Peter Loramie or Pierre Louis de Lorimier
Pierre Louis Lorimier was born on 26 September 1748 in Lachine, Montreal. The Lorimiers were a military and minor nobility family. Lorimier came into the Ohio Country with his father to establish trade with the natives. In 1769 they built a trading post on Loramie Creek north of present-day Fort Loramie. The father died in 1770.
The trading post was established there because it was the shortest portage between Loramie Creek and the St. Marys River and was a place of considerable traffic. The trading post was known as "the Frenchman's Store" or "Loramie's Station".
Lorimier was popular with the Indians and the British and supplied and participated in campaigns against the Americans in Kentucky including the one that captured Daniel Boone.
In 1782, Captain Benjamin Logan under the command of Gen. George Rogers Clark pillaged and burned Loramie's store. It is uncertain whether or not Lorimier was there. It is estimated that his operation was worth what today would be at least a million dollars. Lorimier later submitted a claim to the British government for 20,000 pounds in damages which he never recovered.
Lorimier escaped with the Shawnee to Wapakoneta and then to Vincennes, Indiana. Eventually he settled in Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River where the Spanish made him the local commandant because of his rapport with the Indians. With the Louisiana Purchase he and Cape Girardeau became American. He died there in 1812 a man of great importance.
Fort Loramie
Twelve years after the destruction of Loramie's store Gen. Wayne built a supply fort there which remained until the end of the War of 1812. The next owner of the fort was James Furrow who ran a store and the Post Office out of it. The land passed to the Arkenburg family and then on to the Fleckenstein family who still own it today.
The town was laid out in 1834 and named Berlin although the post office was still known as Loramie's. In 1911 the name of the town was changed to Fort Loramie.
The canal
This branch of the Miami-Erie Canal was finished in 1841 and operated until 1913 when the Great Flood effectively put an end to it. For the next 20 years there was talk of reactivating it but trucks and trains had made it obsolete.
