Ohio

“As lovely a land as ever lay outdoors” was how a native son, author Sherwood Anderson, described his state. Ohio, whose rough easterly hills fade into the undulating western plains, matches its beauty with prosperity. It is a truism that Ohio was once a great manufacturing center, making everything from shoelace tips (aglets) and machine tools, to blast furnaces, playing cards, and bicycles. It was in a Dayton bicycle shop that Wilbur and Orville Wright designed the first airplane, fulfilling man’s ancient dream of flight.

Part of the bed of ancient inland sea rose to form the Allegheny Plateau, which embraces eastern Ohio. This sea left the state rich in both fertile farmland and underground minerals. To this day, intensively worked mines yield billions of dollars for the state from the production of  of lime, made from limestone to produce cement, chemicals, fertilizer and steel. The glaciers which once moved across northern Ohio gave birth to Lake Erie and channeled many of the state’s streams southward into the broad Ohio River. That great waterway, which curves first south, then west around the state, early made Ohio a key east-west corridor across the U.S. Located between the iron ore deposits to the northwest and the coal mines of the Alleghenies, Ohio began its career as a great steelmaker in the 1890’s. But around the great manufacturing centers which dominate the state, there still lie tens of thousands of farms. Their corn, dairy foods, hogs, cattle and other products give Ohio an agricultural income of over $9 Billion annually.