Greene County

The ground was a Shawnee town before it was a county. Old Chillicothe stood on the Little Miami three miles north of where Xenia would go, a stockaded village of perhaps eleven hundred people with a council house at its center. The renegade Simon Girty, a white man who had gone over to the Shawnee, lived here among them, helped raise that council house, and worked to turn the town against the settlers. Through the 1780s the Kentucky militias came up the rivers to burn it: Bowman in 1779, George Rogers Clark in 1780 and again in 1782, Logan in 1786, Harmar in 1790, the last to reach it. By the time the Galloways and the others came north to settle in 1798, the town was gone. Greene County was organized in 1803 on the ground it had stood on.

The village ran about a quarter mile along a low rise above the Little Miami, the huts set out on the high ground inside a stockade that held the council house, the commonest down along the creek bank. Below lay the bottoms, and on the south side of Massies Creek a prairie that had been the Shawnee cornfield since at least 1782. The two streams nearly meet here, close enough that men later argued whether the ground between them was an island. This is the heart of the county's water, the Little Miami gathering Massies Creek and Shawnee Creek and carrying them toward the Ohio. The Shawnee held the best of this ground first.

When Logan's men reached Old Chillicothe in 1786, almost everyone had run. One old chief stayed. Muluntha dressed in his finest, a cocked hat, a tobacco pouch in one hand and a calumet in the other, and walked out to smoke the pipe of peace. Some shook his hand. Then he came to McGary, the Kentuckian whose recklessness had cost the militia the slaughter at Blue Licks, and McGary split the old man's skull with a tomahawk and swore he would do the same to any white man who blamed him for it. They burned the town and the corn and rode home. The Shawnee did not come back.