatawa visited Greenville by request in 1826 as he accompanied the Shawnee during their removal by the U.S. Army.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Greenville, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.