Columbus is in the center of Ohio, a state that is the Heart of It All, as the saying goes, and the city is plainly midwestern. My old friend Jon Butler used to describe driving home to Minnesota (he grew up in Hector, in central Minnesota, near the Dakotas) from his academic post in New Haven, Connecticut. When he began to approach Columbus, he remembered, he knew he was in the Midwest. The lands to the east of Columbus felt like something different to him. They were certainly in the orbit of the core Midwest but also shading into something else, a borderland, the eastern edges of the midwestern pale.

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On the first day of April 2024, I landed in Columbus and, after a day of meetings and meals, began a trek east the next morning, at 6:10. A storm system had rolled in overnight, and in the morning darkness the rain sloshed down in waves. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine held a news conference and said, “There’s a big red blotch on the state of Ohio!” I could see the blotch on my weather app, which was also blinking “Flash Flood Warning!” Before long, despite the morning murk and the rain and the flashing red warnings, I could see what Butler meant when the land was momentarily illuminated via lightning flashes.

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Columbus is in the flatter midwestern core, where the glaciers slid in and left behind glacial till and fertile soils and little lakes, but that changes when traveling east. I first passed through Hebron in Licking County. Hebron was named by Christian settlers who embraced the biblical reference or perhaps borrowed the name from Hebron, Connecticut, whose founders likely had the same idea. The Hebron massacre was in the news again as part of the debate over the deep origins of the 2023 Gaza war, which would paralyze college campuses on the coasts the following spring. Hebron, Ohio (there are also Hebrons in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota) sits on the eighty-second meridian, a designation I notice because back in my home state of South Dakota people often mark space vis-à-vis the hundredth meridian, which splits the state and signals the dividing line between lands where twenty inches of rain is normal and lands where it is not. West of the hundredth meridian is the arid West, as famously explained by the Midwest-born explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell. But Hebron, far from that line of aridity, gets an ample average of forty-two inches of rain per year, a large chunk of which fell during my drizzly drive. Licking County (so named by settlers for its plentiful salt licks) is bordered by Knox County, home to Centerburg, the precise geographic center of Ohio. Hebron was where the National Road intersected with the Ohio & Erie Canal, which connected the top and bottom halves of the state, so the town is dubbed the Historic Crossroads of Ohio. The deep centralness of Ohio—the closeness to the capital, the Horseshoe, the state’s geographic center—can be felt here.

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Down the road east of Hebron is Zanesville, named for the once-famous Zane family. Older Americans will remember the popular western novels of its native son Zane Grey, whose books President Eisenhower of Kansas used to read in the White House to escape from the pressures of the early Cold War. As a young man, Grey took to fishing and hunting and read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales of early frontier scouting, along with other accounts of pioneering. He also read the popular books by Charles Fosdick and Horatio Alger and Our Western Border, a chronicle of pioneers and their struggles in the early Ohio country, who included Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and the Zane family. The town is named for Ebenezer Zane, an early pioneer who constructed Zane’s Trace, or trail, from Wheeling, West Virginia, kitty-corner across Ohio down to Maysville, Kentucky.¹ Zanesville is where the smaller Licking River connects to the larger Muskingum River and Zane’s Trace crosses the enlarged Muskingum River, which flows south, down to Marietta on the Ohio River. Johnny Appleseed knew these central byways well and used the Muskingum and the trace to extend his apple tree empire throughout the Ohio interior.² On this April day, the Muskingum was engorged by the insistent rain, and the lowlands along the river were flooding. There used to be ferries in Zanesville, which transported people and goods across the Muskingum, but in the twenty-first century a rare Y-shaped bridge provides the path for cars navigating the Licking–Muskingum confluence. Because of its centrality to early Ohio history, Zanesville was the state’s capital for a while before the final move to Columbus. Greater Zanesville—or, let us say, Muskingum County—is geographically significant for another reason. It marks the beginning of the Appalachian Plateau, or where the East meets the Midwest. Near the village of Gratiot, the land visibly begins rolling and the trees thicken through the lightning flashes.

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My destination that misty morning was not Hebron or Zanesville but New Concord, Ohio, and Muskingum University, home of the Muskies. While once the real muskellunge grew long in the deeper pools of the Muskingum River, they are now rare, but the legend—and mascot—lives on, even though I am not alone in more closely connecting the great fish to northern Wisconsin than southeast Ohio. New Concord was largely a social visit. Several years ago, I came to know MU’s president, Sue Hasseler, when she was a vice president at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on the other end of the Midwest. But I also wanted to map out this geographical edge country. Reaching New Concord, on the far Eastern side of Muskingum County, one has definitively passed onto the Appalachian Plateau, or the obviously unglaciated eastern rim of Ohio. Muskingum University sits high on a hill, which makes the geographic point, and on the path into town there is a large bridge over Fox Creek which flows between two rounded hills.

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As one approaches the plateau, the change is subtle. There is not a big escarpment announcing its arrival. This is a transition zone, not a stark line of demarcation. This is not the central spine of the Appalachians, not the highlands and hollows. This is the slow beginnings of the topography that evolves into Appalachia. But since this land is unglaciated, it lacks the glacial till and rich soils that glaciated western Ohio boasts. A friend in Columbus had said that “western Ohio is basically eastern South Dakota,” or the flat farming territory where we both grew up. The topographical differences between eastern and western Ohio can be measured in corn. In Mercer County, Ohio, on the western side of the state, the farm ground totals 270,000 acres; in Jefferson County, in eastern Ohio (home to Steubenville), 77,000 acres are dedicated to farming; farms occupy 92 percent of Mercer County; 43 percent in Jefferson (while 32 percent is forested); Mercer produces 18.5 million bushels of corn a year; Jefferson produces 350,000.

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On an Ohio tour threaded together by stops at some of the state’s many colleges, one must note that New Concord is the birthplace of William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago and a champion of the classics and the humanities. He was born in a cabin— which still stands on Main Street—in 1856 and attended then Muskingum College (graduating at age thirteen). I dropped by the cabin at the bottom of the hill below the college next to the village hall and across the street from Wally’s Pizza and Margaret Lane Antiques. Harper earned his PhD from Yale by age eighteen and then married Ella Paul, the daughter of the president of Muskingum College, and began teaching classics at nearby Denison University in Granville. His ambitions soon had him building the University of Chicago into one of the world’s great research universities. John Glenn, a heroic figure from a now distant America, was also raised here, and a towering portrait of him graces the president’s office at Muskingum University. John Glenn Sr. ran a local plumbing business, and his son delivered the Columbus Dispatch on his bicycle and played football and basketball at New Concord High School. John Glenn Jr. then attended Muskingum College and played football before becoming an officer and fighter pilot in the Marine Corps and flying fifty-seven combat missions in the Pacific during World War II. Glenn was an all-American from Ohio. He became an astronaut, served in the US Senate, and ran for president. He was a Mason and an elder in the Presbyterian Church. In 1943, he married Annie Castor in New Concord, and they were husband and wife for seventy-three years. Glenn is a figure from the center of Ohio—from the Heart of It All—who represented the best of the Midwest to the rest of the country and symbolized the solidity of the heartland. New Concord is part of “deep Ohio,” as novelist Stephen Markley calls it.³ On the way out of town, I tried to stop at the National Road and Zane Grey Museum, but it is closed on Tuesdays.

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Before heading farther east toward Appalachia, I turned southwest toward Athens, having downloaded Tom Wolfe’s classic The Right Stuff (1979) to listen to on the drive and reflect on the greatness of John Glenn, whom I remembered passing in the hallways as a young college intern in the US Senate and whose namesake—John Glenn International Airport— had been my gateway to Columbus. Wolfe spotlights Glenn’s decency and striving and describes the scene when the national media descends on his Presbyterian church in New Concord looking for good photos to accompany their coverage of Glenn being the first American to orbit the Earth. I passed signs for The Wilds, an open air zoo with rhinoceroses and zebras, and wished my kids were along. The Wilds used to be a coal mine, a sign of the coming of Appalachia. South of I-70 I was at the mercy of GPS and began traveling down narrow winding lanes with no shoulders through thick trees and a few scattered small fields which would soon yield spring hay. The roads—Pike Road, Hicks Road, Old Wheeling Road, Fulkerson Road, Clay Pike, Miller’s Lane—I likely could not find again. But they definitely took me through the Appalachian hills. This was not the gridded flat Midwest and not the drier western Midwest. Near Philo High School, Indian Run Creek flooded over the road from all the rain. I proceeded through the gushing brown water in my rental car not knowing the depth, and, happily, it worked out. On the radio, Ohio’s governor had earlier warned against doing this.

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I finally reached Highway 60 and the town of Duncan Falls on the raging Muskingum River. Near Lock No. 9, some guys in pickups were watching the water rise and guessing how bad the flooding would be. Highway 60 led me south with the great brown river on the right and steep cliffs on the left. A permanent “Falling Rock” sign got my attention—this is hill country—as did a temporary “High Water” sign being planted on the side of the road by Ohio DOT workers. In the town of Gaysport, the bridge across the river groaned against the mounting pressure of millions of gallons of water rushing downstream. Reaching McConnelsville, about thirty miles downstream from Zanesville, I crossed the river and headed southwest on Highway 78 while the Muskingum continued southeast toward Marietta on the Ohio River. Climbing up out of the river valley, I saw clouds settled on the hills above. The highway is dedicated to the Seventy-Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, since many of the regiment’s men came from this area, part of the larger army of 240 Ohio regiments that pulverized the Confederacy. I reached the top of a small mountain where one can see the whole forest-covered valley. The GPS read Malta, Ohio, but I saw no signs saying such.

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The trees here did not relent. Further south, I passed Wayne National Forest, named after Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne, who ably served General Washington during the Revolution and then waged a campaign in the Ohio wilderness against a confederation of tribes resisting American suzerainty over the early Midwest. I had just published an article about the complexity of this early history and imagined how it all unfolded in the territory around me.⁴ The appearance of a national forest in my path was another sign that the traditional Midwest lies farther west. The non-glaciated Appalachian Plateau is heavily forested and home to many trees, including the buckeye, a contrast to my part of the Midwest, where towns take names such as “Lone Tree” for their rarity. This first week of April, the purple buds of the eastern redbud trees and the pink buds of cherry trees popped, coloring the surrounding hills. Past the impressive Wayne National Forest and two smaller state forests, one reaches Athens, home to the first college in the Midwest: Ohio University, firmly planted in the Appalachian hills. OU even offers a certificate in Appalachian studies. The previous year, it hosted AppalachiaFest, the conference of the Appalachian Studies Association. Athens had also hosted the Appalachia Rising music festival in the past. On that second day of April, I gave a talk about midwestern history at the Central Region Humanities Center at OU, and the audience and later conversations made clear that Athenians consider themselves to be living on the edges of the Midwest and Appalachia in an interstitial and academic zone that embraces music and the arts and writing. Athens, indeed. They love it here. When regionalists talk about the power of place—a power that calls one home after they leave—this is what they mean.

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Athens was once tightly linked to Marietta, fifty miles to the east, farther onto the Appalachian Plateau. After the American Revolution, several veterans from New England formed the Ohio Company of Associates to buy land from Congress in the Northwest Territory and develop a settlement they called Marietta (they also created Ohio University in Athens). As veterans, they chose the name to honor the French queen and to recognize critical French assistance during the war. The Yankees located their settlement on the Ohio River at the mouth of the Muskingum River because they rightly understood that the Ohio would be the first main riverine artery into the future Midwest, a new land, one on the other side of the mountains. The Ohio River would also serve as a real and symbolic dividing line between the Midwest and the lands of deeper Appalachia across the river. Travelers frequently commented on how different the cultures on both sides of the river were and how these differences persisted over the decades.

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On the morning of April 3, before a talk to a Marietta College class of history majors, I ventured across the Ohio River into an upward bulge of West Virginia which juts into Ohio and bends the river northward for several miles. I drove through Williamstown, West Virginia, saw signs for the contested mayor’s race and others for a city council race, and tried to buy a cup of coffee at the State Line First West Virginia Coffee Shop, but it was closed. A candidate for city council told the local newspaper he would not put up political signs: “It’s a small town. People know me or they don’t. It won’t hurt my feelings either way.”⁵ I crossed back over the river and had better luck at the Lafayette Hotel, with its coffee stand outside The Gun Room diner and next to the Rufus Putnam Room, named for the Revolutionary war general who cofounded Marietta (the Ohio University mascot is, accordingly, named Rufus). Out in the Ohio River, a large tug pushed giant barges full of gravel against the swift current under the Williamstown Bridge. The hotel is named for General Marquis de Lafayette, who aided the American revolutionaries and who visited here in 1825. Read a list of all the veterans of the Revolution who lived in the area, he responded, “I know them all. I saw them at Brandywine, Yorktown and Rhode Island. They were the bravest of the brave.”⁶

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West Virginia should have been given more space on this trip’s itinerary. It is the only state that fully rests within the traditional boundaries of Appalachia, and the state has a particular immigration story that should not be glossed over. In the 1600s, after conquering Ireland, English authorities encouraged people from the Scottish lowlands to move across the Irish Sea and settle the province of Ulster, the upper eastern quadrant of Ireland. The Scots were Presbyterians, not English Anglican or Irish Catholic, and thus stood apart. Half of these settlers later migrated to the American colonies, especially Pennsylvania, and started making their way to the backcountry, into the Appalachian mountains. These “Wild Irish” immigrants gained a reputation for squatting, drinking, fighting, singing, and clashing with Native Americans. Stern Presbyterians founded Muskingum College as a religious institution and are the reason John Glenn became a Presbyterian elder. The people of eastern Pennsylvania did not mind having these immigrants out on the frontier serving as a buffer against Indian hostilities. The friction between the settled, wealthier parts of the colonies and the backcountry enclaves was often intense. In western Virginia (there was no West Virginia until the Civil War era), 80 percent of the population was Scots-Irish.⁷ Grazing, weaving, and modest farming prevailed among the mountaineers until after the Civil War, when large timber companies bought up the rights to harvest the region’s thick and varied trees. The region, one Appalachian lawyer recalled, was still “matted with an immense primeval forest, so dank and so dense as to amount to almost a jungle.” A few decades later, coal mining became a major force in this area, underscoring another distinction from the core of the Midwest. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the local timber and coal supplies were mostly controlled by large corporations not based in Appalachia.⁸ I do not think I am alone in tracing many of my impressions of West Virginia to the 1960 Democratic primary, won by Senator John Kennedy, which led to the creation of a specifically regional economic development initiative focused on the needs of this geographic space.⁹

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The history majors at Marietta College had a lot to say about regions.

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One young woman from Dayton, in western Ohio, definitely noticed the distinction between farming Ohio and Appalachian Ohio. Another, from Columbus, said that when she drove southeast to get to Marietta she noticed how the land changes into a new topography around Hocking Hills State Park. A third woman, who grew up in northern West Virginia, felt both Appalachian and Midwestern and believed Marietta inhabits a borderland. Local historian Jean Yost noted that he always said he grew up in the Ohio Valley and did not use the terms Midwestern or Appalachian. In another sign of the power of the rain storms I passed through the previous day, one young woman in the class reported that she was just given keys to a new dorm room, higher up, because the lower floors were flooding. The television news reported on “local residents saying it’s the highest they’ve seen the river in decades.” Marietta College students and local Boy Scouts were called out to help those with flooded homes. On Thursday, the river crested at 41.49 feet near Wheeling. At 42 feet, the river would have entered “major flood stage,” according to the National Weather Service.¹⁰ The director of the Jefferson County (Steubenville) Emergency Management Agency said of the flooding, “Whatever you do, don’t drive through it.”¹¹

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After my Marietta sojourn to start day three of the trip, I followed Highway 7 northeast along the Ohio River to Steubenville. About twenty miles in, however, the Ohio DOT blocked the road with signs that said “ROAD CLOSED—HIGH WATER—Max Fine $2,000.” I had to return to Marietta and get on the interstate north, which I had wanted to avoid in favor of the two lane path along the big river. I later heard that much of Marietta went underwater after I passed through. The high water even caused some barges to come loose and drift down the swollen river.¹²

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The lost time was a shame; I wanted to visit Mount Pleasant on the drive. Mount Pleasant highlights the multiple migration streams into Ohio that made the state an ethnically complex place and a testing ground for American pluralism. Marietta was a Yankee New England town, at least in its early decades, before more and more migrants diluted this early influence. So was Cleveland in the north, which Connecticut Yankees settled. Down the Ohio River, past Marietta, more southerners trickled into the bottom of Ohio, especially from Kentucky, many of them Scots-Irish settlers who had passed through the Appalachian mountains farther south. But Mount Pleasant is a different story. These settlers were Quakers, some of whom came straight across from Pennsylvania into central Ohio and were joined by many of the Germans, or Pennsylvania Dutch, who had settled outside of Philadelphia and were Lutheran, German Reformed, Amish, Mennonite, Schwenkfelder, Moravian, and other sects that spun out from the Protestant reformation.¹³ Zane Grey’s ancestors first came to the United States as Quaker immigrants in the 1600s, and Quaker immigrants established towns such as Mount Pleasant, Ohio, where the Quaker Yearly Meeting House still stands. Not coincidentally, given the Pennsylvania-heavy origins of American Quakers, there’s a town named New Philadelphia nearby. These Quakers and Germans did not always love their Appalachian neighbors, and observers’ “praise of the industrious Ohio farmers was lavish,” while their opinions of Appalachian mountaineers were another matter.¹⁴ The tidy and efficient German farms were frequently contrasted to the spaces on the Appalachian side of the fence.¹⁵

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These migration streams also speak to geography and why the region that became the Midwest was seen as a separate physical space. They speak, specifically, to the imposing power of the Appalachian mountain chain. The settlers of the original thirteen colonies saw the Appalachians as the Great Barrier to the West. Using the mountains, the British tried to wall off the west via the Proclamation Line, and it generally worked. Only adventurers and ragged squatters and the Wild Irish ventured out into these hinterlands. The breakthrough came when Daniel Boone went down the Great Valley of the Appalachians and snuck through Cumberland Gap to reach Kentucky. Others rowed up the Potomac River and made the trek over the mountains via the Cumberland Road (which is not connected to Cumberland Gap—everyone wanted to flatter the Duke of Cumberland, the son of the king) until they reached a tributary of the Ohio River and could travel by canoe and flatboat. This was mostly walking or on horseback and traveling through cold mountains and thus not an appealing trip.¹⁶ It took years for decent roads to be built, so the mountains still remained imposing. The Erie Canal, providing water access to the Great Lakes via New York, and the railroad were the real transportation breakthroughs. But each route maintained its regional ethnic orientation—Cumberland Gap: Scots-Irish southerners; Cumberland Road: Mid-Atlantic Germans and Quakers; Erie Canal: New England Yankees. These varied streams would guarantee a mixed population pool in Ohio. By the mid-nineteenth century, Ohio was the most ethnically diverse state in the country.¹⁷

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I finally rolled into Steubenville on the Ohio River. The destination and its name remind me of how old this place is. The big river begins in Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers merge and over which British and French armies fought in the 1750s during the French and Indian War. A lot of these events happened nearly three centuries ago. This area was first governed by the Northwest Ordinance, passed in 1787, about the time Major Duncan, namesake of Duncan Falls, was killed by the Shawnee. Marietta was founded in 1788 and Athens in 1797. Marietta’s settlers reached their destination via a newly christened flatboat named the Mayflower, a moniker conveying deep time and the nation’s thin beginnings. While Zane Grey is known for his western novels, his early works were about the 1700s and Revolutionary War heroes. Such an interest explains the name of Steubenville, which honors Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the German officer who trained Washington’s army. The town was first Fort Steuben, built in 1786. The mayor, Jerry Barilla, who warmly greeted me and offered a tour of the fort, told me that the town needs a statue of Steuben, and I of course agreed and was surprised there was not one already. Many of the Revolutionary War veterans, who could not be paid during the dark days of the conflict, were given deeds to lands in Ohio as compensation. The Fire Lands, or Sufferers’ Lands, were part of Connecticut’s Western Reserve specifically set aside for those patriots burned out by the British. They named the new Ohio counties after Generals Washington, Knox, Darke, Crawford, Greene, Hamilton, Hardin, Marion, Mercer, Preble, Putnam, Shelby, Stark, Warren, and Clark and patriots like Adams, Carroll, Franklin, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Van Wert, and Williams. Cincinnati was named after the Society of Cincinnati, which honored those who left their families and professions to serve in the Revolution, as the Roman general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus had left his farm to fight off an invader of Rome. The American Revolution, in short, left a direct imprint on Ohio in ways it did not in states farther west.

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Of course the topography is old, too, the mountains and forests untouched by glacial scraping. As John Denver sang about neighboring West Virginia, “life is old there, older than the trees.” In this borderland between the Appalachian Mountains and the leveled farming areas of central Ohio there are lots of hills—a middling topography between the mountains to the east and the flatness to the west. The day before, driving into Athens, I passed Hocking Hills State Park, and its presence is consistently mentioned. Above Ohio University you can find the colloquially named and locally popular Bong Hill (OU was named the nation’s best party school, after all). These hills, spared from the steam-shoveling power of the glaciers, were not what the agrarian-minded early settlers had in mind. The lands of the Ohio Company around Marietta, a new history of Ohio reminds us, were “rather unfertile.”¹⁸ “Farmers found that the shallow upland soils, which eroded readily, would not continually support crops,” according to one natural history.¹⁹ The early explorer Christopher Gist found the hilly unglaciated section of eastern Ohio to have soil that was “mean stony and broken” and “not very rich.”²⁰ Unlike in flatter Ohio, this area boasted hills that made surveying the territory much more difficult.²¹

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Mayor Jerry Barilla, a Steubenville native who ran Frank and Jerry Furniture and Appliance for fifty years, is obviously Italian. While he gave his tour of Fort Steuben, I struggled not to ask questions about local boy Dino Crocetti, aka Dean Martin, because I assumed local folks are tired of this conversation (Dino does not have a statue either, like the neglected Baron von Steuben). But an old posse of friends and I love Dean and Frank Sinatra and believe they helped us survive the absurdities of graduate school, so I had to broach the topic and the mayor was happy to oblige. Every year Steubenville hosts the Dean Martin Festival, which keeps the Dino flame alive, but his boyhood home in a poor neighborhood of the city is long gone. Italians were strong in Steubenville and further north, all through the Mahoning Valley, which guides the Mahoning River down into the Beaver River, which empties into the mighty Ohio in far western Pennsylvania. Italians have a stronger presence in this area, unlike farther south, below Steubenville, where the settlers tended to be from an earlier generation and were mostly Germans and Quakers from Pennsylvania, Yankees, and some Scots-Irish from the highlands. The Italians came about a century later than these earlier settlers, part of the pre–World War I immigration wave brought in by iron and steel jobs. The people in particular places shift over time and transform the identity of towns, cities, and regions. Regional identity is not static. We adjourned for dinner at Naples, a restaurant Dino used to frequent (a student at Ohio University had insisted I also try the pizza at Capri Sausage and Meatball in town, but time was fleeting and my belt was already too tight). I could only eat about half of my massive veal parmesan. As the sun set on the river, I took some photos of the bridges pointing into West Virginia to the east and drove through the lovely campus of Franciscan University of Steubenville, perched high on a hill overlooking the Ohio River.

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Before it was completely dark, I headed north along the river and fueled up in Toronto. By the time I reached East Liverpool, night had fallen. The outlines of the hills were visible from the lights of small houses and the valley below glowed with streetlights and the flashing machinery of sun- dry industrial plants. East Liverpool is a central notch in the rust belt. I noticed the landscape change in Martins Ferry (there is no apostrophe after Martin, for some reason), about forty miles back. It was no longer the green hills and thick forest and small farms of bucolic Appalachia. This was iron, steel, brick, cement, grease, and ash territory. Hulking smokestacks, surrounded by Goliath-size helpings of coal, had started to line the river. Cooling towers with blinking beacons and industrial tubing and rail lines and dump trucks and bridges and tugs and barges become the norm. Dilapidation is more visible. Places like Martins Ferry expose the recent hard times and the scars of the old industrial order. I drove around the town to try and find the football field by the river that the writer James Wright wrote the poem about and found lots of razor wire, collapsing houses, and an air of destitution. Some old houses tip toward the river and seem close to sliding down the hill. The story is that local boys would practice football on the field next to the Ohio River and would be covered in soot from local factories by the end of practice so they would jump into the river to clean up. Soot signaled the presence of good industrial jobs. The NFL kicker Lou Groza, whose Hungarian-immigrant father ran a bar in town, said “When there’s soot on the window sill, there is prosperity.” As the success of Groza and others attest, the Pittsburgh-to-Cleveland steel belt has long been known as a seedbed of gridiron talent.²² One can bear witness to this football history at the Upper Ohio Valley Museum and Learning Center at the Lou Holtz Hall of Fame in East Liverpool.

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Wright captured the local football scene, and the turning of the seasons, in his poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (1963). About the same time, Life sent a photographer and a reporter to town to document high school football in what a New York reporter smugly called a “grimy mill town.” According to the magazine, misbehaving football players were swiftly dealt with, including via judicial tribunals assembled by their teammates, so they did not jeopardize the team’s chances. This system of self-regulation, which the reporter uses in an apparent attempt to highlight the exaggerated importance of football, comes off sounding rather effective. Juvenile delinquency, the story reported, was “virtually unknown.” The high school Latin teacher, Miss Heloise Knapp, could “drag a linebacker out of class by his ear faster than he can red dog an enemy quarterback.” As a result, the coach admitted, he had players “who can call signals better in Latin than they can in English.”²³

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While Wright’s poem captured the salience of football in Martins Ferry, the young poet also knew his location in the surrounding topography. His father worked in glass factories along the Ohio River, and his “mother’s family came from West Virginia, and they were honest-to-God hillbillies to fare-thee-well.” He said Ohio was “both northern and southern; it’s eastern and western; all kinds of people live there.”²⁴ Martins Ferry was an “industrial area enclosed by the foothills of the Appalachians on both sides, near that big river.” As a professor later in life, Wright ordered his students, mostly from New York, to get out and see the big country they lived in and made sure they knew that “when you’ve reached Pittsburgh you’re not really yet at the beginning of the Middle West.” That place was beyond the Appalachian foothills. He also told them to get a cup of coffee in Zanesville and to actually see the country. Wright is an old guide to regions and nooks and side trails and crannies who helped everyone see the fullness of the country, and he was well equipped for such duties. He grew up in Martins Ferry reading the Hoosier writer James Whitcomb Riley in the town where William Dean Howells, the father of American literary realism, was born at a time when regionalist movements were strong.²⁵ We need more Wrights these days if we are going to understand the center of the country.

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I felt like a schmuck driving around Wright’s Martins Ferry since my rental car was a white BMW hybrid (the rental place was out of the bland “midsize sedan” I ordered) and it had Alabama plates. The Steubenville mayor said, “Everyone will think you’re a drug dealer!” But I did not want to skip the stop in Martins Ferry, partly because it is the oldest settlement in Ohio, a place where land-seeking squatters illegally assembled in defiance of federal authority. The American army was sent in to burn them out.²⁶ This harsh early history does not shock. It fits the mood. The Martins Ferry–East Liverpool corridor is a place where the pain of deindustrialization can be seen and felt. Just north of East Liverpool is the now ominous sounding East Palestine, where in early 2023 a massive train derailment and toxic spill added to the air of industrial decline and menace. Government officials burned the toxic chemicals inside the wrecked train cars, sending dense black smoke through the valley. Then, a few weeks before my visit, different government officials said this “controlled burn” was not necessary.²⁷

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East Liverpool is where the Ohio River valley turns sharply east, so we need to part company. About ninety miles upriver is Pittsburgh, where the Ohio begins its long journey. The city sits deeper into Appalachia (the city’s elevation is 1,223 feet, compared to back in Columbus in the Midwest proper at 781 feet). East Liverpool sits across from the last few miles of the little strip of West Virginia sticking up, which holds parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio apart like a boxing referee. The dwindling narrow slice of West Virginia is a sign that rural Appalachia is fading.

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With the Ohio River valley turning east and departing Ohio, I headed north toward Youngstown. I stayed in the Doubletree Hotel in a building designed by architect Albert Kahn, which used to be the headquarters of Youngstown Sheet & Tube, the steel company that broke the back of the Mahoning Valley in 1977 after its Black Monday closure. The next morning over breakfast, the new president of Youngstown State University, Bill Johnson, told me that the valley is changing. The old era of New Deal Democrat domination is over. Johnson, a former area congressman, would know. He narrowly captured a seat in Congress in the district south of here as a Republican in the 2010 midterm wave and kept winning subsequent elections by larger margins. He noted that this valley was turning Republican faster than any other area of the country. The Democrats lost steam when they advocated free trade agreements; opposed new energy development, such as natural gas, in the area; and drifted to the left on cultural issues. Obama won this strip of counties in eastern Ohio in 2008. In 2016 and 2020, Trump won them all. In April 2024, the race to fill Congressman Johnson’s seat was underway and the Republicans had chosen as their candidate the Italian American Michael Rulli, whose family of immigrants from Calabria, Italy, ran Rulli Brothers Market, a grocery business based in Youngstown. (Rulli would go on to defeat the Democratic candidate in the special election in June.) James Pogue, a native Ohioan, has described the political consequences of the unwinding of the old industrial order in Ohio and the resulting feelings of loss and how they shape politics and signal a generational changing of the guard.²⁸ On April 4, I gave a talk in central Youngstown at the Butler Institute of American Art, funded by an early valley industrialist, and I saw Norman Rockwell’s Lincoln the Railsplitter (1964) hanging there. The popular painting of the first midwestern president is the perfect centerpiece for the first museum dedicated exclusively to American art.

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Youngstown was very welcoming, but the road called. I visited my friend Jeff Bilbro across the state line in Grove City, Pennsylvania; he had recently moved here from Michigan. He works at a Presbyterian college and pointed out all the Presbyterian churches in the area and is confident this is Scots-Irish Appalachia and not the Midwest. Bilbro is editor of a journal titled Local Culture, designed to provide an alternative to the obsessions of the national media and to highlight geographic and cultural nuances, so he understands these oft-overlooked details of local life. I headed to Kent, Ohio, to see where the 1970 shootings happened, then to Cleveland to hear a talk about Guardians baseball down in the Flats next to the Cuyahoga River. The first question the speaker was asked is whether he regrets the Cleveland Indians’ 2021 decision to become the Guardians. On the drive into the city, I took a photo of the fifty-foot tall Guardians on the art deco Hope Memorial Bridge over the Cuyahoga River, which gave the old baseball team its new name. At my Beaux Arts–style hotel—which used to house the Cleveland Board of Education—I ran into some Iowa Hawkeye fans in town for the Final Four tournament and yelled, “Go Caitlin Clark!” They yelled, “Go Hawks!” The next morning, Friday, I went down to Lake Erie and took a photo of the Cleveland Cliffs freighter the SS William G. Mather, the “Ship That Built Cleveland,” which has been permanently retired in front of Browns stadium.

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Downtown Cleveland felt empty. Large American cities, especially during the morning sprint to work, once bustled and hustled. I looked for a copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer but could not find one, even at my downtown hotel. My final talk of this trip was at the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College, in the Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike. The final slide of my presentation was of Gray and Gold (1942), a mesmerizing painting by John Rogers Cox of Terre Haute, Indiana, that I visited earlier that day at the Cleveland Museum of Art (William Mather, the president of Cleveland Cliffs Iron, whose name is on the freighter in the harbor, was the president of the museum from 1933 to 1949). The darkening skies of the painting fit the mood—emptied downtown Cleveland, memories of Martins Ferry, the tourists, who began to annoy the locals, arriving to see the total eclipse. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Final Four and the eclipse would put Cleveland on the map and overcome a legacy of Cleveland jokes. Caitlin Clark’s comment that Cleveland “felt like a larger version of Des Moines” did not help the cause.²⁹ I finally found a copy of the Plain Dealer—Caitlyn Clark was on the cover.³⁰

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A woman at the Rust Belt symposium raised her hand and wondered aloud where Cleveland fits into our discussion of regional identity. She went to graduate school in Columbus, and it was a different place to her. She also liked the old retort, “I’m from Cleveland, bitch!”—a nice bit of regionalist defiance that I appreciate. She made the essential point here—Jon Butler was right. When one enters Ohio from the east, it changes from Appalachian hills and the Rust Belt to something different about an hour east of Columbus, something more flat, more farm-oriented, more traditionally Midwest. These are the regional boundaries and identities the people assembled that morning aimed to explore. The organizers were even launching a new journal, titled Rust Belt Studies, to carry the flag. An impressive young woman from Cleveland, Ursuline English professor Katharine Trostel, led the charge. Exploring the East–Midwest borderland is the purpose of the book in your hands, part of a grand enterprise designed to explore the center of this nation and its subregions and corners and sides and borderlands.

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On Friday night I departed Cleveland for Sioux Falls and at 5:30 the next morning drove south through the Big Sioux River valley to Omaha to watch a spring 12U football tournament and could see for miles in every direction. I passed Akron, Iowa, named by people who moved west in the nineteenth century and fondly remembered Akron, Ohio, a city just south of Cleveland I was sorry to miss on my trip. I passed the exit to Vermillion, South Dakota, home to the University of South Dakota and the journal Middle West Review and thought about how it, along with Ursuline College’s Rust Belt Studies, could effectively represent and chronicle both ends of the Midwest. As I pondered the USD–Ursuline alliance, the only breaks in the flat topography were the Loess Hills guiding the Big Sioux River into Sioux City and the short white cliffs on the south side of the Missouri River leading it into Omaha. I crossed the Mormon Bridge over the Big Mo passing from Iowa into Nebraska and drove by a giant grain elevator complex, and I thought about how the Missouri and Ohio Rivers form the broad outline of the Midwest. The railcars I saw near the Iowa–Nebraska border are full of corn-made ethanol, not the industrial ethylhexyl acrylate that made headlines back in East Palestine. The guys on the radio were talking about the University of Iowa women’s basketball team, which for the second season in a row advanced to the national title game. Last year, the team represented the region against a southern powerhouse, Louisiana State University, and this year it played an eastern dynasty, the University of Connecticut. A prairie wind with gusts of thirty-five miles per hour undeterred by knoll or forest or valley thrashed the gridiron in Papillion, Nebraska. This is the agrarian core of the Midwest, the eastern fringes of which were seven hundred miles behind me in the Appalachian hills. In between there is a lot of America that needs to be studied and rediscovered.