Fort Amanda Memorial Park

Fort Amanda was the supply line that kept the army alive — the depot Lt. Col. Robert Pogue built on the Auglaize River in the fall of 1812, on the site of an abandoned Ottawa village, named for his twelve-year-old daughter Hannah Amanda. Harrison's Northwest Army needed the river route because the Black Swamp was impassable for wagons; the fort was the warehouse where the supplies for the Detroit campaign came through, the rafts built on the bank to carry the men and materiel north.

The fort was a working depot — four blockhouses and eleven-foot palisades, enlarged in 1813, garrisoned by Kentucky and Ohio militia, stocked with livestock and grain and the whiskey that was part of the ration. Ensign Schillinger's diary is the daily record — the weather and the work and the routine of a frontier supply post that was the army's lifeline to the northwest. The fort was abandoned in 1815 when the war ended; the settlers took the land, and the site went back to farm.

The memorial is on the ground — the 1915 granite marker at the fort site, the cemetery that holds the soldiers who died at the post, the river the rafts were built on still running past. The park is the Ohio History Connection's site; the fort itself is archaeology — the palisade lines and the blockhouse foundations in the field where the depot was.

Fort Amanda is the archive's depot file — the supply post named for a colonel's daughter, the river link that fed the Detroit campaign, the fort that was abandoned when the war moved on and remembered by the monument and the cemetery on the bank.