OHIO , the farthest east of the
Great Lakes states, lies to the south of shallow Lake Erie. This
is one of the nation's most industrialized regions, but the industry
is largely concentrated in the east, near the Ohio River. To the
south the landscape becomes less populated and more forested.
Ohio also has the world's largest Amish population.
They farm in the northeast and west into mid-Indiana, and are
much less of a tourist attraction than the highly publicized Pennsylvania
Dutch.
Enigmatic traces of Ohio's earliest inhabitants
can be seen at the Great Serpent Mound , a grassy
state park sixty miles east of Cincinnati, where a cleared hilltop
high above a river was reshaped to represent a giant snake swallowing
an egg, possibly by the Adena Indians around 800 BC. When the
French claimed the area in 1699, it was inhabited by the
Iroquois , in whose language Ohio means "something
great." In the eighteenth century, its prime position between
Lake Erie and the Ohio River made it the subject of fierce contention
between the French and British. Once the British had acquired
control of most of the French land east of the Mississippi, settlers
from New England began to establish communities along both the
Ohio River and the Iroquois War Trail paths on the shores of the
lake.
During the Civil War, Ohio was at the forefront
of the struggle, producing two great Union generals, Ulysses Grant
and William Sherman, and sending more than twice its quota of
volunteers to fight for the North. Its progress thereafter has
followed the classic "Rust Belt" pattern: rapid industrialization,
aided by its natural resources and crucial location, which during
the 1970s foundered alarmingly and has only recently shown any
signs of resurgence.
Although the state is dominated by its triumvirate
of "C"s ( Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati
), its most visited destinations are the Lake Erie Islands
, which have benefited from the recent cleanup of the polluted
lake and now attract thousands of partying mainlanders. Cincinnati
and Cleveland, the latter hit especially hard by the recession,
have both undergone major face-lifts and are surprisingly attractive,
as is the comparatively unassuming state capital of Columbus.
