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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Floyd Chapman & the American Black Bear
Floyd Chapman was a Field Ecologist with the Ohio Division of Conservation and spent much of the later part of the 1930s researching his dissertation on the “Development and Utilization of Wildlife…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Dr. Chaboudy and the Origins of the Portsmouth Flood Wall Murals
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…
Copperhead Fire Tower
In 1924, after purchasing the first lands for the creation of the Shawnee State Forest, the Division of Forestry constructed three fire towers in the region to help protect the state's newly acquired…
Concord Presbyterian Church & the Rev. James H. Dickey
Ross County's Concord Presbyterian Church was home to a number of influential abolitionist activists and conductors on the Underground Railroad. Concord's congregation has its roots in nearby South…
Columbus & the Santa Maria Ship/Museum
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…
CCC Co. 1545 & Camp Roosevelt
On May 20th, 1935, T. J. McVey walked the grounds of CCC Camp Roosevelt on the banks of Turkey Creek in Ohio's Shawnee State Forest. McVey worked for the Inspections Division of the CCC and his "Camp…