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While it claims to be 220 years old, an argument can be made that it doesn’t look a day over 70.

Ohio was granted statehood in 1803, on Thomas Jefferson’s watch, but not officially admitted into the Union until 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower was president. Before all that took place, rules were bent, if not broken, to get Ohio on the path to statehood in the first place.

Ohio was the first state to be carved out of the Northwest Territory — a 300,000-square-mile expanse of land north and west of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes on America’s western frontier. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which provided a system for admitting new states into the union, once the the population of the territory reached 60,000.

When backers of the new state of Ohio petitioned Congress for statehood, they included a census document called the “Schedule of the Whole Number of Persons in the Territory North West of the Ohio,� which listed a population of 45,365 — about 25% below the qualifying mark.

But statehood boosters argued that the population would soon reach 60,000, so Congress, instead of following the letter of the law, punted the statehood matter to a select committee to decide what to do. The select committee decided that 45,365 was close enough to 60,000, and drafted a bill enabling Ohio to draft a constitution and create a state government, which cleared both houses.

Those attending a convention in Chillicothe drafted a constitution and sent it to Washington by the end of 1802. On Feb. 19, 1803, Congress passed an act declaring that Ohio had become one of the United States of America.

But Congress forgot one critical detail: Ratifying the Ohio constitution, a requirement for making Ohio statehood legal.

That mistake wasn’t detected until 150 years later, when a group of Ohio public school teachers made a trip to Washington, D.C., to get copies of documents dealing with Ohio’s statehood in a effort to give students a closer connection to their state’s history. When the teachers asked the staff at the Library of Congress for a copy of the document memorializing congressional ratification of Ohio’s constitution, it could not be found — because it never existed.

That presented a problem.

“Without Congressional approval of the Ohio Constitution, the lands remained a part of the Northwest Territory,� according to an Ohio History Connection account of the teachers’ discovery.

U.S. Rep. George Bender, R-Ohio, stepped in to save the day.

“The state constitutional convention presented the Constitution of Ohio to Congress on Feb. 19, 1803 and Congress chose to ignore the whole business,� Bender told his colleagues. In 1953, he introduced a bill, which cleared both houses, that finally ratified the 1802 constitution drafted in Chillicothe, and also granted Ohio statehood, retroactive to 1803.

To me, it’s not all that surprising that a state that forgot to name a state fish, despite a wealth of walleye, smallmouth, steelhead and salmon-fishing opportunities, would forget to ratify its own constitution.

If not for an alert group of teachers, Ohio could have been the 48th state — and West Virginia may have had a shot at having a Great Lakes shoreline.