The "first" Wayne County, which included most…

January 1805 CE

The "first" Wayne County, which included most of the area that will later become the Michigan Territory, as well as portions of what are now Ohio and Indiana, had been established from Knox and Hamilton counties on August 15, 1796, by proclamation of acting governor and territorial secretary Winthrop Sargent.

In 1800, the western half of the Lower Peninsula and most of the Upper Peninsula had been attached to the Indiana Territory when it was established as a separate government from the Northwest Territory.

Wayne County was thereby reduced to the remainder of the two peninsulas, and continued under the government of the Northwest Territory.

St. Clair County, another Indiana Territory county, had also been expanded at this time to include the western portion of the Upper Peninsula and a small sliver of the Lower Peninsula along the shore of Lake Michigan.

When Ohio was admitted as a state in early 1803, the eastern half of Michigan had been incorporated into the Indiana Territory.

One of the first acts taken that year by the Indiana government under William Henry Harrison had been to reorganize Wayne County under Indiana law, adding territory from Knox and St. Clair counties.

Michigan's first county now encompassed all of the Lower Peninsula, much of the Upper Peninsula, and those portions of today's Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin that drained into Lake Michigan.

In many respects, the change from the government of the Northwest Territory to that of the Indiana Territory had had little effect on Wayne County's limited operations.

By Governor Harrison's proclamation of January 11, 1803, the courts of Wayne County—common pleas, orphans, and quarter sessions—had kept their organization under the new territorial government, with almost identical composition, but the logistics of government had gone from difficult to almost impossible, with the mail between Detroit and the capital at Vincennes being routed at one point through Warren in northeastern Ohio.

The deciding factor may have come when an election was called by Governor Harrison for September 11, 1804, to decide whether Indiana Territory (which by this time was responsible for not only the settlements in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, but the newly acquired District of Louisiana as well) should progress to the second stage of territorial government, but word had failed to reach Detroit until after the date had passed, and the settlers of Michigan had petitioned Congress in December 1804, asking that Wayne County be set off as an independent territory.

The Michigan Territory is created on January 11, 1805, effective June 30 of this year.

The act defines the territory as "all that part of the Indiana Territory, which lies North of a line drawn east from the southerly bend or extreme of lake Michigan, until it shall intersect lake Erie, and East of a line drawn from the said southerly bend through the middle of said lake to its northern extremity, and thence due north to the northern boundary of the United States."