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By Robert Albrecht, Dispatch Staff Writer
The Dispatch (Columbus, OH)
07-10-95
Having brought 10 years of research to fruition, Heidelberg College anthropologist G. Michael Pratt is now happily back in his laboratory examining relics he harvested in a Lucas County soybean field
Pratt has been working for a decade to confirm his theories on the site of the Battle of Fallen Timbers. He is convinced that he and 150 helpers have hit the target.
Even so, there is no guarantee that the site will be preserved for its historic value.
The discoveries were made on 180 acres in the city of Maumee, Ohio. The land is owned by the city of Toledo, which acquired it in hopes it would be developed. The two cities have been working together to resolve historical questions and to work out a plan for the land's future, Pratt said.
"I am really excited about this," Pratt said last week of the fieldwork. For two weeks in June, he and volunteers, some using metal detectors, combed the field and nearby woods looking for evidence to confirm his suspicion that the 18th century Indian battle took place there.
Pratt says it was there in 1794 that Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne's forces defeated Shawnee Indians under the leadership of Blue Jacket.
"The Battle of Fallen Timbers led to the Treaty of Greenville (in 1795), and that led to the opening of the Northwest Territory," Pratt said.
"It was the first step west that the United States took.
"We took something on the order of 480 artifacts from the sample area. The overwhelming majority of them are bullets from the battlefield. We also found a lot of buttons of a pattern worn only by the army of Anthony Wayne."
In addition, the searchers turned up flints from the army's flintlock rifles. A broken bayonet from a musket was probably the most dramatic find, Pratt said.
The artifacts are clear evidence "of that event and no other," Pratt said. But most important to him and others on the project is the pattern of the discoveries. The concentration of army-caliber bullets in one area and concentration of army buttons and dropped or unspent cartridges in another are consistent with authoritative accounts of the battle.
Maumee Mayor Steve Pauken and others have sought congressional funding for more studies of the area in the hope that a national park might be carved out of it.
Pratt said the next step for him is to finish cleaning and cataloging the relics, then prepare a report that he will submit in August to Maumee and Toledo officials to help in their consideration of the land.
Toledo bought the property eight years ago "for the purpose of economic and industrial development," said Walter Edelen, Toledo Planning Commission director. The city wants to recognize the historical importance of the area. That this was the battle site "is pretty much proven by the artifacts," he said.
But the city also must make good use of Toledo taxpayers' money, Edelen said.
As part of the development program, the city awarded Isaac Corp. a 14-month option to buy 430 acres of Toledo-owned land west of and adjacent to the battlefield site.
George Isaac, head of the development concern, said his company is planning to build an office park and a complex of light industrial and retail buildings on 100 to 130 acres of that tract. If that plan proceeds and Isaac exercises its option on the larger tract, he said, his company will gain the right to a similar option for the 180 acres on which Pratt's team has found the battlefield.
Isaac called it "prime land" that would be a good acquisition for his company.
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