"OHIO - STATE OF PRESIDENTS" a Ohio Travel Page by mtncorg

Eight American Presidents have had a direct link to Ohio though with three - William and Benjamin Harrison and U.S. Grant - those links are much more tenuous since they spent large parts of their lives living elsewhere. Of the other five, four came from the northern regions of the State. Of the eight, four were connected through services rendered for the Union cause during the American Civil War with three becoming generals. Three of the four northern Ohioans led the Nation during what was known as the Gilded Age, the time between the Civil War and the onset of imperialism brought about by the Spanish-American War of 1898. None of the eight are rated highly on the en vogue Presidential rating lists today, though McKinley does threaten to crack the upper ranks on some lists and with good reasons. One of the five - Harding - comes out at the bottom of some lists, though personally, I would always have him above such greats as Pierce, Buchanan, Fillmore and maybe even Grant. All are mostly forgotten outside of Ohio today, even inside Ohio to a fair degree. Each is remembered with a museum and an elaborate tomb. And while most do not make much of impression on modern history, each do have interesting stories to discover. A couple were very intelligent men and all were very ambitious.

Ohio gives the traveler the opportunity to come face to face with history - Presidents and much more. The State was once the frontier, but that was long ago now. Coming from the Far West, I noted a definite lack of wild open space. Towns and cities are in a surplus with farms filling in the countryside between. Many of these towns demonstrate a bustling, prosperous past though in many case, the past is the past and the future is not necessarily bright.

Preconceived notions. I had a few regarding Ohio before visiting. Once, as a teenager, I had been driven across the State on the Ohio Turnpike from where Ohio looks pretty much the same as Indiana, Michigan or Illinois. Several times I had flown across the State, even once spying Cleveland from 35000 feet up. A couple of times I even landed at the Cincinnati airport - though the airport is not actually in Cincinnati nor is it even in Ohio (it is in Kentucky). Songs from Randy Newman of the burning Cuyahoga River - that event transpired in 1969 - ("Burn on, big river, burn on.") and the Pretenders ("I went back to Ohio, But my City was gone ..... A, O, Oh way to go Ohio") helped to give me some idea of what to expect. Ohio for me was big industrial metroplexes, farmland and Ohio State football. After visiting, I can't say that those preconceptions were totally disproved either. The vast Industrial Age factories of the Cuyahoga Valley; the more modern vast manufacturing plants like the Ford engine works just east of the Cleveland airport or the Whirlpool appliance plant in Clyde are for the most part foreign to my Pacific Northwestern experience (with the exception of Boeing). Farms did fill, for the most part, the spaces between the towns and cities and a lot of people could be seen wearing red and black coats demonstrating an allegiance to the Ohio State University whether they had actually attended the school or not.

During my short visit, I was impressed with the ever presence of the past still discernible despite the modern urban sprawl. Also, like the Mormon missionary guide in Hiram who was showing me the John Johnson House, I found myself always looking around for mountains to give me a clue as to my whereabouts. The guide came from the small Utahn town of Loha, hidden away in the high mountains of the central part of that State. I didn't want to tell him that Hiram is actually considered high ground in Ohio with some of the nearby hills topping the 1000 foot elevation mark.

Cleveland, I found fascinating for the vast industrial sprawl along the Cuyahoga River that effectively divides the metro area into western and eastern halves, as well as serving - along with Lake Eire and I-90 - to isolate downtown Cleveland from the rest of the region. Downtown Cleveland reminds me of Denver or Seattle where the populace has gone a bit sports mad, erecting huge stadia at each corner for every other sport - there are stadia for football, baseball, basketball - actually two for basketball, if you include the Cleveland State University's venue. Maybe because of the plethora of sports teams calling Cleveland 'home', I had always thought of Cleveland as larger than my hometown of Portland, but that idea is actually reversed. Cleveland is in fact getting smaller and the price of housing there is in a free fall at the moment, while Portland is going in the other direction.