Explore the history of the Beneh Abraham Jewish congregation of Portsmouth, Ohio, what is recognized as the third oldest Jewish community in Ohio. Learn how Beneh Abraham was formed in the late 1850s and discover its contributions to the development of the City of Portsmouth. This tour visits explores the Jewish community's history through visiting the locations of the congregation's historic places of worship, along with the Hebrew Section of Greenlawn Cemetery. Complete the tour in person or…

With the City of Portsmouth as your gateway, explore two-thousand years of human and natural history in the Shawnee State Forest Region of Scioto and Adams counties. With its misty hollows, forested ridges, and rolling hills and its spring wildflowers and dramatic fall colors, the region has become known as Ohio’s Little Smokies. Its history stretches from the time of prehistoric Native Americans who built the Portsmouth Earthworks Complex over two-thousand years ago to more recent historical…

Explore two-hundred years of history in Portsmouth’s Boneyfiddle District, where the community’s oldest churches, residences, retail stores, and factories were located in the 19th Century. See the results of a fifty-year effort at historic preservation and economic redevelopment and visit sites connected to the beginnings of the city’s iron and steel industry, the Underground Railroad (UGRR), the abolition of slavery, innovative businessmen and women in the Gilded Age, and a successful NAACP…

The 1930s mark one of the most important decades in Shawnee State Forest’s history. With unemployment rates as high as 25% nationally, and even higher in some cities, the Great Depression provided the impetus for a major expansion of state-owned forest lands, improvement of forest roads, and the development of recreational infrastructure in what would become Shawnee State Park. As part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act of 1933,…

Explore the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Portsmouth, Ohio, where the city’s black residents resisted the development of racial segregation and other discriminatory practices that followed the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Learn about the decades long struggle to end segregation in the city’s schools and how in the 1960s non-violent, civil disobedience worked to integrate the Booker T. Washington School and the Terrace Club, a private, whites-only swimming pool and youth center.…