Steubenville, Ohio – 1803 River Town

Ohio River town that Meriwether Lewis passed under sail at two in the afternoon on September 6, 1803. He described it as small, well built and thriving, with several respectable families, where five years earlier there had been wilderness. The town had been laid out in 1797 or 1798 on the site of Fort Steuben, a federal blockhouse of the late 1780s that was gone years before Lewis passed; he does not mention the fort or say that he landed.

See the Steubenville place page and Lewis’s entry for September 6, 1803.

Sources: Lewis’s 1803 journal, in Quaife (1916), 36-37; Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 2, editor’s notes to September 6, 1803; Hawes, Ohio State Gazetteer (1860).