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 Spartan-Municipal Stadium and its origins in professional football in Portsmouth, Ohio. Learn how the legendary Jim Thorpe and the forgotten Jack Creasy helped build the team and organization that would become the NFL Spartans, and in time, (after being sold) were reborn as the Detroit Lions. Visit sites across the city where key moments in local football history happened and return to the scene of the Spartans’ greatest triumphs in what was originally known as Labold…

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…

Covering the years 1730 through the War of 1812, this tour explores the history of Native American efforts to defend their homeland, first, from the encroachments of the French and English colonial empires, and, second, from those of the new American Republic. This is the story of the conquest of the Scioto Valley and the larger region of the Trans-Appalachian West, what is sometimes called the "First West." From Celeron’s Expedition in 1749 to Tecumseh in the War of 1812, the Shawnee and…

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.…