Upper Sandusky is located in Wyandot County, northwest Ohio. It is not to be confused with the larger, better-known city of Sandusky, Ohio. Sandusky is situated some 60 miles north of Upper Sandusky, on the shores of Lake Erie. Sandusky is the home of Cedar Point, one of the world's best amusement parks. Upper Sandusky is not.
Upper Sandusky is a small town (population 5,992; 1998 estimate) in a very rural county. (Wyandot County's population is 22,921 by a 1999 estimate.) It's located at the intersection of U.S. Route 23 and U.S. Route 30. There's not much there: drive through, and you wouldn't see anything that would distinguish it from any other rural community in Ohio, or even in the midwest.
The only interesting thing I've found about Upper Sandusky is its history. It's probably similar to the history of many other small midwestern towns, since screwing over various Indian tribes was a national pastime in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nonetheless, I'm still young and idealistic enough to be indignant when I hear about the brutality and/or disrespect with which my ancestors regarded the natives, so I find the story of Upper's founding interesting. But I digress. A brief history of Upper Sandusky, Ohio:
In the mid- to late-1700's, groups of Wyandot Indians began fleeing their homes on the shores of Sandusky Bay (on the south shore of Lake Erie, near where the city of Sandusky currently sits). They fled to escape the rule (or perhaps tyranny) of the English, who were operating out of Fort Detriot at the time. One of the groups of Wyandots traveled up the Sandusky River sixty miles or so. (Here it should be noted that the word "Sandusky," unlike other Ohio place names, is not the name of an Indian tribe. It is derived from the Wyandot word "sa-un-dus-tee," which means "water within pools.") Anyway, it was about 1765 when they settled along the riverbank 60 miles south of their former home. Over the next half-century, their community there grew to be fairly large; it was one of the more important Wyandot settlements in Ohio.
Around 1820, a young Methodist missionary (who had himself only recently been converted to the faith) stumbled upon the Wyandot settlement. He succeeded in converting several of the Wyandots to Christianity, and by 1821 a Methodist church and school had been set up in/near the Wyandot village. Soon, white settlers began arriving, and the town of Upper Sandusky was formed. (They called it "Upper" Sandusky not because it is north of Sandusky, which it isn't, but because it's closer to the headwaters of the river.)
So, by 1840 or so, the town's white population had grown to a decent size, and the native Wyandots were getting in the way. So in 1843, the government kicked them out and sent them to live on a reservation in Oklahoma. The Upper Sandusky Wyandots were the very last native settlement to be removed from Ohio (a dubious honor). As a consolation prize, however, the county bore their name when it was officially incorporated in 1845. Yay.
Source: www.uppersanduskychamber.com (but this is by no means a cut-and-paste job)
This has been a nodeshell rescue. Please feel free to /msg me with suggestions; I've never done one before.