One-hundred-and-thirty-eight years after it began, the border war between the states of Michigan and Ohio finally ended on Feb. 22, 1973.
That’s the date the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Turtle Island, a 1.5-acre spit of land in Lake Erie, fell in Ohio territorial waters alone — not half in both states as Michigan had long maintained.
Seen in this 1958 Blade archive photo by Carl Gifford, Turtle Island’s earliest known use was as a hunting ground for the Miami Indians; it was named for one of their councilors, Chief Little Turtle. By 1794 British troops were stations on the six-acre island in their unsuccessful bid to halt U.S. Gen. Anthony Wayne’s conquest of the Northwest Territory, including Detroit.
In subsequent decades, Turtle Island accommodated American troops, a yacht club, a dredging operation and countless day-trippers who would take their boats to the island to picnic. Even so, Lake Erie storms continued to lash at its shores, reducing the island to less than an acre today.
The Supreme Court ruling resolved the last remaining dispute from a conflict that dated to the early 1830s, when both the then-territory of Michigan and State of Ohio coveted Maumee Bay for their port. In 1835, Michigan finally ceded the “Toledo strip” to Ohio under pressure from Congress and President Andrew Jackson to gain its statehood.
But those 1835 boundary lines only pertained to land. The debate over where the state line should be drawn in the waters of Lake Erie continued for another century plus, with both states claiming all or part of Turtle Island.
In the early ’70s, Congress dispatched a special master who determined that the boundary line was angled to the northeast, as Ohio maintained, not a straight line through the island as Michigan contended.
The high court upheld the special master’s report with its 1973 ruling, and thus ended once and for all the Toledo War.
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First Published February 5, 2018, 5:00 a.m.
