By Compatriot George Stewart, Chapter Historian
Highway Marker
Border warfare characterized the American Revolution on the northwest frontier. Between August 26 and September 15, 1781, sixty-four survivors of Lochry’s Expedition were held captive by “Butler’s Rangers” (British-allied Indians led by George Girty) in a camp near this site. Colonel Archibald Lochry’s battalion of Pennsylvania militia, part of a larger punitive expedition under General George Rogers Clark and traveling down the Ohio River behind the main force, was attacked by Girty’s men ten miles downstream from the mouth of the Great Miami River near present-day Aurora, Indiana. Thirty-seven militiamen were killed in the August 24 battle, including Lochry, and the rest captured. Afterwards Rogers abandoned his objective of capturing British-held Detroit. The captives were taken to Detroit and eventually to Montreal. Tradition holds that fewer than twenty of Lochry’s battalion ever returned to their homes.
In 2001 The Ohio Society and The Cincinnati Chapter Son of the American Revolution, with the help of the Ohio Historical Society, sponsored the erection of a Historical Road Marker 150 yards west of the junction at East Miami River Road and Jordan Road in Miami Township near Cleves, Ohio. Members of the Cincinnati Chapter were there for the unveiling.
