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 Complex.

“When the last Ice Age ended in the Ohio valley about 14,000 years ago, the people who wandered into this area found flood prone rivers winding through hills of hardwood forests filled with animals to hunt and plants to gather. Starting more than 3000 years ago and lasting about 1500 years, the people we call Adena (1000 BCE-100 CE) and Hopewell (200 BCE-500 CE) prospered throughout southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, settling primarily along the streams and rivers feeding the Ohio River.  

“While many details about these two cultures remain unknown, it is possible to uncover clues about their lives by closely examining the objects of stone, bone, shell, and other durable materials recovered from home sites, fields, and burial grounds throughout the area. While you are imagining the lives and stories the objects have to tell, consider that the Adena and Hopewell people were much like us, valuing stability, hard work and family life amid the hills and floodplains of this river valley.”

The exhibition displays over 10,000 items, all of which were collected locally by William V. Wertz (1913-2002) and his father, Charles V. Wertz (1872-1936). Following the death of Charles in 1936, the Portsmouth Daily Times noted that “Mr. Wertz collected relics out of scientific interest rather than a source of profit. W. C. Mills, late director of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society, was a close friend and H. C. Shetrone, present director of the society, also was a great admirer of the local student of archaeology.” In 1915 and 1916, Charles V. Wertz assisted Mills and Shetrone in their excavations of Tremper Mound and the Feurt Village and Mounds.

Charles’ fascination with the prehistoric inhabitants of the Ohio Valley was sparked as a child when his father worked on the construction of the Sanford, Varner & Co. Building (known today as the Kricker Innovation Hub) at the corner of Third and Chillicothe Streets. While digging the foundation, workers discovered “an Indian boat” thirty feet below the surface. The mystery captured his imagination and inspired his interest in the local earthworks and mounds and the people who built them. This interest, along with his collection, would be passed down to his son, William V. Wertz, who continued to add items to the collection until his own death in 2002.

Madeline A. Wertz, William’s wife, then donated the collection to the Southern Ohio Museum. At the time, Sara Johnson, the museum’s long-serving Director of Visual Arts, told the Community Common newspaper that “it seems fitting that these remarkable objects remain in proximity to the same lands where they were made. We accept these objects in humility and with reverence for their makers, whom we will honor with a quiet, sensitive installation as we hold them in trust for the public good.”

Following Madeline’s death in 2014 a previously unknown catalog to the Charles V. Wertz Collection was discovered by the Salvation Army, which had received, as a donation, the remaining contents of her house. The catalog had been created in the mid-1940s by Aurelia Hucksoll, a trained archeologist who volunteered her services when the collection was on display at the Portsmouth Public Library. Hucksoll was the wife of Rev. Laurence L. Hucksoll, who served as the minister of Portsmouth’s First Presbyterian Church from 1939 to 1947. Aurelia had received a Master’s degree in Archeology from Columbia University. The Hucksoll catalog was based upon a meticulous inventory, which included item numbering, a physical description, hand-drawn illustrations, and, when known, the item’s site-specific provenance.

“The true significance” of the Wertz Collection, “as a record of sophisticated civilization with a continental trade network tied to the Portsmouth Earthwork Complex, was not fully revealed until the discovery of the Hucksoll Catalog,” notes Emily Uldrich. It is thanks to the provenance recorded by Hucksoll, as well as additional records associated with items added to the collection by William V. Wertz, that it is possible today to associate artifacts with specific mound and village sites that were part of the Portsmouth Earthworks Complex. Uldrich, in her study of the collection and its associated records, explains that although the collection provenance is site specific, “there is no detailed information about the context of the artifacts within the site or mound in which they were found. The artifacts could have been cached below ground level, near the surface, or found on the surface. Unfortunately, this is information we will never know, but we are indebted to the Wertz’s for preserving the artifacts, as most of the sites … are now destroyed.”

Historian Margaret Jacobs in After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands, writes that “Indian grave desecration grew out of brutal Indian massacres." Over time, from the earliest days of European colonization, "it morphed into a pseudoscientific enterprise and then a tourist bonanza. A huge number of settlers took part in this desecration of graves, as they appropriated the land of Native peoples, up to the late twentieth century. The effect has been to eliminate the physical evidence of indigenous people from the land, to make it possible to narrate American history as if it begins with European settlement.”

Amateur excavations and salvage operations during construction projects occurred regularly over the decades, but the area mounds and village sites were also systematically dug by credentialed archeologists from across the United States. Thousands of indigenous artifacts, mortuary objects, and human remains were removed, sold, and dispersed in private and public collections, located far from the Portsmouth area. Looking back now, considering the known history of the mistreatment of Native American peoples, the methods and practices of our predecessors are really not surprising, however disturbing they may be to our present-day moral senses and professional standards.

Thanks to the Wertz Collection, however, it is possible to narrate and illustrate the long history of humanity at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, a history that began thousands of years before European settlement. We know that over the millennia, many different indigenous peoples of different cultural traditions have made their home here, leaving their own mark upon the land and only adding complexity to the surviving archeological record.

The destruction of the mounds and earthworks, along with the unscientific archaeological methods used by local collectors at the time, have only added to the mystery, reminding us today of the importance of preserving what remains. As one of the panels in the “Art of the Ancients” exhibition explains: “We will never know the intricacies of the culture and daily lives of the region’s prehistoric people. Because they left no written language, the knowledge we have of North American prehistory comes from the objects that remain. The purpose of many of these artifacts remains a mystery. However, we do have a shared humanity, evident in our continued interest in tools, ornaments, jewelry, music, games, paint, and figurines.”

The entire Wertz Collection is on public display in an admission free gallery, open to all. For more information on the Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, including their hours of operation visit the museum website at https://somacc.com.    

Sources

Richard Bussa, ”At SOMACC: Golden Age of Native American History,” Community Common (16 October 2002): 1.

Margaret Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Aurelia C. Hucksoll, "Indian Lore Student Cites Wealth of Relics Displayed in Portsmouth's Library," Portsmouth Daily Times (31 March 1951).

“Late Realty Operator Known as Foremost Archaeologist. Charles V. Wertz Made Hobby of Studying and Exploring Mound Builders Earthworks,” Portsmouth Times (31 July 1936).

“Rev. Hucksoll to Leave City,” Portsmouth Daily Times (17 Oct. 1947).

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“The Kricker family’s long-term faith in the economic strength of Scioto County is a matter of historical record,” noted the Portsmouth Daily Times in May of 1978. Edmund J. Kricker, the seventy-nine year old chairman of the board and chief executive officer at First Federal Savings & Loan Association, had just kickstarted the first fund raising campaign for the Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center. Clay Johnson, a founding board member of the Museum who has been credited with soliciting Kricker’s $100,000 challenge gift, told the Daily Times, “It is wonderful that the involvement of the Kricker name in this city block will be perpetuated forever as a result of this outstanding contribution to the Southern Ohio Museum.”

The Portsmouth city block that will forever be associated with the Kricker family is that upon which the museum now stands, on the north side of Gallia Street, just off the Esplanade. The story of the Museum and its home, the old Security Central Bank Building, illuminates the industrial and banking past of southern Ohio. The structure’s survival and its repurposing as the region’s premier museum of art, Native American artifacts, and historical photographs, points to the critical role of local philanthropy, such as that of an Edmund Kricker, in the preservation and exhibition of the art, culture, and history of Portsmouth and its environs.

Since its opening as a museum in 1979, it has hosted hundreds of temporary exhibits and sponsored thousands of hours of educational programing. Yet, it is the museum’s three main permanent collections that are its greatest strengths and which give the museum its historical significance. The Wertz Collection’s Art of the Ancients exhibit displays over 10,000 objects and transports visitors to the time of the Adena and Hopewell and even earlier to the Paleo Indian era, when the Ohio and Scioto Valleys were first inhabited by humans. Art historians, the general public, and students from nearby Shawnee State University regularly visit the museum to study the life and work of Clarence Carter, the most famous painter of Portsmouth origins. The museum’s collection of Carter paintings resonates with the city’s more recent past, the years of the Great Depression and the Flood of 1937, before deindustrialization transformed the city and region. The museum’s acquisition of the Carl Ackerman Historic Photograph Collection in December 1996 rounded out the museum’s holdings and marked the fulfillment of its multifaceted mission. The Ackerman Collection encompasses the photographic record of Portsmouth from the early 1860s through the 1980s, capturing in black and white, and color, the rise and fall of industry in this Ohio River city. The Ackerman Collection is a treasure trove of images that will long shape our vision of life in mid-twentieth century Portsmouth.

Carl Ackerman began his collection in 1948, when he acquired “four old postcards of Portsmouth street scenes.” By the time he and his wife Dorothy donated the collection to the museum, it had come to include early area maps, advertisements, theatrical programs, handbills, books, and newspapers. Beginning in 1952, Ackerman also began photographing the city, adding a couple thousand negatives and prints from his own camera work to his photographic records. In an interview from 1972, Ackerman discussed his work and lamented the fate of much of the city’s past: “Time and neglect, floods and fires, and this thing we call progress have destroyed much of our Portsmouth area history.” In hopes that “generations of tomorrow can see what Portsmouth looked like in the past,” Ackerman explained, he went door to door collecting old photos from area residents; he climbed to city roof tops and overlooks to photograph the city from a bird’s eye view. Ackerman added hundreds, if not thousands of his own photos to the collection, which now totals over 10,000 items.

While much may have been lost and is gone forever, thanks to Ackerman and the Southern Ohio Museum we are able to envision the past of Portsmouth. In the 1990s, when area residents combined their resources again in another major effort of public art and history — the creation of the city’s famous flood wall murals — the artist, Robert Dafford, worked with Carl Ackerman to bring many of his photos to life on the city’s downtown flood wall. Ackerman, who died before the completion of the murals, was painted into a panel, just next to the one immortalizing Clarence Carter.

Without a building to house the museum, however, there never would have been a repository for these priceless collections, nor would there have been a place for their further development and display. The story of the museum is thus inseparable from the story of the building it calls home.

The Southern Ohio Museum is located within a magnificent example of the beaux arts style of architecture, dating to 1918, when it was erected by George D. Selby — the city’s most famous shoe manufacturer. The building was originally designed and constructed specifically to house Selby’s Security Savings Bank & Trust Company. His likeness, along with his hero, Abraham Lincoln, can be found in friezes on the building’s ceilings. The Portsmouth Daily Times, which once offered its take on the building’s appearance, noted that "the exterior gives an impression of massive strength, while the interior is suggestive of quiet dignity combined with every facility devised by modern ingenuity for the efficient conduct of the business.”

In 1904, Selby had joined with others in the local shoe industry, including members of the Williams and Heer family, to organize the bank. Its first location was on Gallia Street, across from the museum’s current location, in a building that stands to this day. Its first floor, where the the old teller cage once stood, is now the bar of the popular Royal Lounge, or what is more commonly known simply as “The Royal.”

It was here, around the Esplanade that Portsmouth’s banking firms established their offices at the turn of the twentieth century, during the city’s Gilded Age. Portsmouth’s first banks had been located in the Boneyfiddle District, on Market Street, between Front and Second. In the years following the Civil War, the expansion of the city’s shoe, steel, firebrick, and other industries shifted the city’s central business district out of the Boneyfiddle and up Chillicothe Street to the intersection of Sixth and Gallia Streets. The “Esplanade,” formerly “Gallia Square,” emerged as the new town center. This was a time when capital was local, a time when control of industry and financial institutions was largely local, with local boards of directors. Some companies, like Selby Shoes began selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, but most shares were regionally, if not locally traded and owned. It was a time of rapid industrial growth, large influxes of German immigrants, a time that saw the rise of commercial and investment banking, a time of incredible technological change.

Just after the stock market crash in 1929, George D. Selby’s Security Savings Bank merged with Central National Bank of Portsmouth, the first bank to establish its headquarters on the Esplanade. In June of 1893, James W. Newman, the former proprietor and editor of the Portsmouth Daily Times, became president of the newly formed Central Savings Bank, which opened its business in what was then the brand new Kricker Building, named for its owner and builder George E. Kricker — the father of museum benefactor Edmund Kricker. Newman’s bank presidency was followed by that of Levi D. York, the former owner of Portsmouth's Burgess Steel Mill. Eventually, after reorganizing under a federal charter in 1905, George E. Kricker became president of Central National Bank, and it would be Kricker who presided over the newly merged Security Central National Bank during the Great Depression.

George E. Kricker, it must be noted, was a second generation native of Portsmouth. His father, Mathias Kricker, had come to the city in 1840 and bought the northwest corner of Chillicothe and Gallia Streets (the land fronting the northern side of the Esplanade), the spot upon which now stands the 5/3 Bank Building. And, so, here is where the story’s thread comes back around to Security Central Bank and creation of the Southern Ohio Museum.

Back in 1974, Harry Kuhner, the president of Security Central National Bank decided to move out of Selby’s and Kricker’s old beaux arts building and into a modern, remodeled former department store, the old Montgomery Ward building. Like with so many other Ohio Valley downtowns in the 1970s, deindustrialization had begun to take its toll. Kuhner and the board of Security Central hoped that the redevelopment of the Montgomery Ward building would help spark the redevelopment of the Esplanade and, in turn, help boost Portsmouth’s downtown business district.

Thus, if one is looking for original causes, if one is telling an origins story, one could argue the closure of Portsmouth’s Montgomery Ward department store in 1971 set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the creation of the Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center in 1977. It was then that Clay Johnson arranged for Edmund J. Kricker to make the Museum’s most important charitable donation. His promise to "donate one dollar for every two dollars raised, up to $100,000" ensured the success of the initial capital campaign, which brought in some $300,000. With funding now secured, the museum’s board and directors could then remodel the interior of George Selby’s and George Kricker’s old bank building and begin acquiring, developing, and displaying top quality temporary exhibitions, alongside the museum’s growing permanent collections.

But how was it that the museum came to make its home in the old Security Central Bank Building? The Wertz, Carter, and Ackerman Collections undoubtedly draw the most attention and interest of scholars and the general public, but a good case can be made that one of the museum’s smaller and lessor known collections — the Russell Leiter Collection — deserves recognition for its critical role in the museum’s origins. Dr. Russell Leiter, a native of California, served as Chief Psychologist at the Portsmouth Receiving Hospital from 1955 to 1964 and taught at the local branch campus of Ohio University, the predecessor of today’s Shawnee State University. Leiter’s obscurity in Portsmouth history is striking as he continues to be well-known in psychological studies as the developer of the Leiter International Performance Scale, a non-verbal method for testing intelligence. Dr. Leiter’s decision to place his estate (which included a small collection of relatively rare silverware) in a trust to be managed by Security Central unexpectedly helped trigger the creation of the Southern Ohio Museum.

“Dr. Leiter had reached an advanced age,” writes Clay Johnson. “He had no natural heirs, no spouse, children, or grandchildren. He was not a wealthy person, but he had accumulated property which was meaningful to him and felt some intangible obligation to dispose of that property prudently.” When Leiter died in November 1976, his estate was in the hands of Dale Sielaff, the new trust officer at Security Central. Sielaff had been handed a nut to crack and he wisely sought the advice of Sara Johnson, Clay’s wife, who had, among other achievements, “founded a volunteer program to teach art to public school students.”

Dr. Leiter’s last will and testament, it turned out, had stipulated: “My trustee may, in its sole and unqualified discretion, make an outright gift of all or any part of the foregoing items to the Columbus Academy of Fine Arts, or to a Portsmouth or Scioto County gallery, should one be established and which could guard, protect and provide the public an opportunity to appreciate such items, on a permanent basis.” Sielaff had determined that there was actually no such institution as the “Columbus Academy of Fine Arts” and he wondered, as there was then no gallery or museum per se in Portsmouth, whether the Leiter Collection might be donated to a new entity, “should one be established.” Thus the fates and muses intervened when Central Security donated their now vacant property to the city for use by the Southern Ohio Museum.

Thanks to the founding board members of the museum, whose vision was only matched by the civic spirit of Edmund Kricker, and those who met his challenge, the Russell Leiter Collection found a permanent home, as intended, and Portsmouth and the residents of the region, as well as future generations, benefited greatly from the museum’s establishment.

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Billed as "the world's most authentic, museum-quality representation of Christopher Columbus' flagship," the Santa Maria Ship/Museum has been anchored to the banks of the Scioto River in the heart of Ohio's state capital since 1992. Built to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the city's namesake's famous voyage, the Santa Maria is a clear reminder that the history of the city and larger Scioto Valley is tied to the age of exploration and conquest. The 1992 Commemoration was not without its critics and controversy. Quincentennial Jubilee Commission officials hosted President George H. W. Bush and marked the anniversary with a $95 million international floral and garden festival, awkwardly named AmeriFlora '92. "We Americans celebrate discovery because we're never satisfied," explained the President, "because we are ever romancing the next horizon. That is why ... a full-size replica of the Santa Maria graces the Scioto River. Here in the largest city in the world bearing the explorer's name," he continued, "we honor Columbus for the same reason as people in Peoria or Prague. We believe that the individual can make a difference and that human dignity can, indeed, change the world. Most of all," Bush intoned, "we know that dignity stems from values like hard work and self-reliance and faith. In 1492, those values sustained Columbus' voyage. In 1992, they must sustain our voyage to do right and thus achieve good." The man whom President Bush cited as an example of human dignity, Christopher Columbus, others saw as the embodiment of all the sins of European colonial oppression. When the new Santa Maria was officially dedicated and opened to visitors, another crowd of more than a hundred gathered in a nearby park and held their own memorial service, recalling the genocide that had flowed in the wake of Columbus' voyage. Today, the Columbus Quincentennial has come and gone, but visitors to the Ship/Museum can look up river from her deck and view the former site of Saltlick Town, the Native American village that was destroyed by Virginians during Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. Sources: George H. W. Bush, "Remarks at the Opening Ceremony of the AmeriFlora '92 Exposition in Columbus, Ohio" (1992-04-20), Public Papers, George Bush Presidential Library . Paul C. Nutt, "AmeriFlora '92" in Why Decisions Fail: Avoiding the Blunders and Traps That Lead to Debacles (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002). Anne Raver, "Ameriflora: An Old Hybrid Struggles," New York Times (6 August 1992), p. C1. santamaria.org Andrew C. Theokas, Grounds for Review: The Garden Festival in Urban Planning and Design (Liverpool University Press, 2004).

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The distinctive A-frame construction of the Nature Center dates to circa 1969, when it was built for a privately owned cabin rental complex, known as the High Meadow, which was briefly located on the current site of the Shawnee Park Lodge.

The High Meadow A-Frames cost $75 a week to rent, and included a canoe, which was tied up on the shore of the then new Turkey Creek Lake. After the State of Ohio purchased the location, the cabin was relocated next to the Turkey Creek Lake Spillway and converted into a Nature Center.

In 2007, Shawnee State Park relocated and restored a log cabin, which had been originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. The cabin had been built as part of CCC Camp Shawnee No. 1. and was located near Pond Lick Lake in the Shawnee State Forest.

CCC work within the forest included the removal of deadened American Chestnut, which had succumbed to an Asian blight in the 1920s. Using this salvaged timber, the CCC built a number of log structures, such as this cabin, which is a perfect example of what scholars have called CCC "parkitecture," the distinctive rustic construction style used in CCC park improvements across the nation.

Today, it serves as an interpretive center on the history of the park and forest. Visitors can learn how the Shawnee once called these hills home, when the game was thick and Europeans were few and far between. Following American settlement, which led to deforestation and the extirpation of buffalo, deer, and black bear, a Conservation Movement would give birth to Ohio's Roosevelt Game Preserve and Shawnee State Forest in the 1920s. And, from these beginnings, with the help of Franklin D. Roosevelt's CCC, would develop what is today Shawnee State Park.

Today the Nature Center and CCC Cabin Museum are popular attractions with area residents and visitors from throughout the tri-state region of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Here, park visitors can learn about native and invasive plant and animal species, which are found within the park and larger Shawnee State Forest. The Center and the Park Naturalist, along with numerous volunteers, carry on the tradition of free educational nature programing, which dates back to the Park’s origins in the Roosevelt Game Preserve, which kept a “zoo” of forest animals in the 1920s and 30s.

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