1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Greenville (Ohio)

GREENVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Darke county, Ohio, U.S.A., on Greenville Creek, 36 m. N.W. of Dayton. Pop. (1900) 5501; (1910) 6237. It is served by the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis and the Cincinnati Northern railways, and by interurban electric railways. It is situated about 1050 ft. above sea-level and is the trade centre of a large and fertile agricultural district, producing cereals and tobacco. It manufactures lumber, foundry products, canned goods and creamery products and has grain elevators and tobacco warehouses. In the city is a Carnegie library, and 3 m. distant there is a county Children’s Home and Infirmary. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Greenville occupies the site of an Indian village and of Fort Greenville (built by General Anthony Wayne in 1793 and burned in 1796). Here, on the 3rd of August 1795, General Wayne, the year after his victory over the Indians at Fallen Timbers, concluded with them the treaty of Greenville, the Indians agreeing to a cessation of hostilities and ceding to the United States a considerable portion of Ohio and a number of small tracts in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan (including the sites of Sandusky, Toledo, Defiance, Fort Wayne, Detroit, Mackinac, Peoria and Chicago), and the United States agreeing to pay to the Indians $20,000 worth of goods immediately and an annuity of goods, valued at $9500, for ever. The tribes concerned were the Wyandots, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the Ottawas, the Chippewas, the Pottawatomies, the Miamis, the Weeas, the Kickapoos, the Piankashas, the Kaskaskias and the Eel-river tribe. Tecumseh lived at Greenville from 1805 to 1809, and a second Indian treaty was negotiated there in July 1814 by General W. H. Harrison and Lewis Cass, by which the Wyandots, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the (Ohio) Senecas and the Miamis agreed to aid the United States in the war with Great Britain. The first permanent white settlement of Greenville was established in 1808 and the town was laid out in the same year. It was made the county-seat of the newly erected county in 1809, was incorporated as a town in 1838 and chartered as a city in 1887.