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Thomas Gaylord and the Beginning of Portsmouth's Iron Industry
Thomas Gould Gaylord provided the capital and entrepreneurial drive to establish Portsmouth as a major center for iron manufacturing, securing his pig iron from the numerous charcoal furnaces in what…
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…
Portsmouth’s Basham Hill Reservoir: An Amazing (and Nearly Tragic) History
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the City of Portsmouth grew so to did its demand for clean and reliable drinking water. Constructed in 1913, the little-known Basham Hill…
Peerless Portsmouth and Detroit, the City of Champions: How the Portsmouth Spartans Helped the Detroit Lions Win the 1935 NFL Championship
The Portsmouth Spartans enhanced their rich NFL history when they moved to Detroit in 1934, became the Detroit Lions and won the 1935 NFL Championship. That Lions team was part of an amazing more than…
Tremper Mound and Earthworks
Of the many peoples inhabiting the Great Eastern Forest in what is now the United States, the Hopewell Culture, spanning 50 BCE to 400 CE was one of the most artistic and geographically influential.…
Bessie Tomlin and the Ohio River Flood of 1937
When the Flood of 1937 hit Portsmouth, Bessie Tomlin, like others in the city's African-American neighborhood, first found safety on the second floor of the Booker T. Washington School. But soon she…
Dr. James F. Scott, the First Elected Black County Coroner in the United States
James Forrest Scott was born in Porter, Ohio located in Gallia County, on 29 July 1903. He graduated from Bidwell Porter High School in 1921. Despite being the only black member of his class, he was…
William Flagg's Stone Wine Cellar on Lower Twin Creek
For richest and best Is the wine of the West, That grows by the Beautiful River; Whose sweet perfume Fills all the room With a benison on the giver... "Ode to Catawba Wine" – Henry Wadsworth…
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…
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…
Portsmouth's Second Synagogue and Jewish Life in the Mid-twentieth Century
Following the construction of Portsmouth's first synagogue, Portsmouth's Jewish population expanded further in the early 20th century. The Jewish community created a new organization called the B'nai…
Portsmouth's Early Jewish Community and First Place of Worship
Beneh Abraham, located at the corner of Second and Union Street, is among Ohio's oldest organized Jewish congregations. Beneh Abraham was incorporated in 1858 at a time when the total Jewish…
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…
"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,…
Raven Rock Nature Preserve
With its dramatic overlook, Raven Rock has long been an attraction for area residents and visitors. Its history is legendary, with some stories placing, at various moments in time, Daniel Boone and…
Spartan-Municipal Stadium: Original Home of the NFL Spartans (Detroit Lions)
The drive to build a sports stadium in Portsmouth, Ohio, was first launched in 1925, when the city's civic clubs all backed a city-wide referendum to construct a city-owned recreational center, which…
NFL Spartans Business Office in the Royal Savings & Loan Building: Harry N. Snyder and the Business of Pro Football in Portsmouth, Ohio
Room 25 on the second floor of the Royal Savings & Loan Company Building on Gallia Street was once the location of the business office of the NFL Spartans.
Stanton and McMahon's Smoke House: The Beginnings of Semi-Professional Football in Portsmouth, Ohio
Portsmouth, Ohio, is renowned as a football town, a community with a deep and abiding love of the sport - a place where both team and stadium history intertwine with the early years of professional…
George Remus - 'King of the Bootleggers' - in the Boneyfiddle
In 1927, George Remus, known as the "King of the Bootleggers," spent the last month of his three-year prison term, in the newly built Scioto County Courthouse Jail, which at the time was located on…
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…
Fifteenth Amendment Ratification Celebration in Portsmouth, Ohio: Allen Chapel of the AME Church Hosts Integrated Celebration in 1870
The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 marked the culmination of a decades long struggle to end slavery and establish a new national republic that guaranteed equal rights to all its…
Jim Crow at Wurster Brothers Drug Store on Chillicothe Street: The Ohio Conference of the AME Church Denounces Racial Discrimination in Portsmouth, Ohio
In September 1904, Portsmouth, Ohio's Wurster Bros. Drug Store on Chillicothe Street made headlines in the New York Times when they refused to serve soda water to Bishop W. B. Derrick, a visiting…
“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,…
Capt. William McClain's Underground Steamboat: McClain v. Esham (1856) and the Escape of Joshua onboard the Steamer Bostona
A long-overlooked Kentucky lawsuit, known as McClain v. Esham, dating to 1856, provides important insight into the Ohio River operations of what might best be described as an Underground Steamboat. In…
“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…
Runaway Slave Advertisements in Portsmouth, Ohio: Recovering the Story of Harriet's Escape on the Underground Railroad
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…
Union Mills and Lock 50 of the Ohio & Erie Canal
Ideally located, where the Ohio and Eric Canal turned to make its final descent across the Scioto River bottoms to its terminus at Portsmouth, Union Mills was developed to take advantage of the large…
Excavation and Destruction of the Waller-Heinisch Mound
Portsmouth High School (PHS) is built upon the location of what was first known as Waller Mound, and later became known as the Heinisch Mound, the earthen structure taking its name from the land's…
Portsmouth NAACP Protests Jim Crow at the Westland Theater: Screening of Joe Louis's “The Spirit of Youth” Sparks Controversy in 1938
In February 1938, Joe Louis was just starting his reign as heavy-weight champion of the world, having won the title the previous June when he knocked out James J. Braddock. Portsmouth, Ohio, like the…
Integrating Portsmouth, Ohio’s Dreamland Pool: Non-violent Direct Action at the Terrace Club
By the summer of 1964, the Civil Right’s Movement had picked up momentum and direct actions aimed at integrating white-only public accommodations and places of amusement, such as swimming pools, had…