Ohio history
The Salty Dog Museum, a top-notch assemblage of Model T and A Fords in Shandon, Ohio, came into being out of necessity for Ron Miller, his son B.J., and their friend Mark Radtke.
Before they opened the museum, the vehicles were spilling out of their backyards and garages.
“Everybody collects something, and we happen to collect antique vehicles and their stories,” Radtke says.
Charles Young was born into slavery in Mays Lick, Kentucky, in the time just after Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation and just before the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
His parents, technically still considered runaway slaves, carried him as an infant across the Ohio River to the freedom granted them when his father enlisted in the Union Army.
Large windows inside Howard Miller’s office give him a prime view of Hartville Hardware’s main floor; he often leaves his desk to watch folks navigating his store.
Down on the sales floor, shoppers might run across anything from a bright green John Deere Gator to a hot pink, Lil’ Pig Traeger grill. From time to time, someone looks up, spots Miller at the window, and waves. Miller always eagerly waves back. “I grew up with so many people that work and shop here,” he says.
No matter how big a hero he became, through his pioneering work as a test pilot and astronaut or his service to the state and country as a United States senator, John H. Glenn Jr. never forgot his rural roots — and that made him a friend to electric co-op members everywhere, says Darrel “Cubby” Cubbison, the retired longtime member services manager at Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative.
Heading along Ohio’s Interstates and limited access highways, we sometimes forget there are amazing attractions at some of the exits.
Just off US Route 23 is Wyandot Popcorn Museum, located in downtown Marion. Famous for collecting and restoring the world’s largest collection of popcorn antiques and peanut roasters, the collection will fascinate anyone interested in antiques, collectables, and wonderful memories of another time. Two examples are more than 100 years old.
According to an old Pima Indian legend, a flock of very ordinary gray birds became concerned about how unattractive they looked. They began bathing in a sparkling blue mountain lake every morning hoping to make themselves more beautiful. After bathing in the lake for four days, their feathers fell off, and all that remained was gray skin that was even uglier than their plain-looking gray feathers. On the fifth day the feathers grew back in, but this time they were the brilliant blue color of the mountain lake.
While Holmes County historians have ascertained that the hamlet of Charm began in the 1840s when a blacksmith shop opened along an old Indian trail near Doughty Creek, no one knows for sure how Charm got its unusual name. Other businesses gradually joined the blacksmith shop, and by the 1860s, a community had evolved that locals called Stevenson, apparently because Stephen Yoder and his son farmed the land there. When Stevenson’s citizens applied for a post office in the 1880s, the postal department asked them to choose an official name. They picked Charm. Why?
