Big Bottom Massacre

On January 2, 1791, warriors from the Lenape and Wyandot peoples carried out a deadly attack on American settlers, an event that came to be known as the Big Bottom massacre. The site of this violence lay close to what is now Stockport, Ohio, and the killings stand as one episode within the broader Northwest Indian Wars, a struggle in which native Americans across the Ohio Country fought to drive American settlers from lands they claimed as their own.

In the years after the Revolutionary War, the federal government began offering tracts of the Ohio Country for sale, largely to companies that pledged to settle and improve the land. One band of squatters had pushed into this region and built a settlement on the low-lying floodplain, known locally as "bottom" land, bordering the Muskingum River. Their location sat roughly 30 miles (48 km) north of Marietta, Ohio, itself established by the Ohio Company of Associates. Lenape and Wyandot fighters descended on this settlement determined to force the intruders out. They broke into a blockhouse still under construction and killed eleven men, one woman, and two children, though different sources give varying casualty counts. Three settlers were taken captive by the attackers, with at least one later dying in captivity, while four others managed to flee into the surrounding forest.

As hostilities spread further across the region, the Ohio Company of Associates pushed for stronger measures to protect settlers throughout the Northwest Territory. Multiple native tribes had banded together in an effort to push out the newcomers and hold onto their territory, and the fighting between them dragged on until 1794.

Today, the Ohio History Connection oversees the three-acre grounds of Big Bottom Park, a property now included on the National Register of Historic Places. Beyond the historical markers described elsewhere, visitors to the site will find a marble obelisk standing 12 feet (3.7 m) tall, along with picnic tables and signage detailing the location's past.

Attack by Lenape and Wyandot warriors

Roughly three dozen settlers connected with the Company had moved north from Marietta, establishing themselves illegally on land east of the Muskingum that the Company had no legal claim to. As friction with the region's American Indians grew sharper, Colonel William Stacy, a veteran of earlier fighting, made a dramatic journey in late December 1790, skating thirty miles along the frozen Muskingum to alert his two sons at Big Bottom that danger might be near.

His warning proved prophetic. On January 2, 1791, warriors from the Lenape and Wyandot descended on the settlement from the north, killing a number of the people living there. Settlers and other Americans later gave this event the grim label of the "Big Bottom Massacre." The Ohio Historical Society records that the toll included nine men, one woman, and two children.

Among those who perished were both of Colonel Stacy's sons. John Stacy died in the assault itself, while his brother Philemon was seized and carried off as a captive, succumbing sometime afterward.

Historical markers

Obadiah Brokaw, on whose land the old blockhouse once stood, paid out of his own pocket to raise a monument to the massacre in 1905. That same year, in the fall, ownership of the monument along with the two surrounding acres passed to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, an organization that would later become the Ohio Historical Society. Today the Ohio Historical Society oversees Big Bottom Memorial Park, located in Stockport, Ohio. A marker honoring the victims of the massacre was installed at the park's entrance by the historical society in 2002, with funding assistance coming in part from the Ohio Bicentennial Commission.

Elsewhere, at the corner of Butler Street and Front Street in Marietta, Ohio, stands another historical marker bearing the names of everyone who died at Big Bottom. This marker dates back to 1893, when it was put in place by the New Century Historical Society.