Pro Football Hall of Fame
Artifacts, film, statistics, bronze busts, and changing displays connect the NFL’s Canton origins to the players, coaches, tactics, media, and institutions that shaped professional football.
Places and wildlife — page 48
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
A documented slave pen, first-person histories, art, resistance networks, and contemporary human-rights exhibits connect American slavery to the difficult work of defining freedom.
American Sign Museum
Neon, hand lettering, gold leaf, porcelain enamel, dimensional letters, and working fabrication shops reveal how commercial signs were designed, built, sold, repaired, and seen.
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Lucy, Balto, Dunkleosteus, dinosaurs, geology, astronomy, live native animals, and a radically redesigned campus connect planetary history to the habitats outside Cleveland.
Cincinnati Art Museum
More than 73,000 works span global art and design, while fifteen Cincinnati Wing galleries make the city’s painters, potters, furniture makers, and patrons unusually visible.
Taft Museum of Art
European paintings, Chinese porcelain, enamels, furniture, and Robert Duncanson’s landscape murals remain inside the 1820 house where the Tafts assembled and bequeathed them.
Akron Art Museum
Modern and contemporary art occupy an 1899 brick building pierced and wrapped by a steel-and-glass addition whose rooms make scale, light, and civic space part of every exhibition.
Butler Institute of American Art
American painting, works on paper, sculpture, folk art, and changing exhibitions fill a marble landmark whose collection moves between canonical names and the everyday life of industrial Ohio.
Columbus Museum of Art
American and European modernism, Columbus artists, photography, decorative arts, and participatory spaces reward connections between collection history, neighborhood memory, and making.
Dayton Art Institute
European, American, Asian, African, ancient, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art occupy an Italian Renaissance–inspired building designed for deliberate cross-cultural looking.
Ohio History Center
Archaeology, Indigenous life, natural history, social movements, industry, everyday objects, and state archives make Ohio’s official history museum both an introduction and a research gateway.
Armstrong Air & Space Museum
The flown Gemini VIII spacecraft, Armstrong’s suits, an Apollo 11 Moon rock, aircraft, and Ohio astronaut stories connect one Wapakoneta childhood to the risks and teamwork of spaceflight.
National Veterans Memorial and Museum
Letters, belongings, recorded testimony, photographs, and a circular narrative route center veterans of every branch and era rather than organizing the museum around weapons or battles.
Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor
Tools, worker clothing, oral history, giant photographs, a blooming-mill reconstruction, and the mills’ final pours explain how steel organized the Mahoning Valley—and how its collapse reorganized it.
Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
Six linked sites trace the Wright brothers’ printing and bicycle work, experimental flying, family life, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writing—an innovation story spread across a real city.
Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial
A 352-foot Doric column on South Bass Island commemorates the Battle of Lake Erie while deliberately facing a later achievement: enduring peace among the United States, Britain, and Canada.
James A. Garfield National Historic Site
Lawnfield preserves the farm, campaign office, home, and memorial library where James and Lucretia Garfield turned a Mentor property into a political stage and family institution.
William Howard Taft National Historic Site
Taft’s restored Mount Auburn birthplace uses family rooms, education, ambition, and civic networks to explain the only person to serve as both U.S. president and chief justice.
First Ladies National Historic Site
A downtown visitor center and Ida Saxton McKinley’s family home examine how first ladies shaped communication, policy, preservation, style, advocacy, and expectations across American history.
Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument
Youngsholm interprets Charles Young as Army officer, diplomat, educator, cartographer, family man, and pioneering Black public servant alongside the broader history of the Buffalo Soldiers.
Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums
Spiegel Grove combines Hayes’s 31-room home, presidential museum, research library, tomb, and wooded grounds—one of the earliest presidential library complexes in the country.
Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens
The Seiberling family’s Tudor Revival estate joins a 65-room manor, service passages, Gate Lodge, conservatory, and ten historic gardens shaped by industry, family life, labor, and landscape design.
Ohio State Reformatory
A vast Romanesque prison built around an unfulfilled reform ideal now exposes cell-block scale, institutional routine, incarceration history, grassroots preservation, and a complicated screen afterlife.
Harriet Beecher Stowe House
The Walnut Hills home of Lane Seminary president Lyman Beecher situates Harriet Beecher Stowe within family debate, Black activism, antislavery networks, riots, river crossings, and the city that shaped her writing.
Paul Laurence Dunbar House
Dunbar’s final home preserves his desk, bicycle, books, family furnishings, and relationship with his mother Matilda while interpreting a literary career that crossed dialect, standard English, fiction, journalism, song, and activism.
John Rankin House
The Rankin family home overlooks Kentucky and anchors one of Ohio’s best-documented Underground Railroad networks, where shelter depended on free Black residents, abolitionists, routes, secrecy, and enormous personal risk.
Fort Meigs
One of North America’s largest reconstructed log forts uses earthworks, blockhouses, artifacts, letters, and demonstrations to explain two 1813 sieges and the brutal logistics of the War of 1812.
Historic Zoar Village
Homes, workshops, a store, garden, church landscape, and archival collections preserve the Society of Separatists of Zoar, who held property communally here from 1817 to 1898.
Adena Mansion & Gardens
Benjamin Latrobe’s 1807 stone house, restored formal garden, outbuildings, and Scioto Valley prospect interpret Thomas and Eleanor Worthington’s household, labor, politics, and early Ohio power.
Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum
The brick house where Edison spent his first seven years uses family objects, early Milan, guided storytelling, and a separate education center to examine curiosity before the famous laboratories.
Mound City Group
The principal visitor center for Hopewell Culture National Historical Park overlooks a restored earthwork where ancestors of today’s Native nations gathered, buried honored dead, and placed extraordinary materials two millennia ago.
Great Circle Earthworks
A nearly 1,200-foot circular enclosure, high earthen wall, interior ditch, and ceremonial gateway survive from the immense Newark Earthworks complex and now anchor its visitor orientation.
Octagon Earthworks
An octagon joined to a vast circle preserves precise sightlines to extreme lunar risings and settings, revealing Hopewell engineering at a scale best understood by walking rather than aerial diagram alone.
Fort Ancient Earthworks & Nature Preserve
More than three miles of Hopewell-era walls crown a Little Miami bluff, enclosing gateways, calendar mounds, a museum, recreated garden, and trails within North America’s largest ancient hilltop enclosure.
Serpent Mound
A 1,348-foot serpent undulates along a bluff above Ohio Brush Creek, its spiral tail, curves, oval head feature, nearby burial mounds, and unresolved chronology demanding slow, respectful observation.
Flint Ridge Ancient Quarries & Nature Preserve
Hundreds of ancient quarry pits, workshops, forest trails, and a museum built over an excavation reveal how brilliantly colored Vanport flint became tools, offerings, and a continent-spanning material.
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Forest, ravines, farms, waterfalls, canal locks, towpath, rail line, villages, and a recovering Cuyahoga River form a long, narrow national park between Cleveland and Akron.
Hocking Hills State Park
Seven separated hiking areas reveal towering cliffs, hemlock gorges, rock shelters, waterfalls, narrow passages, and the erosion of massive Black Hand sandstone beds.
Mohican State Park
The Clear Fork cuts through forested sandstone country where gorge trails, Lyon Falls, a covered bridge, Pleasant Hill Lake, mountain biking, paddling, and adjoining state forest create many different park days.
John Bryan State Park
Rim trails, river paths, limestone and dolomite cliffs, camping, climbing, and an adjoining nature preserve follow the Little Miami through western Ohio’s most dramatic gorge.
Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park
Jointed Sharon Conglomerate breaks into ledges, slots, rooms, waterfalls, and talus where color-coded routes range from a gentle overlook walk to hands-on scrambling through tight passages.
Maumee Bay State Park
A broad western Lake Erie park combines barrier beach, restored wetland, accessible boardwalk, inland lake, meadow, lodge, campground, and one of Ohio’s most productive migration corridors.
Shawnee State Park
Steep forested hills, Roosevelt and Turkey Creek lakes, backpacking connections, lodge overlooks, and Civilian Conservation Corps landscapes form Ohio’s “Little Smokies” along the Ohio River escarpment.
Salt Fork State Park
Forest coves, open water, wetlands, meadows, trails, historic Kennedy Stone House, golf, lodge, camping, and wildlife occupy a vast park whose scale rewards choosing one shoreline district.
Ohio to Erie Trail
A 326-mile route links Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron, and Cleveland through rail-trails, canal towpaths, rural roads, Amish country, riverfronts, and city connectors.
Little Miami Scenic Trail
Railroad grades carry cyclists, runners, and walkers beside the Little Miami through forest, river towns, bridges, parks, and the Xenia trail hub with unusually gentle elevation.
Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail
A mostly level crushed-limestone trail follows canal locks, aqueduct remains, farms, wetlands, towns, and the Cuyahoga River for about twenty miles inside the national park and much farther beyond.
Buckeye Trail
More than 1,400 miles circle Ohio through Lake Erie shore, canal corridors, Appalachian ridges, state forests, farmland, cities, and road connectors maintained by a statewide volunteer network.