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How the Boneyfiddle Got Its Name: Historic Preservation and Economic Redevelopment in a “Land of Good Faith”
In the spring of 1993, Portsmouth Murals Inc, launched plans for their first mural, a birds-eye-view of Portsmouth in 1903. Imogene Howland chaired the Art Committee, which included Carl Ackerman,…
B. Glockner on Market Street: The Hardware Store Origins of an Automobile Empire
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…
Jim Thorpe and the Shoe-Steels: Portsmouth, Ohio's First Professional Football Team
In Portsmouth, Ohio, the birth of professional football involved one of America’s greatest athletes of all time — Jim Thorpe — and one of the city’s most forgotten civic leaders — Jack Creasy. Jim…
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…
Booker T. Washington School on Eleventh Street: Public Education and Racial Segregation in Portsmouth, Ohio
Portsmouth City Schools opened their first segregated facility for African American students in 1859, marking the first time that black residents were able to receive a public education. The school…
Portsmouth's African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Underground Railroad
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,"…
The Iron Man Game of 1932
: The NFL Spartans Defeat the Green Bay Packers
in the Greatest Football Game in Portsmouth Sports History
On Sunday, 4 December 1932, the reigning NFL champion Green Bay Packers faced off the Portsmouth Spartans in what has come to be popularly known as the Iron Man Game. Played in Portsmouth’s Universal…
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…
Eugene McKinley Memorial Pool: "A Place in the Sun for Everyone”
Portsmouth, Ohio’s only city-owned, public pool was built to memorialize the drowning death of fourteen-year-old resident Eugene McKinley, the son of George and Ruth McKinley, who lived at 1212-E…
Mitchell-Morrison Cemetery at Moore's Run: A Forgotten Pioneer Era Cemetery in the Shawnee State Forest
Where Moore's Run exits the river hills of Shawnee State Forest, just off modern-day US Highway 52, near the "100 Mile House," one finds a particularly significant pioneer era graveyard, which dates…
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…
Innovation at the Sanford, Varner & Co. Building
The Sanford, Varner & Co. factory building at the southwestern corner of Third and Chillicothe streets has its origins in America's Gilded Age, when clothing manufacturing took place in small cities…
Gradual Emancipation & Colonization: Antislavery Moderates in Southern Ohio: The Chillicothe Colonization Society Meets at St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The operators and station masters of the Underground Railroad in southern Ohio may have all opposed slavery and supported its abolition, but the antislavery movement was not united as it regarded the…
General Jacob H. Smith & the Philippine War’s Samar Campaign: American Imperialism at the Washington Hotel
“A monster public reception followed by a complimentary banquet was last night tendered to Gen. Jacob H. Smith, by local Grand Army men and citizens. The reception was from 8 to 9 o’clock, held in the…
Rev. Edward Weed & the Piketon Anti-Abolition Resolutions: Piketon Courthouse Scene of Anti-Abolition Meeting in 1836
The Piketon Anti-Abolition Resolutions originated in a public meeting held on the 29th of July, 1836, not far from the banks of the Scioto River, at the original courthouse of Pike County, Ohio, in…
How Pee Pee Creek Got Its Name: Peter Patrick, Squatter Rights, & the First Attempted American Settlement in the Scioto Valley
Modern-day Lake White is located near the old confluence of Pee Pee Creek and the Scioto River. In the 1930s when the waters of Pee Pee were dammed by the state of Ohio and the WPA, its flow was…
Horsehead Bottom & the Origins of Dunmore's War: Major Frontier War Triggered by Looting of “Thirty Horse Loads of Skins" and Killing of Shawnee Indians
Explore the obscure and forgotten origins of Dunmore's War of 1774, which began with an attack on a long-forgotten Shawnee Indian Village known as Horsehead Bottom, located just north of modern-day…
Fourteenth Street Community Center: "The Heart of the North End"
Today’s Fourteenth Street Community Center has its origins in a vibrant black civic movement of the 1920s during the Era of Jim Crow, when Portsmouth, Ohio, like much of the United States was…
Nurses at Portsmouth General Hospital (December 1937)
Portsmouth has long been a center for medical care, beginning with the city’s first professionally trained physician, Dr. Thomas Waller, who also served as President of the first City Council in 1815.…
Ohio Stove Company Workers (30 January 1942)
The foundry workers pictured here in January of 1942 worked for the Ohio Stove Company, which was first organized in 1872. Perhaps the oldest manufacturer still operating in Portsmouth, they…
Portsmouth's First Presbyterian Church and the Antislavery Movement in Southern Ohio
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…
The White Front Restaurant on Chillicothe Street (c. 1965)
In 1936, Nicholas Sainopulos purchased the “White Lunch Car,” a diner that was housed in an old Portsmouth street car. Sainopulos “walled in the structure" and rechristened it the “White Front…
Glick’s Furniture and the Damarin Block (c. 1965)
“Buy your furniture at Glick’s on Second Street,” so sang Zeke Mullins on WPAY. Glick’s Furniture opened its doors in 1936 and closed in 1976, having made the Damarin Block at Court and Second…
Masonic Temple at Sixth & Chillicothe Streets
Taken from atop the Martings Building on Chillicothe Street, this photo captures the majesty of the Masonic Temple, which is offset by the plain red brick facade of the then new Montgomery Ward…
Selby Shoes & WPAY on Gallia Street (circa 1952)
WPAY pioneered Portsmouth radio, beginning its broadcasts on April 15th, 1933. By the early 1950s the station’s offices and studios were to be found on the north side of Gallia Street, next door to…
Grand Opera House at Fourth & Chillicothe Streets (c. 1910)
In 1895, Lodge No. 154 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks laid the cornerstone of Portsmouth’s Grand Opera House in the name of “Charity, Justice, and Brotherly Love.” Before the rise of…
Tracy Shoe Company Building
Built in 1891 for the Tracy Shoe Company, this structure has recently been restored and repurposed by the YEI Corporation, a locally owned firm specializing in software solutions and other digital…
James M. Ashley and the Thirteenth Amendment: Author of Thirteenth Amendment Abolishing Slavery Edited Newspaper on Portsmouth's Market Street
Before there was the Washington Hotel at Second and Market Streets, the residents of Portsmouth knew this as Micklethwaite Corner. It was on this block that James Ashley, the author of the Thirteenth…
"Where Southern Hospitality Begins" by Carl Ackerman (5 September 1964).
In the early 1960s, City Manager Frank Gerlach and others championed a new slogan for the City of Portsmouth — “Where Southern Hospitality Begins.” In the summer of 1964, a welcome sign with the…
Southern Ohio Museum & Cultural Center
“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…