Jamie Rhein

Couple sitting outside BrewDog's Doghouse

It wasn’t too long ago that the area along Gender Road, south of Route 33 near the Franklin-Fairfield county line, was farmland as far as the eye could see. There was the bucolic village of Canal Winchester nearby and Columbus just a bit farther up the road.

Soon came a taproom-style restaurant and then, in 2018, a 32-room hotel called the DogHouse that has been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Greatest Places to Stay.”

It’s clear from the very start that an overnight stay at the BrewDog complex is not your everyday experience. Here, dogs are welcome (in some of the guest rooms), beer is a celebration, and ingenuity is everywhere.

A black and white dog at a dog park stares into the camera.

Ohio is generally a dog-friendly state — more than a third (36.6 percent) of the state’s households include a canine resident — and research tells us that nearly two-thirds of dog owners consider their pup to be a member of the family. So when summer travel beckons, it’s nice to know where your tail-wagging pal can come along for the ride.

A man points to a part of the museum.

On August 4, 1879, before the sun rose over the craggy mountains in western West Virginia, the oil boomtown of Volcano turned into a “lake of fire.” By the time the blaze died, Volcano was almost gone. The post office, opera hall, bowling alley, saloons, and all but a few buildings had been reduced to ash.

The fire didn’t end Volcano’s existence right away, as a few remained to continue oil production, but what had been a bustling burg was on an irreversible path to becoming the ghost town that it is today.

Two old boots contain plants.

The first containers Kathleen Killilea remembers planting were terra cotta window boxes with cherub embellishments. “My father lifted me over the wall of a client’s garden and handed them to me,” she recalls. Killilea’s job was to place those flower boxes she had helped to plant. She and her brothers played assistant to their dad, who started working at deMonye’s Greenhouse in Columbus when he was 13 years old and grew up to own it.

A black and white photo of Charles Young.

Charles Young was born into slavery in Mays Lick, Kentucky, in the time just after Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation and just before the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

His parents, technically still considered runaway slaves, carried him as an infant across the Ohio River to the freedom granted them when his father enlisted in the Union Army.