Let’s look to the future: It’s mid-July and incredibly hot, just as it’s been every summer. On one of those 80-80 days — in the ballpark of 80 degrees accompanied by 80 percent humidity — the condensation pools on the table around the base of your glass of iced tea.
Conveniently, ice is but a few steps away. Open the freezer, twist a white rectangular tray, and cubes fall out; push a button on the door and crescent-shaped ice chips cascade into your glass.
Maps make for good reading. In the names of places, you’ll find some history, drama, romance, biography, and even some fiction — or at least some mistakes. All that and more lies within a map covering College Corner, Ohio. It’s a quaint place, an unassuming, long-established village with quirks that few towns anywhere could claim.
Location: On the grounds of the Ohio Statehouse at the northwest quadrant of Capitol Square. Provenance: Created for an Ohio exhibit at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, These Are My Jewels is a sculpture featuring bronze statues of seven Ohioans — Salmon P. Chase, James A. Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Philip H. Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Edwin M.
What’s Cow Patty ice cream? According to Dan Young, CEO and chief ice cream scooper at Young’s Jersey Dairy, that’s customers’ most common question. Folks need only glance at the pasture where Young’s Jersey cows graze to figure out what inspired Cow Patty’s name, but Young considers the question an opportunity to interact with guests.
If you have a concern for wildlife, it’s easy to get caught up in the plight of current endangered and threatened species — so much so that we sometimes forget to celebrate the victories of those species that have stepped back from the brink of extinction or extirpation.
The return of soaring bald eagles to the skies of Ohio and to the nation as a whole is definitely one of those victories.
Pumpkin pie may rule on Thanksgiving, but at Lebanon’s Golden Lamb, Sister Lizzie’s Shaker sugar pie gives it serious competition. The cream-style pie, a perpetual customer favorite, is based on a recipe that was accidentally discovered after Robert and Virginia Jones purchased the Golden Lamb in 1926.
As hunting seasons open this fall, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Division of Wildlife will have five more wildlife officers patrolling the state’s woods, fields, and marshes. Unlike the other 100 or so state wildlife officers, the new recruits will have cold, wet noses and wagging tails; they’re K-9s.
For the first time in its nearly 70-year history, the Ohio DNR has joined more than 20 other state conservation agencies in employing K-9 officers. During the past year, five dogs and their handlers have been trained and assigned — one per wildlife district.
Location: Historic downtown Milford near the Little Miami Scenic biking trail.
Provenance: After customers kept asking him to make bicycle parts and repairs, blacksmith John Bishop founded Bishop’s Bicycles in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1890. The shop moved to Cincinnati in 1910, subsequently relocated to Norwood and Silverton, then finally planted on Milford’s Main Street in 1971. Bruce Bishop sold the business in 2006, and now it’s owned by Greg and Lisa Linfert.
The notion seems so fanciful: A U.S. Navy ship sinks in Ohio, not in Lake Erie or the Ohio River, but over the Appalachian piedmont of Noble County. It was a rural, bucolic setting — a patchwork of woodlots and farm fields split by fence lines and hedgerows and narrow roads with curves that followed the contours of the hillsides.
And the sky! An ocean blue that seemed meant for sailing — this, after all, is not a maritime tale, but rather, an aviation story.
With its tattered seat and uneven slats, the ladderback chair looks rather uncomfortable, but it was pioneer James Galloway’s best chair. “Since this was the ‘guest chair,’ it’s where Tecumseh sat whenever he visited,” says Catherine Wilson, director of the Greene County Ohio Historical Society in Xenia.
