That said, it often surprises me how fast the local governments got up and running.
Medina County (immediately South of Cuyahoga/Cleveland) was pretty much wilderness/frontier in 1810 and had a more-or-less fully functional County Government by no later than 1830.
This might be specific to Ohio and possibly a few other states such as Oklahoma.
Some history:
One of the complaints of the Colonists that contributed to the Revolution was that the British were deterring Westward migration. Hence, most of the Indian Tribes sided with the British during the Revolutionary War because they obviously also opposed westward expansion of white/European settlement.
Side note here:
The British opposition wasn't based on the British appreciating Native American land rights, it was purely pragmatic. The British had spent a ton of money fighting off the French and Indians in what we call the French and Indian War. The North American Colonies weren't particularly profitable for Britain (they were making a LOT of cash from India and their sugar plantations in the Caribbean) so Westward expansion of the North American Colonies was something that would have been very costly for the British and provided very little in the way of benefit to Britain.
Back to the History. Due to the British resistance against Westward Expansion, the area that became Ohio was basically off-limits to white/European settlement until after the Revolution. Then, at the end of the Revolution a number of East Coast States (former 13 Colonies) gave land in Ohio to their Revolutionary War Veterans in lieu of pensions. The area where I live was originally part of the "Connecticut Western Reserve" and there are a number of Revolutionary War Veterans buried in our Town Cemetery. They are nearly all first-wave settlers from Connecticut.
Anyway, the delayed settlement meant that once Ohio was open for settlement, it grew VERY rapidly because demand for Western land had been effectively bottled up for many decades. Ohio became a State in 1803 and by the 1810 census it had already surpassed Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont in population. A decade later Ohio was the fifth most populous state behind only NY, VA, PA, and NC. Ohio's population surpassed NC in the 1830 census and by 1840 Ohio was the third most populous state trailing only NY and PA.
My point is that Ohio was settled VERY rapidly. Consequently, the first wave settlers saw an enormous change. When they arrived around 1800-1810 Ohio was literally a wilderness totally disconnected from civilization back east. Within about 30 years Ohio was the third most populous state in the Union and had fully functioning State and local Government.
