Two Ohio historical markers will be dedicated locally on Indigenous Peoples Day, Monday, in Lebanon and North Bend. They tell the story of the forced removal of the Wyandot people from Ohio in 1843. The markers are among 13 being installed over seven years along the Wyandot Removal Trail from Northern Ohio to the Ohio River.
UC history professor Rebecca Wingo says the sign being unveiled in Lebanon details how people flocked to watch tribal members walking from Upper Sandusky to Cincinnati.
"At every point along the Wyandot removal trail, crowds of spectators flooded the streets to watch the procession roll through town," Wingo tells WVXU. "Everybody in the state of Ohio already knew that this was the last tribe to leave the state, and they wanted to witness it. But they also poked and they prodded and they stole from the Wyandot, making an already hard experience even harder."
There are no federally recognized tribes headquartered in Ohio today. They were all forcibly removed in the 1700s and 1800s.
The Wyandot were the last. Forced from their homelands in 1843, more than 600 people walked over 150 miles south to Cincinnati, where they boarded steamboats bound for Kansas City. They numbered just around 200 by the time they were displaced a final time to Oklahoma.
The second marker being unveiled Monday in North Bend details how the Wyandot fought both with and against William Henry Harrison.
"When the Wyandots boarded the steamboats in Cincinnati and started moving to lands unknown in Kansas Territory, they asked the steamboat captain to cut the engine, and they held a moment of silence as they drifted past William Henry Harrison's tomb," says Wingo. "Then the steamboat captain fired off a cannon, and the principal chief of Wyandot Nation reportedly said, 'Farewell, Ohio, and her brave.' It was their final goodbye to the state, final goodbye to the life that they knew, and their final goodbye to an adversary and friend that they respected."
The first marker in the series was installed in October 2025 beside the Wyandot Mission Church, the oldest Methodist mission in the country, according to Congressional record. The mission church and three acres of land upon which it sits, along with a portion of a the accompanying cemetery, were deeded back to the Wyandotte Nation in 2019.
That new marker delineates the beginning of the Wyandot Removal Trail. It replaced a previous one that described the forced removal as a "departure" and a "journey." That didn't sit well with Wingo, and she and some of her students began working with the Wyandotte Nation, headquartered in Oklahoma, to correct that history, and tell the broader story.
There currently are around 7,356 enrolled citizens of the Wyandotte Nation. Some are expected to be in attendance at Monday's dedications.
"I think a lot of people of Ohio don't realize or recognize that the Natives that called Ohio home are still living, still thriving," Kim Garcia, a Wyandotte Citizen and the nation's cultural preservation officer, told WVXU in 2025. "Also, a lot of people don't realize that the reason we left Ohio was not because we wanted to leave. We were forced to leave. That's what this project is about; to say we wanted to stay in our homelands of Ohio, but we had to be removed."
Marker dedication details
There will be two public marker dedication ceremonies Monday, Oct. 12.
The first is at Cedar City Park in Lebanon, 200 S. Broadway Street, at 10 a.m.
The second is at William Henry Harrison Riverfront Park in North Bend, 5 Harbor Ave., at 1:30 p.m.
This report will be updated.
Editor's note: The two spellings of Wyandot and Wyandotte are purposeful. "Wyandotte" is used in reference to the modern-day nation headquartered in Oklahoma. "Wyandot" is inclusive of all the bands of Wyandot people dispersed across modern-day Canada and the USA. After prolonged contact with the British, the traditional name "Waⁿdát" (Wandat) was corrupted into "Wyandot" sometime in the 1730s-1750s.
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