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Indigenous Peoples of Paulding County

Era: Pre-Settlement (before 1820)
Source: Started as a draft note for pauldinghistory.wordpress.com citing native-land.ca; expanded using Randy Buchman's 1993 Old Settlers' Day talk, reported by Melinda Krick in the Paulding County Progress (see this archive's transcription of that talk).
Rights & source note: Original short note plus excerpted newspaper reporting; see the Buchman article entry for its own rights note.
Tags: indigenous historykickapoopeoriamiamimascoutenottawadelawareshawneemingohuronwyandotnative landpre-settlementrandy buchmanoquanoxa

This entry began as an incomplete draft note. It’s now substantially expanded using a 1993 historian’s account, but still isn’t a finished, primary-sourced history — treat it as a strong starting point rather than a final word.

A historian’s account, 1993

Defiance College history professor Randy Buchman spoke at the John Paulding Historical Society Museum’s Old Settlers’ Day in 1993, tracing the peoples who occupied this area from about 10,000 BC to the 1830s. The full account is transcribed in this archive as “Buchman Traces County Indians.” In brief:

c. 10,000–12,000 years ago: early post-glacial “hunter” peoples
c. 200–300 AD onward: “early woodland” peoples begin growing food alongside hunting and gathering
Late 1500s–1620: the Beaver Wars and Iroquois-Sioux conflict drive Indigenous people out of the area
1701 treaty onward: Huron (now calling themselves Wyandot), Ottawa, Miami, Mingo, Delaware, and Shawnee peoples move back into the region; Kickapoo and Mascouten groups also present
1760s–1776: French-allied Miami move to western Indiana as British control solidifies; Ottawa become more entrenched along the Maumee
1796–1819: Ottawa, Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami activity returns, including Delaware villages on the Auglaize; after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, a Delaware village relocates south near Oakwood and becomes known as Oquanoxa’s village
Through the early 1800s: Delaware and Miami peoples leave the area for Indiana; Ottawa remain in Ohio until about 1832

A modern lookup

The original draft note read simply: “Paulding is the land of the Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Peoria, and Miami (Miami Nation History),” sourced from native-land.ca.

A more specific native-land.ca “Place Search” lookup for 15464 Charloe Trail, Paulding, Ohio 45879 returns:

Nations: Peoria, Kaskaskia, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Myaamia (Miami)
Treaties: Cession 87

“Myaamia” is the Miami people’s own name for themselves, as used by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The specific historical treaty behind native-land.ca’s “Cession 87” label hasn’t been confirmed here — that would be worth tracking down before treating it as a citable fact.

Other entries in this archive touch on Indigenous history from different angles worth cross-referencing: the 1882 Historical Hand-Atlas and the county engineer’s overview both describe Ottawa and Pottawatomie presence and Oquanoxa’s village near Charloe, Charloe: “A Village by a Stream” covers the village and its namesake, Charloe Peter, directly, and the 1973 Maumee River map plots Delaware, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Wyandot towns and trails across the wider region. Native-land.ca’s territorial mapping and these historical sources don’t necessarily agree on nation, name spelling, or era — that reflects real complexity (overlapping and shifting territorial claims over time, and differing conventions between 19th-century settler sources and modern Indigenous-led mapping projects) rather than a simple error to resolve.