The region was long inhabited by the Iroquoian-speaking Wyandot and Algonquian-speaking Ottawa tribes, who settled along the Blanchard River.

Truman and Lynch were killed; the date of their deaths was apparently prior to April 20, 1792, at Lower Tawa Town, an Ottawa village.

{The Ottawa County Courthouse stands on the site of their killings) A similar mission led by Colonel John Hardin ended with Hardin and his servant Freeman being killed in Shelby County; the tribes resisted European-American encroachment.

During the War of 1812 between the US and Great Britain, numerous tribes allied with the British in the hope of keeping European Americans out of their territories.

Unable to resist the continued pressure, in 1817, the tribes ceded a large tract of land in Northwestern Ohio to the United States.

The tribes ceded this Reserve in 1831, during the era of Indian Removal, and their land claims in the state were extinguished.

[6] The Ottawa population on that Reserve removed to Indian Territory in present-day Kansas in 1832.

Among the early settlers of the Ottawa area was Henry Kohls, who arrived in 1835 and settled with his family in the village of Glandorf.

In the early 1900s, his grandsons, Charles and Frank Kohls, were each elected Putnam County treasurer in successive two-year stints.