All Stories: 107
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…
Spartan-Municipal Stadium
Today's Spartan-Municipal Stadium began its life as Universal Stadium in the summer of 1930, when Harry Snyder, the largest share owner of the Portsmouth Spartans, began its construction as part of the deal that brought an NFL franchise to the…
NFL Spartans Business Office in the Royal Savings & Loan Building
Harry N. Snyder, the largest share owner of the Spartans, was the sole proprietor of the Universal Contracting Company. Snyder had prospered in the 1920s with major road, bridge, and dam construction projects on the Ohio River and in Portsmouth and…
Stanton and McMahon's Smoke House
As early as 1912, Frank Stanton and George McMahon, co-owners of the Smoke House (a popular Portsmouth tobacco shop), had sponsored an amateur football team that traveled the Ohio-Kentucky-West Virginia Tri-State region, playing its home games at…
George Remus - 'King of the Bootleggers' - in the Boneyfiddle
Remus completed the first two years of his sentence in the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. For the last year of his sentence, however, he was allowed to return to Ohio, where he was first lodged in the Miami County Jail in Troy, Ohio.…
Spock Memorial Dog Park
Spock Memorial Dog Park was officially opened August 9th, 2019. The park was named after Scioto County Sheriff’s first K-9 dog Spock who was killed in the line of duty while pursuing a suspect with his handler, Alan Lewis. A memorial plaque at the…
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,…
Fifteenth Amendment Ratification Celebration in Portsmouth, Ohio
On Wednesday, the 27th of April 1870, a coalition of white and black residents turned out for a celebration hosted by Allen Chapel of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. With ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, there was much to…
Jim Crow at Wurster Brothers Drug Store on Chillicothe Street
The New York Times reported: "The African Methodist Conference, in session here to-day, was thrown into confusion when it became known that its presiding Bishop, W. B. Derrick of New York City, had been unable to obtain a drink of soda water." As…
“Black Friday”: Enforcing Ohio’s “Black Laws” in Portsmouth, Ohio
On Friday, January 21st, 1831, the following notice appeared in the city’s paper: “The citizens of Portsmouth are adopting measures to free the town of its colored population. We saw a paper, yesterday, with between one and two hundred names,…
Capt. William McClain's Underground Steamboat
Eliza Esham of Nicholas County, Kentucky claimed Joshua as her property and sued Capt. McClain, seeking damages. During a jury trial, witness testimony established that Joshua "at the time [had] no written pass or authority from his mistress ... and…
“The Crossing”: Robert Dafford's Underground Railroad Mural in Portsmouth, Ohio
Hidden away in plain sight, like the operations of the Underground Railroad itself, one finds Robert Dafford's mural honoring the heroic men and women who fled their enslavement in the southern states, as well as those (white and black) Scioto…
Runaway Slave Advertisements in Portsmouth, Ohio
As a river town, bordering the slave state of Kentucky, the newspapers of Portsmouth, Ohio, would occasionally publish runaway slave advertisements, paid for by slaveowners in Kentucky, Virginia, and other states to the south. As a major intermodal…
Union Mills and Lock 50 of the Ohio & Erie Canal
The Ohio and Erie Canal connected Portsmouth to Cleveland and the eastern markets via New York's more famous Erie Canal, which had opened in 1826. While Cleveland, on the other end of the canal, experienced far more dramatic growth, both…
Excavation and Destruction of the Waller-Heinisch Mound
We owe much of the history of the exploration and ultimate destruction of the Waller-Heinisch Mound to Clara Waller, who grew up on the property where it was located. She was the daughter of George A. Waller and the niece of Francis Cleveland, an…
Portsmouth NAACP Protests Jim Crow at the Westland Theater
Capitalizing on Joe Louis's new won fame, Hollywood movie director Harry L. Fraser would cast Louis to star in "The Spirit of Youth," which told the story of the boxer's rise from poverty and obscurity to world champion and Jazz Age celebrity life.…
Integrating Portsmouth, Ohio’s Dreamland Pool
Discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was now banned by federal law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically outlawed racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. Private clubs, however,…
James M. Ashley and the Underground Railroad in Friendship, Ohio
Marked today as the intersection of US Highway 52 and Ohio State Route 125, Friendship is the southern gateway to the Shawnee State Forest and Park, and is recognized as the site of the first permanent American settlement in Scioto County. In the…
Tremper Mound and Earthworks
Tremper Mound was constructed on the west terrace of the Scioto River, five miles north of its confluence with the Ohio. Built late in the first century BCE, which was quite early in the Hopewell Cultural era, Tremper Mound’s irregularly shaped…
Mound Park and the Preservation 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 Barbershop and "New Light" on the Underground Railroad
Born in 1828 in Albemarle County, Virginia, John James Minor settled in Portsmouth, Ohio 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 African…
Kennedy & Ashton's Feed Store
Built in 1852 by Milton Kennedy, Portsmouth's most outspoken abolitionist, the building first housed Kennedy's feed store, which was an auxiliary to his dealings as a grain merchant. Before some major financial reverses in 1855, Kennedy was…
Thomas Gaylord and the Beginning of Portsmouth's Iron Industry
The original “Portsmouth Iron Works” were constructed by Glover, Noel and Company in 1832 on the Ohio river front, "on the southeast corner of Front and Washington Streets on what is known now as York Park." The land was owned by the City and leased…
Julia Marlowe and Madame Brough's Saloon on Front Street
Indeed, just over ten years earlier, in October 1878, the Times reported "there was a terrible row at Madame Brough's Saloon on Front Street, last Thursday night, and beer glasses flew around in a lively manner. It appears that John McCarthy came in…
The Eclipse Livery and T.M. Lynn's "Dan Rice"
With its two large arched entryways facing Second Street, the Eclipse Livery Building (now the home of Wright's Farm Center) was constructed by T.M. Lynn in 1871 for his livery business.
Trustem Mearns Lynn, more commonly known as T.M. Lynn,…