Craig Springer

First, I encountered the ruins of curious concrete edifices in the creek bed that were clearly relics from another time. Old sycamores and silver maples grew thickly through cracked concrete. A tall tower stood there, orphaned, in what seemed the most out-of-the-way place. Not 40 yards away, Indian Creek bent into a deep pool beneath sheltering box elders. That leads to the second reason for the memory: It was there that I hooked a smallmouth bass as long as my forearm and thick as a pillow from the smallest of waters.

For DeWerth, it’s a moral imperative. “People need to know about nature,” he says. “We need to look up — there is so much to see and learn in nature. I want youth to understand the significance of Ohio’s trees.”

Mildred Gillars was born in Maine in 1900 and came of age in Ohio, the stepdaughter of an alcoholic dentist who once practiced in Bellevue. Home life was tumultuous. 

She graduated high school in 1917 at Conneaut, near the extreme northeastern corner of the state, and attended Ohio Wesleyan University, where she majored in dramatic arts. Gillars, who went by the nickname “Milly,” took roles in plays and earned a reputation as an excellent orator, eccentric, and a bit of a coquette. 

Four Mile Creek, for example, rises in the uplands along the Indiana-Ohio state line, picking up the waters of small rills and runs and seeps. It bumps into glacial moraines and purls through pastoral farmsteads on its downhill destiny with the Great Miami River — by which time it has become a substantial stream. Its placid form and lyrical name belie the fact it was born from warfare. 

Grant descended on his father’s side from a family long-established in America, dating to the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1630. His great-grandfather served the British in the French and Indian War, and his grandfather aided the colonists’ cause at the famed American victory at Bunker Hill in the American Revolution. Perhaps, then, it was no surprise that the 5-foot, 2-inch 17-year-old Grant would accept an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1839. 

Several species of widow spiders exist in North America, and Ohio has two of them: the Northern Black Widow and the Southern Black Widow — and the fear that we hold in our hearts for both of them is rational and deserved.

In fact, a 6-pound, 9-inch pyramid of aluminum was set atop the Washington Monument in 1884 just for that purpose. The cost of that pyramid is unknown, but had it been constructed two years later, its cost would have been far less: Reducing aluminum’s ore to a metal was labor-intensive and expensive before a 23-year-old Hall — working in a shed in his parents’ Oberlin backyard — happened upon what is now called the Hall method for reducing globs of ore to metal by applying electric current.

The glaciers also left a little prize that they picked up on the slow slog south: gold.

Yes, there is gold in Ohio. You can find it in perhaps most any stream that flows over glaciated Ohio, but the vast majority of the fine flecks of the yellow metal occur where the glaciers advanced their farthest and fell apart — melted — dropping what they had carried along.

This orange-and-black or red-and-black speck of an insect (which is technically a beetle rather than a bug) is the size of a pencil eraser, and it brings a welcomed utility to orchardists and farmers alike. Ladybugs, as cute and dainty as they may be, are voracious predators of other bugs, including some destructive ones that are too small for the human eye to see.

The nasally call of summer insects has begun to fade away, and the shiny wax coating of tree leaves is beginning to lose its luster. As summer turns toward fall, buckeye seeds come to rest on the forest floor, where they will sink into the soil and take root, as they’ve done since the Pleistocene winter of 10,000 years ago.

Coded in that inedible promise of a would-be tree lies all the information the seed needs in order to make a living in Ohio’s rich and varied soils — just add water and light.