Oliver Hazard Perry

Oliver Hazard Perry built a fleet in a Pennsylvania wilderness and then used it. On September 10, 1813, off Put-in-Bay, he fought the British squadron that locked the upper lakes. His flagship Lawrence was shot to pieces. He passed in a small boat to Niagara, broke the British line, and sent the dispatch that the country still quotes: he had met the enemy and they were his.

The sentence is polished. The work was timber, guns, and not losing the lake after the first ship was a wreck. Detroit and the Northwest turned on that afternoon.

He was a Rhode Island officer from a navy family, already blooded in the Barbary wars. Lake Erie was the command that made him a public name. He died of yellow fever on his thirty-fourth birthday, August 23, 1819, returning from a diplomatic errand in Venezuela. The body was later brought to Newport.

This page does not invent a later glory. It records a lake fight that a young republic had to win with green timber and a boat that would still row.