WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

“This book is the major contribution of the Writers’ Project in Ohio to the American Guide Series,” the preface declares — a contribution to what its editors called a monumental picture of the Nation, past and present, never before undertaken. The task, they admitted, had been long and often difficult, for Ohio is thickly populated, various, and cosmopolitan: settled rapidly by all classes and types of people from many states, it grew in haste and in all directions at once, and never unified itself around a single legend or tradition. The information about the state was at once stupendous and, because of its sheer magnitude, oddly inaccessible.

To gather it, the project did more than consult the histories. Its workers sorted and checked the usual data, then supplemented it by reading old newspapers, diaries, and documents, by talking with venerable citizens who knew things never written down, and by traveling the highways and by-roads through towns, villages, and farmlands to report what Ohio was like at that moment and how it had come to be. Governor John W. Bricker, in his foreword, set the book in a wider frame: Ohio, he wrote, typically represents a cross-section of the country — fifth state in industry, fourth in agriculture, first of the great Northwest Territory, and the corridor through which the people passed on their way to the West.

The Guide has three main divisions. Seventeen essays open the book, recording and interpreting the political, industrial, and cultural life of the state, with emphasis on what is peculiar to Ohio — its natural setting and first peoples, its government and economy, its carriers and farms, its churches, schools, and press, and its architecture, art, literature, music, and theater. Nineteen cities follow in a section of their own, chosen not for size alone but because each has marked individuality: Oxford the genuine college town, Chillicothe with remnants of its Virginia heritage, Sandusky showing traces of its Germanic origin, and Cincinnati, Toledo, Cleveland, and Youngstown the great industrial centers around the rim of the state.

The third division comprises the tours — twenty-three numbered automobile routes with their lettered branches and lettered sections, arranged to unfold a point-by-point picture of the present aspect of Ohio, from the Pennsylvania line to the Indiana line and from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. Edited under the guidance of Professor Harlan Hatcher, the state director, and sponsored by the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, the volume was first published by Oxford University Press in October 1940. Population figures throughout were drawn from the preliminary returns of the 1940 census. Read today, it remains what its makers hoped: a book to deepen the love and understanding of Ohio among its citizens, inside and beyond its boundaries.