Founders of Ohio University

Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823) and Rufus Putnam (1738-1824) are credited with being the co-founders of Ohio University. Cutler - preacher, botanist and land promoter - was born in Connecticut and educated at Yale but served for most of his adult life as a Congregational minister in Hamilton, Massachusetts. He was a director of the Ohio Company of Associates (1786), which first settled southeastern Ohio in 1788. He was later a two-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1801-1805).

Putnam - soldier and pioneer - was born in Massachusetts and largely self-educated. During the American Revolutionary War he served as an engineer and constructed the defensive works around Boston and New York and reconstructed West Point. In 1785 Congress named him surveyor of the national lands northwest of the Ohio River; he was also a director of the Ohio Company. In 1796 President George Washington named him surveyor-general of the U.S. where he served until 1803.

For more information, a good starting point is the biographical articles on Cutler and Putnam in the American National Biography (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) (Alden Reference CT213 A68 1999). The entry for Cutler was written by Peter S. Onuf; the entry for Putnam by Andrew Cayton.

Ohio University, for which they were the founders, was established in 1804 under the auspices of the Ordinance of 1787. It became the first institution for higher learning in the Northwest Territory.