Dearborn County IN Archives History - Books .....Page 39 1915
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Book Title: History Of Dearborn County Indiana

DEARBORN  COUNTY, INDIANA.	39
Vincennes and vicinity that the best blood of the Northwest Territory was found
at the time of the Revolutionary War. It was made the seat of justice of Knox
county when it was organized in 1790 and consequently it is by many years the
oldest county seat in the state. It became the first capital of Indiana
Territory in 1800 and saw it removed to Corydon in 1813 for the reason, so the
Legislature said, that it was too near the outskirts of civilization. In this
oldest city of the Mississippi valley still stands the house into which Governor
frarrison moved in 1804, and the house in which the Territorial Legislature held
its session in 1805 is still in an excellent state of preservation.

    Today Vincennes is a thriving city of fifteen thousand, with paved streets,
street cars, fine public buildings and public utility plants equal to any in the
state. It is the seat of a university which dates back more than a century.

FIRST SURVEYS AND EARLY SETTLERS.

    The next period in the history of the territory north of the Ohio begins
with the passage of a congressional act (May 20, 1785), which provided for the
present system of land surveys into townships six miles square. As soon as this
was put into operation, settlers—and mostly Revolutionary soldiers— began to
pour into the newly surveyed territory. A second Ohio Company was organized in
the spring of 1786, made up chiefly of Revolutionary officers and soldiers from
New England, and this company proposed to establish a state somewhere between
Lake Erie and the Ohio river. At this juncture Congress realized that definite
steps should be made at once for some kind of government over this extensive
territory, a territory which now includes the present states of Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and about a third of Minnesota. Various plans were
proposed in Congress and most of the sessions of 1786 and the first half of 1787
were consumed in trying to formulate a suitable form of government for the
extensive territory. These deliberations resulted in the famous Ordinance of
1787, which was finally passed on July 13, 1787.

ORDINANCE OF  1787.

    There have been many volumes written about this instrument of government and
to this day there is a difference of opinion as to who was its author. The
present article can do no more than merely sketch its outline and set forth the
main provisions. It was intended to provide only a tem-


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