This large area west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River had been ceded by Great Britain after the Revolutionary War.

It consisted of the area later organized as the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota.

Prior to the early nineteenth-century European-American settlement of the Hanover area, its predominant inhabitants were the Shawnee people.

He said both banks of the river were covered in thick forest, and reported seeing Native American hunters and fishermen, numerous buffalo and deer, and heard the cries of coyotes.

[5] Faced with severe weather toward the end of February, Logan stopped his river journey, pulling in roughly half a mile west of the present-day area of Hanover Beach.

[5] Judge Williamson Dunn, from Mercer County, Kentucky, purchased the land area of modern Hanover from the federal government on November 28, 1808.

They were immigrants and their children, mostly from northern Ireland, who had come to Virginia, then to Kentucky, and finally to the area of Hanover.

He later was elected as Indiana's first lieutenant governor and played a key role in planning the state capital of Indianapolis.

Logan bought the land and settled permanently in Hanover, while Harrison moved to Salem, Indiana.

In 1819, Presbyterian minister Thomas C. Searle (January 15, 1787 – October 15, 1821) moved to nearby Madison.

[10] John Finley Crowe was born in Greene County, Tennessee, growing up there and in Missouri, where his family migrated.

After meeting some Presbyterian elders who had moved from North Carolina to his area in Missouri, Crowe became interested in pursuing a religious education.

He established a Sunday school for African-American children, but could not find a place where they were allowed to meet.

Crowe's abolitionist sympathies alienated him from his slave-holding neighbors, and he soon lost access to the printing press.

Disheartened by the hostility of neighbors in Kentucky, Crowe accepted the position, relieved to move to a free state.

Located just north of the present-day Hanover Presbyterian Church, the Crowe-Garritt House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

[13] Soon after joining the Hanover Presbyterian Church, Crowe began encouraging members to sponsor the founding of a seminary.

In 1829, the state of Indiana granted a charter for Hanover Academy, essentially with a classical high school curriculum.

In the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains as a whole, Baptists and Methodists largely outnumbered Presbyterians during the early nineteenth century.

[citation needed] St. Stephen's African Methodist Episcopal Church, which belonged to the first independent Black denomination founded in the United States, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

[16] The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.