Ohio, United States — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Ohio known for?

Columbus is the capital and the largest city, a government and university town in the middle of the state. Cleveland put itself on the map with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the Lake Erie waterfront, while Cincinnati grew up as a river port on the Ohio River in the southwest. Dayton gave the world powered flight, where the Wright brothers built and tested their first aircraft.

The game of professional football was organised in Canton, home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Farm country fills the rest.

Where is Ohio?

Ohio sits in the Midwestern United States, one of the Great Lakes states. Lake Erie forms its whole northern edge, and the water there doubles as the border with Ontario on the Canadian side. The Ohio River runs the length of the south and southeast.

That river is the boundary with Kentucky and West Virginia, while Pennsylvania lies along the east, Indiana to the west, and Michigan reaches down at the northwest corner. Six neighbours ring it. Most of the state drains either north into Lake Erie or south into the Ohio River, and that low divide running across the middle sends its rivers two opposite ways.

The land splits into three. The rugged Appalachian Plateau covers the east and southeast, where the hills rise and the valleys cut deep, and the unglaciated corner in the far southeast is the wildest ground in the state. Westward, the flat Till Plains take over, glacier-levelled and deep-soiled, the start of the Corn Belt.

Along Lake Erie the ground flattens again into a narrow lake plain. Glaciers shaped nearly all of it. They scraped the north smooth and left the southeast untouched.

Its cities follow the geography. Columbus stands near the centre, Cleveland and Toledo along the Lake Erie coast, Akron just inland in the northeast, and Cincinnati and Dayton down in the southwest.

What is Ohio like?

Ohio thinks of itself as the heart of the country, and much of American ordinary life reads clearly here. Big cities, mill towns, university campuses and open farmland sit close together, and a single afternoon can carry a traveller from downtown Cleveland to the Amish farm lanes of Holmes County. Flight is the state's proudest thread.

The Wright brothers designed and built their first aircraft in Dayton, and the state later sent astronauts of its own aloft, among them John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon. Music and sport carry weight too. Cleveland keeps the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its lakefront, and the professional game of football was born in Canton, where the Pro Football Hall of Fame stands.

Saturdays in autumn belong to college football. Food leans hearty and local: Cincinnati piles its own cinnamon-spiced chili over spaghetti, and Columbus keeps the brick streets and beer halls of German Village. English is the working language everywhere.

The Amish settlement around Holmes County ranks second in size anywhere and first in concentration, and horse-drawn buggies still work the back roads there. For all its industry, Ohio wears a plain, unshowy Midwestern manner. That steadiness is the point.

What is the history of Ohio?

Long before statehood, the Ohio Country belonged to the Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot and Delaware nations. After the Revolution the young republic organised it as the first testing ground of the Northwest Territory, and surveyors cut the land into an orderly grid of numbered townships. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 forced the native confederacy off most of that ground.

Ohio joined the Union in 1803 as the seventeenth state, the first carved wholly from the territory. Canals and then railroads turned its farms and river ports into an industrial core. Growth followed the water first.

What is the climate of Ohio?

Ohio runs on four clear seasons. Summers turn hot and muggy, winters cold and grey, with spring and autumn swinging between the two. The far south, along the Ohio River, edges toward a milder, humid-subtropical feel.

Lake Erie changes the story in the north: the water keeps the shore a little warmer late into autumn, then feeds heavy lake-effect snow onto the ground east of Cleveland. That northeastern snowbelt piles up far more snow than the rest of the state sees. Rain spreads fairly evenly through the year.

The skies stay changeable.

How do you get to Ohio?

Air travel brings most people to Ohio. Three big airports split the traffic: John Glenn Columbus International in the centre, Cleveland Hopkins in the north, and the Cincinnati airport that actually sits across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Interstate highways do the rest of the work, with I-70 crossing east to west and I-71 and I-75 running north to south through the main cities.

The Ohio Turnpike skirts the top of the state toward Toledo and the Lake Erie shore. Trains call at a handful of stations. For many travellers the drive from a neighbouring state is the simplest way of all.