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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

At the end of the 1926 season, Jacques 'Jack' Creasy, at the age of 25, purchased the equipment of the Studebaker Presidents -- an amateur football team that had enjoyed moderate success and ignited the excitement of football fans in Portsmouth --…

Portsmouth's African Methodist Episcopal Church (Allen Chapel - AME) is the city's oldest Black religious society. In March 1837, "Father Charleston" organizd the church in the "Old Wheeler Academy," which was located on the southwest corner of…

Packers coach Curly Lambeau entered the game with the NFL’s best record, 10-1-1, with only two games left in the season. If the Packers defeated the Spartans they would clench their fourth league championship. The Spartans sat at 5-1-4 in the…

On Friday, June 9th, 1961, McKinley and a group of other African American school boys went swimming in a flooded sand and gravel pit that had recently been dug in the bottoms of the Scioto River. It was the last day of school and the students were…

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the congregation now known as First Presbyterian of Portsmouth, Ohio, was a nexus of the antislavery movement in southern Ohio and it’s members, elders, and ministers represented a wide spectrum of…

Born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, James Ashley moved with his parents and siblings to Portsmouth in the spring of 1826 at the age of four and grew to manhood here. His father, John Clinton Ashley was a minister in the Disciples (Campbellite)…

Visit the Scioto County Welcome Center and view Robert Dafford's large canvas portrait of Ava and Louis Chaboudy. Dr. Louis Chaboudy is remembered as "the person who originated the idea of having murals painted on the Portsmouth floodwall." Bob…

On a Friday afternoon, November 27th, 1829, with the Ohio River and the hills of the northern shore as backdrop, five rebel slaves were executed near the Greenup County, Kentucky, courthouse. This is a story from the days of the interstate slave…

The City of Portsmouth, located at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, has a history of public murals, from those painted in the 1930s by Clarence Carter in the lobby of the Post Office on Gay Street to those in the Law Library at the…

Beginning in the late 1730s, the Shawnee Indians established one of their principal villages here. Some sixty years earlier, in the 1670s and 80s, the Shawnee had been expelled from the Scioto and Ohio valleys by the Iroquois in what historians…

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…

In 1934, a segregated, all-black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) unit of enrollees, known as Company 1545, dammed the waters of Mackletree Run and Turkey Creek, creating Roosevelt Lake, the centerpiece of a new state park in southern Ohio’s Scioto…