According to early histories of Auglaize County, in 1748 the French built a trading post 380 yards north along the north bank of the navigable headwaters of the Auglaize River for keel boats, when this area was in Upper Louisiana of New France. It may have been the first European-built structure in this region after George Croghan's British Trading Post was built the same year at Pickawillany. Traders received goods brought up the Miami of the Lakes (Maumee) and Auglaize rivers on pirogues and scows from Detroit and exchanged them for furs and hides with Miami, Wyandot, and Ottawa tribes, then floated the peltry downriver to Detroit. In 1752 the post was enclosed with a palisade, becoming the first fort built along the Auglaize River and one of the first fortified French trading posts in Ohio. Around 1770 it was re-established as Francis Duchouquet's Trading Post, and sometime after 1785 it was named Fort Au Glaize after the river. It was abandoned shortly after the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, but it was strengthened and used as a supply base during the War of 1812. Between 1795 and 1798, the first of the two Wapakoneta Shawnee council houses, ti mi wi s'ki ke, was built a short distance east of the fort when Wapakoneta became the most important Shawnee village. It served as the primary meeting place for the Shawnees, including Black Hoof, Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet, Blue Jacket, and Captain Logan. The council house became the center of the Wapakoneta Shawnee Reserve in the Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids (Fort Meigs), signed by the Shawnees and other tribes on September 29, 1817. It remained in use until it was replaced in the 1820's by the second Wapakoneta Shawnee council house in present-day downtown Wapakoneta.