Hilltop Home in Steubenville, OH
Hilltops Community Meeting Sign
Icy Civic Stairway in Steubenville, OH
Market Street Bridge, Steubenville, OHHistoric Ohio Steel Town on the Upper Ohio River
"Tromping Through the Snow in Minus 5F Weather"
I had arrived a day earlier than needed to do a delivery along US 22 in the southeastern corner of Ohio, just near the Ohio river, so I had the opportunity to visit Steubenville, albeit in minus 5F temperatures. Snow and ice were underfoot, and I had to constantly warm the trigger finger for my camera. I talked to residents of the town and learned that Dean Martin, MVP A's baseball pitcher Rollie Fingers, Jimmy "The Greek" Synder, among others were from this otherwise gritty steel town. After walking around downtown, I climbed a snowy hillside to the most affluent hilltop residential neighborhood in town to get this overview of the small city that sits on the west side of the upper Ohio River.
"Fort Steuben and Edwin M. Stanton"
President Abraham Lincoln was introduced by Edwin M Stanton as a candidate for president worth listening, and naturally Lincoln wowed his audience with his oratory. Later, Stanton became Lincoln's Attorney General and still later Secretary of War. There is a bronze statue in his honor in front of the courthouse in Steubenville. The town itself was named after the wooden stockade, Fort Steuben, which in turn was named by President Washington in honor of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Von Steuben an immigrant Prussian soldier with aristocratic background is generally credited for having trained military discipline into the rag-tag American revolutionary army, but he eventually served Washington as his military chief of staff. The original fort is long gone, but cornerstones mark the orginal location and there's a nicely reconstructed wooden stockade of the type used during the period.
"Old Church and Residential Architecture and More.."
In addition to a fine collection of old church and commercial buildings downtown, I was able to shoot images of the residential architecture. Downtown also has a merchant organized series of 25 murals that relate the period of town history when much of the downtown buildings were constructed--between 1880 and 1930. The town's hey day was during the latter 19th century when it provided labor for several steel factories, but today, there is only one steel factory left and it employs a bare fraction of what was once required in this industry.
