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Ohio Unfiltered, Columbus, OH (2026)

09/08/2026

Ohio is one of the few states where you can start a real argument just by asking somebody what to call a Coke. 🥤

Most of Ohio says pop, and says it without thinking twice. But the state sits directly on top of the boundary, and in the southwest corner, roughly the Cincinnati area and down along the river, plenty of people say soda instead. Linguists have been mapping this for decades and Ohio keeps turning up as one of the messiest states on the map, because the pop region coming down from the Great Lakes runs straight into the soda region coming up out of the Ohio Valley, and the seam runs right through the middle of us.

It is not the only line either. Ohio splits on whether the thing on the front of your house is a porch or a stoop, on tennis shoes versus sneakers, on whether you say 71 or the 71, and on the vowel in the word wash, which a good number of Ohioans quietly put an R into. You can hear the state change on you as you drive south, somewhere around the middle.

The whole thing is a leftover of who settled where. New Englanders came into the Western Reserve up north, Virginians and Kentuckians came up the river into the south, and neither group has ever fully given in.

Which one do you say, and what part of the state are you from?

09/08/2026

For a few years in the middle of the 1970s, the best baseball team on the planet played on plastic grass next to the Ohio River. ⚾

The Big Red Machine won back to back World Series in 1975 and 1976, and the 1976 club swept the Yankees without trailing for a single inning of the entire Series. The lineup is the part people still recite from memory. Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey Sr., Cesar Geronimo. Morgan won back to back MVPs. Sparky Anderson managed it and picked up the nickname Captain Hook because he would pull a starter the second the game asked him to.

Riverfront Stadium was a concrete circle with artificial turf, the kind of ballpark every city built in that era and most cities later apologized for, and Cincinnati loved it anyway. The turf played fast, which happened to suit a roster full of players who could run.

The 1975 World Series against Boston is still argued about as the best ever played. Seven games, five of them decided by a single run, Carlton Fisk waving a ball fair in Game 6, and Cincinnati taking Game 7 in the ninth inning anyway.

Who is the first name you say when somebody brings up the Big Red Machine?

09/08/2026

There is a seven story office building in Newark that is a picnic basket. Not shaped a little like one. It is a basket. 🧺

Dave Longaberger built it in 1997 as the headquarters of his handmade basket company, and he wanted an exact replica of the company's Medium Market Basket, scaled up something like 160 times. Architects reportedly tried more than once to talk him into something subtler. He did not move an inch. The story people in Newark still tell is that he told them if they wanted to build something else, they could go build it for somebody else.

The details are what get you. The two handles arcing over the roof weigh close to 150 tons together and are heated so ice cannot form and drop off onto the entrance. The gold leaf medallions on the sides carry the company logo. Inside there is a seven story atrium with a glass ceiling, so light comes down through the middle exactly the way it would in a real basket sitting in the sun.

The company declined, the building sat empty for years, and for a while people assumed it would come down. It was bought in 2017 and has been in the long process of becoming a hotel. Which means the largest picnic basket in the world may end up being a place you can sleep.

Have you ever pulled off the road just to stand next to it?

09/08/2026

Columbus had one of the great railroad stations in the country and most of it was gone before people knew it was happening. 🚂

Union Station stood on North High Street, and the piece everybody remembers was the arcade designed by Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. It was a long row of ornate stone arches facing the street, opened in 1897, and for half a century it was the front door of the city. Troop trains in two wars. Thousands of people through it a day at its peak.

Passenger rail collapsed after the war. The last Amtrak train out of Columbus ran in 1979, which left the city as one of the largest in America with no passenger rail service at all, and it still is. The station buildings were coming down through the 1970s to clear the block for a convention center. Preservationists were actively working to save the arcade when crews took most of it down over a weekend in October 1976, before an injunction could be argued.

One arch survived. It sat in storage for years and now stands in the Arena District at McFerson Commons, lit up at night, grass around it, nothing on either side. People get married in front of it. Most of them have no idea it used to be one of a long row.

Do you remember Union Station, or the arch going up in the Arena District?

09/07/2026

Cincinnati tore down one of the finest theaters in America and kept only the front door. 🎭

The RKO Albee opened on Fountain Square on Christmas Eve 1927. It seated roughly three thousand people. Marble lobby, grand staircase, crystal chandeliers, a Wurlitzer organ that rose up out of the floor, and an ornate arched entrance on Fifth Street carved out of limestone. It was built for vaudeville and silent film at the exact moment both were about to change, and for decades afterward it was simply where you went downtown.

Television and the suburbs took the audience. By the 1970s it was running second run films to a mostly empty house. The city wanted the block for a convention hotel, preservationists fought hard for it, and the theater came down in 1977. The one concession was the entrance arch. It was taken apart stone by stone, numbered, and put in storage, and in the 1980s it was reassembled onto the front of the convention center on Elm Street, where it stands today attached to a building it has nothing to do with.

Cincinnati saved the Emery and eventually saved Music Hall. The Albee is the one that got away. If you walk past that arch you are looking at a doorway to a room that no longer exists.

Do you remember seeing anything at the Albee before it came down?

09/07/2026

Ohio's small town festival circuit is one of the most underrated travel experiences in the Midwest, and the best ones have been running long enough that the community ownership of them is total — these are not events put on for visitors, they are events that happen to welcome visitors. 🎪

The Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville in Warren County is the biggest argument: 350,000 people, a village of 3,000, every October, sauerkraut in every form imaginable and a craft and vendor scene that takes over the entire town. It should not work at this scale and it has worked for over 50 years. The Sweet Corn Festival in Millersport in Fairfield County has been running since 1947 and draws over 100,000 people to eat corn prepared in ways that are all essentially variations on the same excellent theme. The Circleville Pumpkin Show in Pickaway County holds multiple world records for pumpkin-related items and has been running since 1903, which makes it one of the oldest festivals in Ohio. The Bob Evans Farm Festival in Rio Grande each October celebrates rural Ohio life in a setting — the original Bob Evans farm — that gives it a specificity other agricultural festivals do not have. And the Feast of the Flowering Moon in Chillicothe, honoring the Shawnee Nation's connection to the region, is among the largest Native American festivals in Ohio and one of the most meaningful.

Ohio's festival calendar is worth planning around. 🌽 Tell us what Ohio small town festival you think is worth the drive.

09/07/2026

Holmes County has one of the largest Amish populations anywhere, and the food that comes out of it does not care what year it is. 🥧

The cooking is plain in the best possible sense. Hand rolled egg noodles served over mashed potatoes, which sounds like a mistake until you eat it and understand that it is starch on starch on purpose and it is correct. Fried chicken. Roast beef with the drippings. Chow chow and pickled beets and the seven sweets and seven sours on the table, because that is simply how a meal is supposed to be set. Trail bologna, which came out of the village of Trail and now turns up at gas stations across half the state. Cheese houses still turning out Swiss in wheels.

Then the pie. Whole restaurants in Berlin, Walnut Creek and Millersburg are basically structured around getting you to the pie. Peanut butter cream. Sour cherry with a lattice top. And date pudding, which is not a pudding at all, it is a warm cake sitting in caramel, and it is one of the most underrated desserts in America.

The part people miss is that Holmes County has been feeding travelers for decades without softening any of it. The portions are still absurd, the coffee is still bottomless, and nobody has plated anything artfully.

Which Holmes County place do you stop at every single time you drive through?

09/07/2026

Friday night in an Ohio town had a very specific order of operations, and everybody followed it without ever being told. 📼

Practice ended. Somebody's mom drove the whole team to the pizza place. Then everybody walked two doors down to the video store, where the new releases lived on the wall by the front window and the good ones were always already gone. So you argued in the aisle for twenty minutes and settled on something nobody actually loved. There was a rewind sticker on every tape and a real fine waiting if you ignored it.

The counter had a jar of candy on it and a guy behind it who knew your last name and what your brother rented last week. Nobody thought of any of it as an event. It was just what Friday was.

Those stores closed one by one, and most of those buildings are phone shops and nail salons now. It is strange how much of an Ohio childhood happened in a small room lit by fluorescent tubes and lined with plastic cases. 🍕

09/07/2026

Every October a town of about thirteen thousand people in Pickaway County takes on a few hundred thousand visitors across four days. 🎃

The Circleville Pumpkin Show started in 1903 as a small gathering the mayor put together downtown, and it has never stopped. It calls itself the Greatest Free Show on Earth, and the free part is real. No admission, no gate, no ticket. You park somewhere questionable and you walk in.

The whole downtown closes and fills with stands. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin doughnuts, pumpkin fudge, pumpkin burgers, pumpkin chili, pumpkin ice cream, and one enormous pumpkin pie made several feet across that is a spectacle before anybody gets a slice. There are seven parades over four days, including one that is just for pets. And there is the weigh in, where growers roll in giant pumpkins on flatbed trailers and the winners come in well over a thousand pounds, a number that does not really register until you are standing next to one.

The thing that gets people is how unglossy it is. The same families run the same stands for generations. Kids on shoulders. Somebody's high school band coming down the street slightly out of step.

Have you been to the Pumpkin Show, and what do you eat first when you get there?

09/07/2026

If you went to elementary school in central Ohio, you have stood at a railing on East Broad Street watching a brass weight knock over pegs. 🔬

The old COSI opened in 1964 in Memorial Hall on East Broad in Columbus, and for thirty five years it was the single best field trip in the state. The building was dim and enormous and slightly maze like, which was most of the appeal. You went in with a class list and a sack lunch and came out convinced you were going to be a scientist.

Everybody has their exhibit. The Foucault pendulum swinging down through the stairwell, knocking over a peg every so often to prove the earth was turning underneath it. The coal mine, which was a reconstructed mine you rode down into and which smelled exactly right. The high wire unicycle up near the ceiling with the counterweight hanging below. The rat that played basketball. The dark room where your shadow stayed on the wall after the flash. Somebody in your class always got scared in the mine.

COSI moved across the river to the big white building on the peninsula in 1999, and the new one is genuinely excellent. But the old building had something you cannot rebuild, which is the specific feeling of walking into a place your parents also went to on a field trip.

What was the exhibit you made a beeline for at the old COSI?

Ohio Unfiltered

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