Explore two-hundred years of history in Portsmouth’s Boneyfiddle District, where the community’s oldest churches, residences, retail stores, and factories were located in the 19th Century. See the results of a fifty-year effort at historic preservation and economic redevelopment and visit sites connected to the beginnings of the city’s iron and steel industry, the Underground Railroad (UGRR), the abolition of slavery, innovative businessmen and women in the Gilded Age, and a successful NAACP…

With the City of Portsmouth as your gateway, explore two-thousand years of human and natural history in the Shawnee State Forest Region of Scioto and Adams counties. With its misty hollows, forested ridges, and rolling hills and its spring wildflowers and dramatic fall colors, the region has become known as Ohio’s Little Smokies. Its history stretches from the time of prehistoric Native Americans who built the Portsmouth Earthworks Complex over two-thousand years ago to more recent historical…

Explore the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Portsmouth, Ohio, where the city’s black residents resisted the development of racial segregation and other discriminatory practices that followed the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Learn about the decades long struggle to end segregation in the city’s schools and how in the 1960s non-violent, civil disobedience worked to integrate the Booker T. Washington School and the Terrace Club, a private, whites-only swimming pool and youth center.…

Explore the history of the Beneh Abraham Jewish congregation of Portsmouth, Ohio, what is recognized as the third oldest Jewish community in Ohio. Learn how Beneh Abraham was formed in the late 1850s and discover its contributions to the development of the City of Portsmouth. This tour visits explores the Jewish community's history through visiting the locations of the congregation's historic places of worship, along with the Hebrew Section of Greenlawn Cemetery. Complete the tour in person or…

Explore the history depicted in Portsmouth’s famous floodwall murals. This tour covers some 2,000 years of history at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, from the ancient Adena and Hopewell to the workers at Williams Shoe factory in downtown Portsmouth. Explore in more detail some of the history depicted in Robert Dafford’s epic Portsmouth Floodwall Murals. The history of human settlement at the Mouth of the Scioto has always been shaped by the rise and fall of flood waters. Over…