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Gharky & Waller at Carey's Run Cemetery
The lives of David Gharky and Dr. Thomas Waller are forever intertwined. These two pioneer settlers first made their home at Alexandria, on the West Side of the Scioto's Old Mouth, but when that…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Harry Knighton Trail & the Shawnee Nature Club
Coming soon! The story of the Shawnee Nature Club and the Harry Knighton Trail in the Shawnee State Park.
Harry Knighton, internationally known for his study of fungi, helped found the North…
Harry Wagner & the Origins of Boy Scout Camp Oyo
"HOW!" rang the greeting.
"It is indeed a pleasure for me, as a representative of the people who once inhabited this very spot, to come before you, our White Brothers, who are now sitting about our…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
James M. Ashley and the Underground Railroad in Friendship, Ohio
In 1841, a seventeen-year-old James M. Ashley conducted a group of seven African American freedom seekers from Greenup County, Kentucky, down the Ohio River, past Portsmouth, Ohio, to the West Side of…
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…
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…
Joe Logan & the Fugitive Slave Experience in Southern Ohio: West Union, Ohio's Olde Wayside Inn and the Underground Railroad
The Olde Wayside Inn in West Union, Adams County, has gone by many names over its two-hundred plus years of existence. Originally known as Bradford's Tavern, for a while in the 1870s and 80s, area…
John J. Minor's Barbershop and "New Light" on the Underground Railroad: Recovering the History of Portsmouth's 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…
Julia Marlowe and Madame Brough's Saloon on Front Street: The Boneyfiddle Childhood of a World-Famous Actress and Women's Voting Rights Activist
In December 1888, when Julia Marlowe's star was first rising in the national firmament, the Portsmouth Daily Times published an account of Marlowe's scandalous childhood in the Boneyfiddle District of…
Kennedy & Ashton's Feed Store: The Politics of Slavery and Abolition in Southern Ohio
Since its construction in the early 1850s, what was originally known as Milton Kennedy's Feed Store and City Hall building has become arguably the city's most historic structure, having played a…
Logan's Elm & Commemorating Dunmore's War
At the Logan Elm State Memorial, near Circleville, in Pickaway County, Ohio, visitors can read the frontier history of the Scioto Valley written in bronze and stone. First conceived in the fall of…
Lookout Trail and Rocky Hollow: In the Footsteps of Dr. E. Lucy Braun
Hike or ride the Mackletree Bridle Trail, which runs up Rocky Hollow and contemplate the life's work of Dr. E. Lucy Braun, the pioneering female naturalist who first comprehended the significance of…
Lower Shawnee Town and Céloron's Expedition of 1749
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…
Major John Belli and the First American Settlement on Turkey Creek
In the summer of 1787, John O'Bannon surveyed a one-thousand acre parcel at the Mouth of Turkey Creek in what would become Scioto County, Ohio. O'Bannon selected these lands for Larkin Smith, a…
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…
McKendree Chapel & the Grave of Jonas "Am" Cooper
At the McKendree Methodist Chapel, near the mouth of Upper Twin Creek, one finds the graves of key players in the Shawnee Wilderness Area's history of moonshine and murder.
Of particular note is…
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…
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…
Nathaniel Massie and Indentured Servitude at Buckeye Station, Adams County, Ohio
Buckeye Station, the one-time home of Nathaniel Massie and his brother-in-law, Charles Willing Byrd, lays in ruins, marked now by a cell phone tower on what was once known as Hurricane Hill. An…
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.