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William Crawford & the Destruction of Salt-Lick Town
Jonathan Alder, a native of Virginia, is best remembered for his life as an Indian captive in Ohio during the 1780s and 1790s. He was taken prisoner and adopted into a Mingo family in 1782, towards…
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…
One Hundred Years of Conservation in Shawnee State Park: Gov. Harry L. Davis and the Dedication of Ohio’s Theodore Roosevelt Preserve
The Theodore Roosevelt Preserve was dedicated at 3pm on December 5th, 1922, by Governor Harry L. Davis. It began with 20,000 acres as a "game and reforestation preserve." At the time of its…
Buckhorn Ridge & William Flagg
Hike or ride along historic Buckhorn Ridge Bridle Trail, which runs through the heart of the Shawnee Wilderness Area, dividing the waters of Upper and Lower Twin Creeks.
In the 1850s, William…
CCC Cabin Museum and the Shawnee State Park Nature Center
The Shawnee State Park Nature Center, which is located just below the Turkey Creek Lake Dam, carries on the traditions of the original Roosevelt Game Preserve, from which the Park was first carved in…
Burning of CCC Camp Adams: Segregation & Sabotage in Ohio's Shawnee State Forest
In June of 1936, Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps addressed a letter to two Ohio senators, Robert J. Bulkley and Vic Donahey, regarding complaints he had received from…
Tecumseh Comes of Age on the Allan W. Eckert Trail: Myth and Legend at the Mouth of the Scioto River
One need not refer to well-known bestseller lists to appreciate that more Americans are familiar with Allan Eckert’s telling of frontier history than with the writings of any dead or living, academic…
The Alexandria Stone & Alexandria Point Park
In 1938, during the North-West Territory sesquicentennial celebration, Portsmouth residents put on a "gigantic parade" through the city, carrying a large stone at the "head of the procession." The…
Buena Vista Freestone Company Store
Coming Soon!
The story of the Buena Vista Freestone Company and John M. Mueller, its sole proprietor.
Learn about Mueller's operation, which included quarries up nearby Vastine Hollow, a saw…
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…
Vastine Hollow Freestone Quarries
During the second-half of the nineteenth century, Vastine and other hollows of Lower Twin Creek were the center of a major stone quarry industry. Here workers for various firms, including John…
Roosevelt Lake and the CCC Stone Memorial: Memorializing the Men Who Built Shawnee State Park and Forest
In 1934, a segregated, all-black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) unit of enrollees, known as Company 1545, dammed the waters of Mackletree Run and Turkey Creek, creating Roosevelt Lake, the…
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…
Picnic Point and Auto-tourism in Ohio's Little Smokies
With a spectacular view of the Ohio River, the hills of Kentucky, and the City of Portsmouth, Picnic Point in the Shawnee State Forest offers visitors a memorable experience. While there are a number…
Pond Lick Lake and CCC Camp Shawnee No. 1
The first of seven Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps to call Shawnee Forest home, CCC Camp Shawnee No. 1 was located on Pond Lick Run, a tributary of Turkey Creek. The enrollees who called this…
CCC Co. 1520 & Camp Shawnee No. 2
CCC Camp Shawnee No. 2 was home to one of the four segregated, all black companies of Civilian Conservation Corps units, which helped to construct the infrastructure of the modern-day Shawnee State…
Wolfden Lake & CCC Camp Gordon
Camp Gordon was one of seven Civilian Conservation Corps camps that were established in the Shawnee State Forest, beginning in 1933. Located in the Headwaters of Turkey Creek on State Route 125, Camp…
CCC Camp Scioto & McBride Lake
In the mid-1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees from nearby Camp Scioto built McBride Lake in the headwaters of Pond Run, a small tributary of the Ohio River.
One of six lakes…
Bear Lake & Horse Camp
Bear Lake is situated deep in the heart of Shawnee State Forest and only adds to the scenic beauty of what is now known as the Horse Camp. Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees from Camp Bear Creek…
CCC Camp Bear Creek
Camp Bear Creek was one of the seven Civilian Conservation Corps camps located in the Shawnee State Forest, beginning in 1933. The camp, with its barracks, officers quarters, and out buildings is now…
Roosevelt Lake Overlook Trail & the Mackletree Shelter House
With the completion of the Roosevelt Lake Dam in 1934, the Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees of Company 1545 from nearby Camp Roosevelt, built two shelter houses for visitors to the new Roosevelt…
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…
Snake Hollow & the Old Forest Experiment Station
In the 1930s, Snake Hollow in Shawnee Forest became the location of a wildlife and forestry research station, which received its funding through state and federal conservation programs. One of the…
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…
The Drummer's Ghost in Dead Man Hollow
According to Harry Knighton, noted mycologist and founder of the Shawnee Nature Club, a crew of CCC Boys in the mid-1930s found the bones of a murdered pedlar when they were constructing Forest Road 2…
Treber Inn, Henry Clay, & the "Self-Made Man" on Old Zane's Trace
Zane's Trace, the first Federally funded road through frontier Ohio, ran from Wheeling, in modern-day West Virginia, across the Hocking, Muskingum, and Scioto Valleys, to Limestone, (now Maysville),…
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…
Robert Dafford & the Portsmouth Floodwall Murals
The City of Portsmouth, located at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, has a history of public murals, from those painted in the 1930s by Clarence Carter in the lobby of the Post Office on…
Sole Choice & the Portsmouth Shoe Industry
Explore the history of the sole-surviving remnant of Portsmouth, Ohio's once mighty shoe industry, Mitchellace, Inc. This "narrow fabrics" company emerged from the Panic and Great Recession of 2008…