My fascination with discovering the exact location of historic events isn’t new. The first time I read “The Frontiersman,” Allan W. Eckert’s classic about the Midwest in the late eighteenth century, I became hooked on his use of footnotes to let the reader know where the event he had just read about occurred and what was there now.
That addiction has stayed with me. My 2021 book “A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus, Finding the Past in the Present in Ohio’s Capital City,” sent me off in search of places where famous people had played, worked, slept and died. I wanted to know the places in his hometown that humorist James Thurber wrote about and the locations of hotels, taverns and theaters where historical figures have visited, performed or dined.
The seed for that interest in Columbus had been planted when I researched and wrote the book “Chic, The extraordinary rise of Ohio State football and the tragic schoolboy athlete who made it happen”; in researching the era when Chic Harley lived and starred at Columbus East High School and OSU, I discovered many fascinating facts about people and places in the city. And again, there was that addition: Just where did that happen exactly?
That addition obviously put me on the Road to Wapatomica. It also showed me (as if I didn’t already know) that finding the exact locations of many historic sites isn’t easy,.
That’s one of the things that makes what Greg Shipley and his crew doing at the Fleckenstein farm in Fort Loramie, Ohio, for the past eight summers so impressive. Before these talented amateurs started digging, historians believed that the trading post built by Pierre-Louis de Lorimier (anglicized at Peter Lorimer) in 1769 and the fort built by Anthony Wayne in 1794 shortly after the battle of Fallen Timbers were located north of Loramie Creek (previously known at Pickawillany Creek) on the Fleckenstein farm, but didn’t know the precise locations.
Thanks to Shipley and his team, now we know. A few summers ago, they discovered burnt post holes and other charred artifacts in a farm field just to the west of Ohio route 66. Lorimer’s store had been burned to the ground by American soldiers in 1782. (Now, it’s buried under rows of corns.) Then, this summer they found the stained post holes for the north picket wall of Wayne’s fort, a discovery that even awed Shipley, who has been doing digs big and small for decades. You can see part of it and other parts of the farm in the YouTube video I took during my visit on August 14.
With the blessings of the Fleckenstein family, Shipley and his volunteers will be digging out there deep into the fall, making more discoveries in a place where no one was really looking. For people like me, who always want to know the exact site of something that happened hundreds of years ago and is usually disappointed to find out that there’s no way to know, I can only offer a loud, energetic “thank you.”
