in U.S. colonial history, organization of Englishmen and Virginians, established in 1748, to promote trade with groups of American Indians and to secure English control of the Ohio River valley. Its activities in an area also claimed by France led to the outbreak of the last French and Indian War (1754). A separate organization, the Ohio Company of Associates (1786), founded Marietta, the first systematic settlement in the region north of the Ohio River.