Recent Stories
Greenlawn Cemetery Hebrew Section
The Hebrew Section of Greenlawn Cemetery in Portsmouth, Ohio, was established in the early 1850s by members of the Portsmouth Hebrew Benevolent Society and its grounds have served as the final resting place for members of Southern Ohio’s Jewish…
Portsmouth’s Third Synagogue and Contemporary Jewish Community
By 1974, Portsmouth’s Jewish community numbered no more than 120 people. The existing syngaogue at Eighth and Gay grew increasingly expensive to maintain and its size no longer fit the needs of the congregation. In 1973, Beneh Abraham’s leadership…
Portsmouth's Second Synagogue and Jewish Life in the Mid-twentieth Century
During the 1910s and 1920s Portsmouth’s Jewish community experienced a period of growth. In 1919, an estimated 150 people attended Rosh Hashanah services at Beneh Abraham. This same year, a new Jewish organization, B’nai B’rith, was created in…
Portsmouth's Early Jewish Community and First Place of Worship
Portsmouth is home to Ohio’s third-oldest organized Jewish community. This community, known as Beneh Abraham, or Children of Abraham, also has the distinction of being the oldest Jewish community in the state of Ohio outside of Cleveland and…
"Art of the Ancients" Exhibition at the Southern Ohio Museum
Upon entering the "Art of the Ancients" exhibition an etched glass panel orients visitors to the prehistory of the Adena and Hopewell peoples who built the mounds, rock cairns, parallel embankments, and other earthworks of the Portsmouth…
Raven Rock Nature Preserve
From its height and location on a bend in the Ohio River, Raven Rock offers views of modern-day Portsmouth at the Confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers. In frontier times, Shawnee and Cherokee warriors could look up and down the Ohio River for…
Featured Stories
Picnic Point and Auto-tourism in Ohio's Little Smokies
In the mid-1930s the Ohio Division of Forestry, with the assistance of the Civilian Conservation Corps, built Forest Road 9, from Pond Lick Run up to this dramatic ridge-top point. They cleared this spot and placed a picnic area in the center of a…
B. Glockner on Market Street
The B. Glockner Building at 206 Market Street illustrates the contribution of German immigrants to the nineteenth century development of Portsmouth, Ohio. And the building's restoration -- following a fire in January 2016 -- has contributed to…
The Birth of the NFL Spartans at the Hotel Hurth
On August 20th, 1928, Portsmouth, Ohio football fans and civic leaders gathered at the Hotel Hurth for a dinner meeting and the launch of a new professional football venture. The meeting came just five weeks after the tragic death of Jack Creasy,…
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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