Ohio attractions

The Tiffin memorial’s centerpiece is a 17.5-foot-long steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center. It weighs more than 3 tons and rests on a pentagon-shaped piece of granite that alludes to the strike on America’s military headquarters. Positioned at an angle of 9.11 degrees, the beam sits low to the ground so people can touch it. “When rust particles drop off that beam, they almost seem like tears,” observes Gosche.

Located near U.S. 30, the store sits along a rural road in Wayne County just minutes away from the J.M. Smucker Company’s headquarters in Orrville. The town’s population is less than 10,000, yet it’s home to a Fortune 500 corporation with some 7,000 employees who work in offices and manufacturing facilities spread from Quebec to California. Why Orrville? In 1897, local farmer Jerome Monroe Smucker opened a cider mill there and began making apple butter from concentrated cider.

Location: In the heart of downtown Cincinnati, just southwest of Fountain Square.

Location: On U.S. 250, about 4 miles east of Ashland and a half-mile from Interstate 71.

It was more than 60 years ago, and I was just 6 years old, rubbernecking from the back seat of my parents’ red-and-white 1950s-era Ford Fairlane. As we neared our destination, my father remarked into the rearview mirror, “We should be able to see it soon…”

We crested a hill, and I caught my first glimpse.

What’s in a name? Dalton Union Winery and Brewery’s name is packed with meaning. Owners Dale and Tonya Mabry liked “Dalton” because it’s a portmanteau word, combining three letters from their first names, while “Union” alludes to their relationship and location. “The two of us are a union,” says Tonya, “and we’re in Union County.”

When The Shawshank Redemption was released in 1994, no one predicted the movie would make Mansfield, Ohio, a tourist destination for fans. Filmed almost entirely in and around Mansfield, the prison drama stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a banker wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and Morgan Freeman as Ellis “Red” Redding, the resourceful inmate who befriends him.

Only a few years ago, when Buckeye Lake in central Ohio was being drawn down for dam repair, workers made a historic find: Hidden in those murky depths was a sunken canal boat called the Black Diamond.

“It’s the first archaeological-documented canal boat discovery in Ohio,” says Andy Sewell, historian with Columbus-based Lawhon and Associates, an environmental consulting firm associated with the dam project.

Location: The Rivertown area of Kings Island, a 364-acre amusement and water park in Warren County.

The whole world watched on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong planted his left foot in the virgin lunar dust. That “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” rocketed Armstrong to instant immortality. As the first person to stand on a celestial body, Armstrong fulfilled the late President Kennedy’s goal of putting an American on the moon and rendered the United States the winner in its space race with the Soviet Union.