Deep dives
Long reads on Ohio places, lost places and landmarks, each built from maps, newspapers and public records, with a source on every fact.
All deep dives (14)
- AmlinFranklin County · placeAmlin is a Franklin County crossroads named for an 1894 rail depot, home to a post office that ran 130 years and a schools vote it alone lost in 1917.
- Fort Ancient and Serpent MoundWarren, Montgomery, Hamilton, Cuyahoga, Licking, Jackson, Erie, Adams counties · topicOhio's Fort Ancient farmers built maize villages from about AD 1000-1650. Nearby, Serpent Mound's true age is still disputed: about 300 BC or AD 1070.
- Ohio data centersFranklin, Licking, Cuyahoga, Hamilton, Summit, Butler, Montgomery, Delaware counties · topicWhere Ohio's 181 data centers sit, who is building them, the tax breaks, the power and water they need, and the moratoriums and ballot fights over them.
- Ohio's Archaic periodHardin, Lorain, Clermont, Athens, Ashland counties · topicOhio's Archaic period ran 7,000 years. People here built dugout canoes, grew squash, buried dogs beside their dead and traded Lake Superior copper.
- Ohio's deep timeWarren, Hamilton, Greene, Erie, Cuyahoga, Licking, Muskingum, Adams counties · topicOhio was once a tropical sea south of the Equator, home to giant trilobites and a toothless armored fish — and it has no dinosaur fossils at all.
- Ohio's first peopleWyandot, Medina, Stark, Coshocton, Adams, Knox, Licking, Fairfield counties · topicOhio's first people arrived at least 13,000 years ago, hunted mastodons and giant sloths, and carried Coshocton flint hundreds of miles on foot.
- Ohio's Ice Age animalsLicking, Franklin, Holmes, Wyandot, Darke, Medina, Muskingum counties · topicOhio has yielded over 150 mastodons and a giant beaver named for the state — plus a golf-course mastodon skeleton that now sits in a museum in Japan.
- Ohio's Ice Age glaciersErie, Logan, Champaign, Summit, Wayne, Portage, Pickaway, Franklin counties · topicIce a mile thick once buried the Lake Erie basin. Three glaciations reshaped Ohio, rerouted its rivers, and left the farmland Ohioans still farm today.
- Ohio's Native Nations, 1650-1843Scioto, Coshocton, Tuscarawas, Wyandot, Auglaize, Pickaway, Logan, Greene counties · topicOhio's historic Native nations were mostly newcomers of the 1720s-1750s, not ancient residents, and by 1843 every one had been forced out of the state.
- Ohio's Road to StatehoodTuscarawas, Darke, Mercer, Pickaway, Lucas, Ross, Washington, Hamilton counties · topicFrom the French and Indian War through St. Clair's defeat to a one-vote loss of Black suffrage, Ohio's path to statehood in 1803 was neither clean nor certain.
- The Adena, Ohio's first mound buildersRoss, Montgomery, Clark, Hamilton, Warren, Adams counties · topicOhio's Adena culture raised the state's first burial mounds around 800 BC. It is named for Thomas Worthington's Chillicothe estate.
- The First Europeans in OhioCuyahoga, Coshocton, Tuscarawas, Sandusky, Miami, Washington, Hamilton, Gallia counties · topicMarquette saw the Ohio's mouth in 1673, but the first European known by name to live in Ohio was a French trader on the Cuyahoga around 1742.
- The Hopewell CultureLicking, Ross, Warren, Pickaway, Washington, Scioto counties · topicOhio's Hopewell people built moon-aligned earthworks around AD 90-430, moved Yellowstone obsidian 1,500 miles, and left a 2023 UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- The Mound Builder MythLicking, Pickaway, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Ross, Scioto, Coshocton counties · topicOhio's earthworks were long blamed on a vanished 'lost race,' a myth that helped justify Indian Removal and outlived its 1894 federal debunking.