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.
United States: places and wildlife — page 48
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
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.
Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve
The Little Miami River races through a postglacial gorge of Silurian limestone and dolomite, revealing potholes, slump blocks, fossils, rapids, and cool habitats along cliff-edge trails.
Conkles Hollow State Nature Preserve
A cool, narrow Black Hand Sandstone ravine offers an accessible lower approach beneath 200-foot walls, while an exposed rim loop climbs above the canopy for demanding cliff-edge views.
Rockbridge State Nature Preserve
A forest trail crosses a working-landscape edge to reach a slender Black Hand Sandstone arch more than 100 feet long above a tributary ravine of the Hocking River.
Glacial Grooves Geological Preserve
A 400-foot trough of parallel grooves exposes Devonian limestone, marine fossils, and the abrasive force of debris-laden ice on an island reached only by ferry, boat, or plane.
Cedar Bog Nature Preserve
A mile-long boardwalk enters Ohio’s richest calcareous fen complex, where cold mineral groundwater supports orchids, sedges, northern white cedar, prairie species, spotted turtles, and remarkable seasonal change.
Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
A Victorian glasshouse opens into rainforest, desert, Pacific-island, bonsai, culinary, and seasonal gardens where plants share the stage with a major Dale Chihuly installation.
Holden Arboretum
A vast Lake County landscape joins cultivated collections, native forests, ponds, and ravines with a 65-foot canopy walk and a 120-foot tower looking toward Lake Erie.
The Dawes Arboretum
Nearly 2,000 acres combine a historic home landscape, Japanese garden, cypress swamp, conifer glen, native habitats, and an eight-mile driving tour east of Columbus.
Kingwood Center Gardens
Formal terraces, woodland paths, seasonal borders, a historic French Provincial mansion, greenhouse, and contemporary Garden Gateway fill a 47-acre Mansfield estate.
Cleveland Botanical Garden
A dramatic glasshouse moves between Madagascar’s dry spiny forest and Costa Rica’s cloud forest before paths unfold through Japanese, rose, woodland, restorative, and children’s gardens.
Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
One of the country’s largest zoo campuses combines seven geographic regions, conservation interpretation, an aquarium, rides, seasonal experiences, and enough walking to demand a route.
Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden
Opened in 1875, the nation’s second-oldest zoo layers celebrated animal habitats, mature trees, pollinator gardens, conservation science, and steep Cincinnati terrain into a compact urban campus.
Toledo Zoo & Aquarium
A pedestrian bridge joins animal habitats and a 178,000-gallon aquarium to an extraordinary cluster of Works Progress Administration buildings from the 1930s.
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo
Hillside paths connect African Elephant Crossing, primates, cats, bears, Australian habitats, and a vast indoor rainforest where a geodesic dome shelters a two-level tropical world.