The town was settled in 1788, when Gen. Rufus Putnam led 47 former Revolutionary War officers in a crude flatboat to the rivers’ junction, where they built a fortified settlement. George Washington — who owned land in the area — actively encouraged the arduous journey.
Visitors can tour Campus Martius on Second Street, the territories’ first civilian settlement. The museum encloses Putnam’s home on its original foundation; thick bolted shutters, rough floors and an open hearth testify to the pioneers’ hard life.
“Campus Martius isn’t fancied up like Williamsburg,” said James O’Donnell, a longtime history professor at Marietta College. “But if you want to see how a middle-class family lived in the 1790s — sleeping eight to a room and cooking over an open fire — here it is.”
A trolley tour is probably the best way to begin a Marietta visit. Led by local guides, the trolleys cruise past landmarks like the Meigs House, built in 1802 and home of a postmaster general — aptly named Return J. Meigs — under President James Madison; the Betsey Mills Club, founded in 1911 to help young women move from farm to city life; and the stately Dawes House, from whose steps Charles G. Dawes accepted the nomination as President Calvin Coolidge’s running mate in 1924. (Dawes, who later feuded bitterly with Coolidge, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on World War I reparations.)
One of the tour’s chief attractions is Mound Cemetery on Fifth Street. Said to be the resting place of more Revolutionary War officers than any graveyard in the nation, it also has the so-called Great Mound, or Conus, built by Indians as long ago as 800 B.C.
Marietta’s politicians were early protectors of civil rights. In 1802 a passionate speech by Ephraim Cutler, a delegate from Marietta, swayed a single constitutional convention vote and kept Ohio from becoming a slave state. The abolitionist fervor surged through the 1800s, and Marietta College and a yellow brick home at 401 Fort Street were Underground Railroad stops.
