Ebenezer Zane was an American pioneer, road builder and land speculator.
Background
Zane was born on October 7, 1747 in Moorefield, West Virginia. Little is known of his parents except that his father, William Andrew Zane, migrated to the Potomac Valley after he was expelled from a Quaker meeting in eastern Pennsylvania because he married Nancy Ann Nolan outside the Society of Friends. His sister was the famous Betty Zane who successfully braved the Indian gunfire in the siege of 1782 to bring an apron-load of gunpowder from a nearby storehouse to the fort. His brother Jonathan learned much of Ohio lands as a soldier under Crawford in the Sandusky expedition of 1782.
Career
Ebenezer came of age in the year that the frontier to the Ohio River was officially opened by the Iroquois cession at the treaty of Fort Stanwix. Since he and his brothers, Silas and Jonathan, had already explored in those lands, in 1769 they led the frontier advance by establishing their claims under Virginia law to the lands at the mouth of Wheeling Creek, to which place they brought their families in 1770. The Wheeling settlement became the important Ohio River terminus of the road from Cumberland, Maryland, over which emigrants were moving westward in increasing numbers. Ebenezer Zane was active in the land speculation that was one of the causes of Dunmore's War, although he refused to countenance the violence against the Indians that preceded it. During the war he was a colonel and disbursing agent of the Virginia militia at Fort Fincastle, Wheeling. He supported the Patriot cause during the Revolution, taking a prominent part in repelling the British-Indian besiegers of Fort Fincastle, rechristened Fort Henry, in 1777 and 1782. Zane's speculative activity in land continued after the Revolution. In 1785-1787 he was often the host for the United States surveyors of the Seven Ranges and he and Jonathan were active in making salt at the Muskingum River Salt Licks ten miles below what is now Zanesville, Ohio. After the treaty of Greenville in 1795, by which the south Ohio lands were given up by the Indians, Zane petitioned Congress in March 1796 for permission to open a road from Wheeling to Limestone, Kentucky, and by an act approved May 17, 1796, Congress granted him three lots, each a mile square, to be located respectively where the road crossed the Muskingum, the Hockhocking and the Scioto, on condition that Zane blaze the road himself before January 1, 1797, that he pay to the United States federal bounty warrants to the amount of the acreage granted, that he provide ferries across the three rivers, and that he survey his three tracts at his own expense. On two of these tracts the towns of Zanesville and Lancaster were laid out in 1799 and 1800 respectively. The third tract lay across the Scioto River from Chillicothe. Zane died on November 19, 1812 and was buried in the Zane family plot near Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, not far from Wheeling.
Achievements
Connections
Zane married Elizabeth McCulloch before he left the South Branch of the Potomac, and was the father of thirteen children.