From 1749 into the 1820s, the St. Marys River crossing near present-day Rockford was associated with a wide range of people and events significant to the region’s history. The earliest known record of Europeans there dates to 1749, when Captain Celeron de Bienville led an expedition through the upper Ohio Valley, accompanied by Father Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamp, who helped reinforce relations with local tribes, drive out English settlers, and plant lead plates marking the French claim to the valley. Along the St. Marys between Mendon and Rockford, archaeologists have located two pre-historic enclosures and two burial sites showing the presence of tribespeople, and in 1782 a group of Moravian apostate Mahicans established a small village directly across the river from present-day Rockford, where they converted hundreds of Indians to their faith. General Anthony Wayne brought an army north in 1794 to fight the Miami Confederacy and built Fort Randolph on the south side of the St. Marys River to protect his supply line; it was soon renamed Fort Adams in honor of Vice President John Adams and was abandoned in the summer of 1796 after Wayne’s army defeated the Miami Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Wayne was nearly killed during construction of Fort Adams when a tree fell on his tent, causing suspicion of a possible assassination attempt by General James Wilkinson. Antoine Chene, later known as Anthony Shane, a French Canadian and Indian, became an influential figure whose land grant, Indian reservation, and other dealings affected settlement across northwest Ohio; he spoke five languages, worked as a hunter at Ft. Defiance and an interpreter for the Ft. Wayne Indian Agency, and later served as a messenger and advisor to General Henry Hull at Detroit during the War of 1821. His wife, Lamateshe, also known as Auqualanaux, was a Delaware Indian whose grandmother was a Moravian convert, and together they had two daughters and two sons, though one son died young. In 1820 Reverend Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, visited the Shane home at the Crossing, where Mrs. Shane, grieving a lost child, received religious solace and was later converted and baptized by him. On August 30, 1812, General William Henry Harrison led an army of 2,200 men from Cincinnati to relieve Fort Wayne, pursuing Indians with his cavalry, and on September 9 they reached what he called Shane’s crossing of the St. Marys, where Colonel Adams was waiting. In 1823 Major Stephen Long led an expedition to explore the Upper Mississippi Valley; traveling along the St. Marys River, the party crossed 12 miles of swampy land to Shane’s Prairie and then reached Shanesville six miles later. In 1821 Captain James Riley’s family met Anthony Shane and his wife at Shane’s Crossing, and Shane’s nephew Sacatcha guided them to their cabin at Devil’s Run on the St. Marys River. At the end of 1821 Benjamin Drake visited the Shanes and interviewed them about Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet, providing a major later source on those Native American leaders. On April 29, 1828, John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed, came to Shanesville for a business deal and met William B. Hedges to sign a 10 year lease on local land for an apple orchard, and he continued to visit the community after the lease ended.