“Up, up, and away!” Before Superman became a global icon, he was a glimmer of hope imagined in a Glenville bedroom.
“Superman is one of Cleveland’s greatest exports,” says Valentino Zullo, assistant professor of English at Ursuline College and co-director of the Rustbelt Humanities Lab. “We’re not exporting steel; we’re exporting culture. The superhero genre was created here.”
“No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum.
When Ohio gained statehood in 1803, leadership recognized the potential of the Muskingum to facilitate the opening of Ohio and the entire Midwest for increased trade and development. As a result, in 1837, the legislature began funding construction of a series of 11 locks and dams on the river, spending $1.6 million over the next four years (roughly the equivalent of $1.4 billion today) for what was one of the most extensive — and expensive — public works projects of its kind in America at the time.
In 1957, humorist James Thurber wrote to Columbus Dispatch writer and artist Bill Arter to discuss the future of the house where Thurber had been born.
Not a bad local legacy for a humor writer and cartoonist who frequently made his hometown and its inhabitants the butt of his jokes. In stories like “The Day the Dam Broke” and “University Days,” the good citizens of Columbus and its land grant college, Ohio State University, were often portrayed as naïve or foolish at best, bumpkins at worst. But overall, his portrayal was fond, says Leah Wharton, operations director at Thurber House.
Among the many documents stored in the Archives Research Center at the Sandusky Library is a copy of a letter dated Oct. 7, 1899, and signed by Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie, in fact, eventually became the wealthiest person in the world in his time, thanks to early successful investments in the railroad industry and building what eventually became U.S. Steel. And he followed through on his musing. Carnegie — and later his philanthropic foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York — gave away most of his fortune in his later years, spending much of it on free-to-the-people libraries.
Of Ohio’s 88 counties, eight are named for Indian tribes: Delaware, Erie, Huron, Miami, Ottawa, Seneca, Tuscarawas, and Wyandot.
In development since 2019, Ohio’s newest state park is located along U.S. Route 68 just north of Xenia, where “Old Chillicothe” — a historic Shawnee village — once stood. As Gov. Mike DeWine said at its June 2024 grand opening, “The land had a story that needed to be told.”
Constantine Rafinesque-Schmaltz is the scientist you did not know that you knew. His walkabouts through Ohio impressed upon him a desire to discover more about plants and fishes and a prehistoric culture that predated him by millennia.
The family moved to Italy to escape the terrors of the French Revolution. It was there that a self-educated Constantine came of age and took an ardent interest in natural history and languages, which would come to have its consequences in the names of organisms — through the eastern U.S., in Ohio, and even into the American Southwest.
Along the eastern edge of Alum Creek State Park in central Ohio runs a thoroughfare called Africa Road. I’ve lived in the general vicinity for years, and the road’s name always seemed a bit odd to me.
Late last fall, just off Africa Road in Alum Creek State Park, the ODNR unveiled the first of four planned “Heritage of Freedom” trails in the state commemorating Ohio’s contribution to the Underground Railroad. “The Underground Railroad is a key part of Ohio’s history,” says Mary Mertz, director of ODNR. “This Heritage of Freedom Trail serves as a visual history lesson and provides an immersive way to see what freedom-seekers faced in Ohio’s natural environment during this time in history.”
During the first holiday season after the death of her husband, the noted local artist Jack Hubbard, in 1987, Pat Hubbard received a curious gift delivered to her Yellow Springs home: two sacks — one filled with flour, the other with sugar.
“Wheeling Gaunt was a person of faith and a very resilient man who did not let adversity beat him down; he used it as a motivation to achieve,” says Brenda Hubbard Ibarra, Jack and Pat’s daughter. Although she had been born and raised in Yellow Springs, Ibarra was unaware of Gaunt’s story until her mother started getting those gifts. Inspired, she immersed herself in researching that history, and in 2021, she self-published Legacy of Grace: Musings on the Life and Times of Wheeling Gaunt.
Ohio seems to have a bit of a thing with flags. It’s not just that our state flag is the only one out of the 50 that is not a rectangle (an interesting story in its own right).
You might have seen a service flag: a blue star (or stars) on a field of white, surrounded by a red border — hanging in the picture window of a seemingly random home in the neighborhood or in a shop window of a downtown building. But many folks might be unaware, or at least unsure, of its significance.
Sitting beside a small campfire, its woodsmoke scenting the cool air of a perfect autumn afternoon, I could almost see the scene as vividly as the man seated across from me described it.
The “my people” he speaks of — and traces his lineage to through one of his grandfathers, a full-blooded Native American — were a mixed-race group (modern-day anthropologists term it a “tri-racial isolate”) known as the Carmel Indians. They lived in Ohio’s Highland and Meigs counties until as recently as the early 1900s.
