Recent Stories
Mound Park and the Central Complex of the Portsmouth Earthworks
Portsmouth's Mound Park lays claim to the lone remnant of the central complex of the Portsmouth Earthworks that once spread across the Ohio River over the modern communities of Portsmouth, Ohio and South Portsmouth and South Shore, Kentucky. The…
John J. Minor's Boneyfiddle Barbershop
Born in 1828 in Albemarle County, Virginia, John James Minor settled in Portsmouth in the mid-1830s, not long after the city had expelled many of its black residents during its infamous “Black Friday” enforcement of Ohio laws requiring…
Recovering Portsmouth's Past in Huston's Stone Front Building
The story of the Huston Stone Front Building, the first three-story building constructed on Second Street. Since its original construction in the early 1850s by Milton Kennedy and Joseph Ashton it has played a role in the history of the Underground…
Portsmouth National Bank & the Elk Building
Coming Soon! The story of the Elk Building and Portsmouth National Bank. Built in 1892 by the Elks fraternal order, this signature Boneyfiddle commercial building was home to the Portsmouth National Bank, which had been originally organized in 1866…
Albert McFarland's Tribune Building
Coming Soon! The story of the Tribune Building. Albert McFarland constructed this two story commercial structure to house the office and pressroom of the Portsmouth Tribune, one of the city's oldest newspapers, which traces it origins to the Scioto…
Eliza Trotter Building on Second Street
Coming Soon! The story of Eliza (Denison) Trotter, a pioneering Portsmouth businesswoman, who launched her millinery retail store in 1858 and constructed the "Trotter Building" on Second Street in the early 1870s.
Over the years and at…
Featured Stories
Joe Logan & the Fugitive Slave Experience in Southern Ohio
The Olde Wayside Inn in West Union, Adams County, has gone by many names over its two-hundred plus years of existence. Originally known as Bradford's Tavern, for a while in the 1870s and 80s, area residents and visitors would have called it…
Copperhead Fire Tower
In 1924, after purchasing the first lands for the creation of the Shawnee State Forest, the Division of Forestry constructed three fire towers in the region to help protect the state's newly acquired resources.
Today, at the metal…
Sanford, Varner & Co. Factory Building at Third & Chillicothe Streets
Portsmouth may be best remembered for its shoe and steel manufacturers, which dominated the city from the 1830s to the 1970s, but in the years after the Civil War, when the city was first connected into the national rail network, Portsmouth had a…
Featured Tours
Scioto Historical
A project by Andrew Feight, Ph.D.Scioto Historical is an educational mobile app and website that puts the history of southern Ohio at your fingertips. Learn about American and local history through map-based, interactive, multimedia presentations and experience professionally curated virtual historical tours on your laptop, tablet, or on a screen in your classroom. With its mobile app, Scioto Historical can guide you to historical locations and augment any walking or driving tour.
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