Ohio sits at the geographic and cultural crossroads of the United States. Bordered by Lake Erie to the north, the Ohio River to the south, Pennsylvania to the east, and Indiana to the west, it occupies a position that has made it a meeting point of peoples, ideas, industries, and landscapes since long before the nation was founded. Eight American presidents were born in Ohio, more than any other state. It was the birthplace of aviation, the home of the first professional baseball team, and the state that produced Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon. Yet Ohio remains stubbornly underestimated as a travel destination, which means that those who do make the effort to explore it properly are rewarded with world-class museums, extraordinary natural scenery, vibrant cities, and a warmth of welcome that is genuinely Midwestern in the best possible sense of that word.
Ohio is not a state that announces itself with dramatic mountain ranges or tropical coastlines. Its beauty is more subtle, more accumulated, more human in scale. It reveals itself gradually, through the mist rising off a glacial lake at dawn, through the sudden appearance of a sandstone gorge hidden in a state park nobody warned you about, through the remarkable density of exceptional art and history packed into its cities, and through the conversations you find yourself having with people who seem to have time for you in a way that faster-paced parts of the country rarely allow.
CLEVELAND: THE COMEBACK CITY
Cleveland has been redefining itself for decades, and the results of that transformation are now impossible to ignore. Situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, Cleveland was one of the great industrial powerhouses of twentieth-century America. The decline of the steel and manufacturing industries hit Cleveland hard, but the city responded with a sustained effort at cultural investment and urban renewal that has produced one of the most genuinely interesting mid-sized cities in the United States.
The single most compelling reason to visit Cleveland, for many travelers, is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Designed by architect I.M. Pei and opened in 1995, the museum sits dramatically on the lakefront with its geometric glass facade catching the light off Lake Erie. The permanent collection traces the entire history of rock and roll from its roots in blues, gospel, country, and rhythm and blues through every subsequent evolution of popular music. Rotating exhibits focus on individual artists and specific eras, and the scope of the collection, encompassing handwritten lyrics, original instruments, performance costumes, film footage, and interactive listening stations, makes this a pilgrimage site for any serious lover of popular music.
The annual induction ceremony, held at the museum or at a nearby venue, is one of the most watched events in the music world.
The Cleveland Museum of Art ranks among the finest art museums in the entire United States. Its collection spans five thousand years of human artistic production across virtually every culture and medium. The museum’s holdings of medieval armor, Asian art, and American painting are particularly distinguished, and the building itself, a neoclassical structure fronted by a reflecting pool and recently expanded with a soaring atrium, is architecturally magnificent. Admission to the permanent collection is free, which makes the Cleveland Museum of Art one of the great cultural bargains available to any American traveler.
University Circle, the neighborhood surrounding the art museum, is one of the densest concentrations of cultural institutions in any American city. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Severance Music Center where the world-renowned Cleveland Orchestra performs, and the Cleveland Institute of Art are all within comfortable walking distance of each other. An afternoon spent wandering University Circle, ducking in and out of museums, eating lunch at one of the neighborhood’s excellent cafes, and listening to a free outdoor concert in summer constitutes a near-perfect cultural day.
The West Side Market, opened in 1912 in the Ohio City neighborhood just across the river from downtown, is one of the oldest and largest indoor-outdoor markets in the United States. More than a hundred vendors sell fresh produce, meats, seafood, baked goods, dairy products, and prepared foods under an ornate vaulted ceiling that makes the space feel almost cathedral-like. Saturday mornings are the busiest and most atmospheric time to visit, when the market is packed with locals doing their weekly shopping alongside visitors from out of town.
The Flats, the entertainment district along both banks of the Cuyahoga River as it winds through downtown toward the lake, has undergone multiple cycles of boom and decline but continues to offer a lively concentration of restaurants, bars, and event venues in a setting that takes full advantage of the dramatic riverine topography. The view of the river, the bridges, and the downtown skyline from the Flats at night is one of the distinctive visual pleasures of Cleveland.
Cleveland’s food scene has expanded dramatically in recent years. The East Fourth Street dining corridor in downtown is packed with acclaimed restaurants. Little Italy, a historic neighborhood adjacent to University Circle, is thick with trattorias and Italian bakeries whose cannoli and biscotti have been satisfying visitors for over a century. Tremont, a renovated neighborhood on the near west side, has become a center of creative dining and gallery culture, with excellent restaurants occupying renovated industrial and residential buildings along streets lined with mature trees.
COLUMBUS: A CITY IN FULL BLOOM
Ohio’s capital and largest city, Columbus, is one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing cities in the Midwest. Home to the Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in the country by enrollment, Columbus has the energy, diversity, and creative restlessness that large university cities tend to generate. But Columbus has outgrown any easy categorization as merely a college town. It is a genuine metropolitan destination with a distinctive identity that continues to evolve.
The Short North Arts District, a mile-long stretch of High Street between downtown Columbus and the Ohio State campus, is the cultural heartbeat of the city. Galleries, boutiques, restaurants, bars, and performance spaces line both sides of the street in a concentration of creative energy that has few peers in the Midwest. The Gallery Hop on the first Saturday of every month brings thousands of people into the district for an evening of open galleries and street energy that is one of the liveliest regular events in any Ohio city.
The Columbus Museum of Art is a genuinely excellent regional museum with a strong permanent collection and a particular emphasis on wonder, imagination, and the connection between art and creative thinking. The museum’s WonderLab is an interactive space designed to blur the line between art and play for visitors of all ages, and the museum’s programming is consistently inventive and community-oriented.
The Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens is a hidden gem that surprises many first-time visitors to Columbus. The conservatory’s collection of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures, installed permanently throughout the various climate zones of the facility, creates an extraordinary dialogue between the organic world of tropical plants, desert cacti, and temperate forests and the blazing colors of blown glass. The surrounding formal gardens are beautifully maintained and offer a peaceful retreat in all seasons.
The German Village neighborhood, just south of downtown Columbus, is one of the finest surviving examples of a nineteenth-century German immigrant community in the United States. Several blocks of brick streets, brick sidewalks, and beautifully maintained brick homes create an atmosphere of almost European solidity and charm. The Book Loft of German Village, a legendary independent bookstore occupying a warren of thirty-two interconnected rooms in a historic building, is a destination unto itself. Schiller Park, at the heart of the neighborhood, hosts an outdoor Shakespeare festival each summer that draws large and enthusiastic audiences.
Ohio’s state capital building, the Ohio Statehouse, is among the most architecturally distinguished capitol buildings in the country. The Greek Revival structure, completed in 1861, lacks a traditional dome, its designers having opted instead for a low rotunda that gives the building a dignified restraint often lacking in more ostentatious state capitols. Free tours are offered regularly and cover both the architecture and the political history of the state in considerable depth.
CINCINNATI: QUEEN CITY OF THE OHIO
Cincinnati occupies a spectacular natural setting on the northern bank of the Ohio River, its hills rising steeply from the water in a series of ridges and valleys that give the city a topographic drama unusual among Midwestern cities. Founded in the late eighteenth century as one of the first major settlements west of the Allegheny Mountains, Cincinnati developed rapidly as a river trading center and became one of the most cultured and prosperous cities in antebellum America. That legacy of culture and civic ambition endures in a city that continues to punch significantly above its weight.
The Cincinnati Art Museum, set atop Eden Park above the city, houses an exceptional collection of over sixty-seven thousand works spanning six thousand years of art history. The museum’s holdings of ancient Near Eastern art, European old masters, and American decorative arts are particularly strong. Like Cleveland’s museum, admission to the permanent collection is free, a generosity that reflects Cincinnati’s long tradition of civic cultural investment.
The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal is one of the most impressive destinations in Ohio. Union Terminal itself is a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture completed in 1933, a vast half-dome structure that was once one of the busiest rail stations in the country. Restored at enormous expense and reopened in 2018, the building now houses the Cincinnati History Museum, the Cincinnati Children’s Museum, the Museum of Natural History and Science, and the Cincinnati Historical Society Library, all under one spectacular rotunda decorated with murals by German artist Winold Reiss that stand among the finest examples of Art Deco public art in the United States.
The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden is consistently ranked among the top zoos in the country. It is also one of the oldest, having opened in 1875, which makes it the second-oldest zoo in the United States. The zoo has been a leader in animal conservation and breeding programs for endangered species, and its botanical gardens, particularly beautiful during the holiday season when elaborate light displays transform the grounds, draw visitors throughout the year.
Over-the-Rhine, the neighborhood immediately north of downtown Cincinnati, is one of the most extraordinary concentrations of intact Italianate Victorian architecture in the entire United States. The neighborhood was built by German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, its name derived from the Miami and Erie Canal that once divided it from downtown, which German residents compared to the Rhine River separating their homeland’s cities. After decades of disinvestment and population loss, Over-the-Rhine has undergone a remarkable revival, its historic buildings now housing restaurants, breweries, art galleries, boutiques, and residential lofts. Findlay Market, the oldest continuously operating public market in Ohio, anchors the neighborhood with a vibrant Saturday farmers market that is among the best in the Midwest.
Cincinnati has a strong claim to being America’s great craft beer city. The city’s German heritage created a deep brewing culture that survived Prohibition and has been spectacularly revived in recent decades. The city hosts dozens of craft breweries, and the annual Cincinnati Craft Beer Week draws enthusiasts from across the region. Christian Moerlein Brewing Company, which traces its lineage to one of Cincinnati’s great pre-Prohibition brewers, produces a range of beers in a large brewpub overlooking the Ohio River.
The food culture of Cincinnati includes several local specialties worth seeking out. Cincinnati chili is an institution, a spiced meat sauce related to but distinctly different from Texas or New Mexican chili, served over spaghetti at establishments like Skyline Chili and Gold Star Chili in a ritual ordering system involving “ways” that denote the combination of ingredients. It is an acquired taste for many visitors, but trying it is an essential Cincinnati experience. Goetta, a breakfast sausage made from ground meat and steel-cut oats, is another Cincinnati original that you will not find anywhere else.
The Newport Aquarium, just across the Ohio River in Kentucky but functionally part of the greater Cincinnati tourist experience, is one of the finest aquariums in the inland United States, with shark tanks, penguin exhibits, and a remarkable walk-through tunnel that gives visitors a 360-degree view of marine life swimming overhead and on all sides.
HOCKING HILLS: OHIO’S NATURAL MASTERPIECE
Southeast of Columbus, where the flat farmland of central Ohio gives way to the Hocking Hills region, the landscape transforms into something entirely unexpected. Carved by glacial meltwater and millions of years of erosion through the Black Hand Sandstone formation, the Hocking Hills contains a series of gorges, caves, waterfalls, and rock formations of breathtaking beauty. This is Ohio’s most visited natural area, and the number of visitors it receives each year is a testament to how completely it confounds visitors’ expectations of what Ohio looks like.
Old Man’s Cave is the most famous site in the Hocking Hills, a deeply recessed cave carved into the gorge walls of Hocking Creek, with a waterfall cascading over the entrance and a trail system winding through the canyon to a series of additional caves and overhanging ledges. The cave takes its name from a nineteenth-century hermit who reportedly lived and died within its shelter. The surrounding gorge, thick with hemlock trees and ferns even in midsummer, has a cool, moist, prehistoric quality.
Ash Cave is the largest recess cave in Ohio, a horseshoe-shaped overhang some seven hundred feet across and one hundred feet deep, with a spectacular waterfall dropping to a pool at its entrance. After rain, the falls are thunderous and the spray fills the cave with a luminous mist. In winter, the falls freeze into elaborate formations of ice that draw photographers from across the state.
Cedar Falls is widely considered the most beautiful waterfall in Ohio. Unlike the single-drop falls at Ash Cave, Cedar Falls descends in a rushing, braided cascade over sandstone ledges before pooling in a clear basin. The trail to Cedar Falls passes through a hemlock grove that maintains a cathedral-like atmosphere of cool shadow even on the hottest summer days.
Rock House, accessible by a moderately strenuous trail, is the only true cave in the Hocking Hills system, a tunnel-like chamber cut through a sandstone fin with seven large window openings looking out over a heavily forested gorge. The combination of interior drama and exterior views is unlike anything else in the region.
The town of Logan serves as the gateway to the Hocking Hills and has a range of accommodations, including many privately owned cabin rentals scattered through the surrounding forest. These cabins, offering privacy, hot tubs, and fireplaces deep in the woods, have made the Hocking Hills a popular weekend romantic getaway for residents of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Booking well in advance is essential, particularly for autumn weekends when the fall foliage draws enormous crowds.
CUYAHOGA VALLEY NATIONAL PARK
Between Cleveland and Akron, the Cuyahoga River flows through a deep, forested valley that represents one of the great environmental recovery stories in American history. The Cuyahoga River was so severely polluted by industrial waste in the mid-twentieth century that it famously caught fire in 1969, an event that shocked the nation and helped galvanize the environmental movement that produced the Clean Water Act. Today, the river runs clean through a valley that became Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2000, the only national park in Ohio.
The park encompasses thirty-three thousand acres of forest, wetlands, farmland, and river corridor. Beaver Marsh, accessible from the Towpath Trail that follows the route of the old Ohio and Erie Canal, is one of the finest wildlife viewing spots in the park, where beaver dams, great blue herons, turtles, and migratory waterfowl can be observed in abundance. The Brandywine Falls, a sixty-five-foot cascading waterfall in the northern section of the park, is one of the most photographed spots in Ohio and is accessible by a short, easy trail from the parking area.
The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad operates excursion trains through the park on vintage rail equipment, offering a relaxed and visually lovely way to experience the valley’s beauty, particularly in autumn when the hardwood forest is at peak color. The railroad connects with several trailheads along the Towpath Trail, allowing visitors to ride in one direction and hike back along the canal path.
The park contains numerous historic sites related to the canal era, including restored canal locks, lockkeeper’s houses, and a visitors’ center at Canal Visitor Center in Valley View that explains the history of the Ohio and Erie Canal and its central role in Ohio’s development as a commercial and industrial state in the nineteenth century.
THE OHIO AMISH COUNTRY
Holmes County and the surrounding counties of east-central Ohio constitute the largest Amish settlement in the world, a fact that surprises many visitors who are unaware of Ohio’s substantial and long-established Amish and Mennonite communities. Traveling through this region is a quietly disorienting and genuinely moving experience. Horse-drawn buggies move along country roads at a steady trot. Farmsteads without utility lines sit amid immaculate fields. Children in plain dress play in yards. The pace of life here is not performed for tourists but is the genuine expression of a community living according to deeply held religious and cultural principles.
Millersburg, the Holmes County seat, and the smaller towns of Berlin, Sugarcreek, Walnut Creek, and Charm are the centers of tourist activity in the region. The Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin offers an excellent introduction to the history and beliefs of these communities, including a massive painted cyclorama depicting the Amish migration to America that is an impressive work of folk art in its own right.
The area is extraordinarily rich in excellent food. Amish cooking is abundant, hearty, and made from scratch, and numerous restaurants in the region serve traditional meals featuring chicken, roast beef, noodles, mashed potatoes, and fresh-baked pies in quantities designed for appetites sharpened by farmwork. Der Dutchman in Walnut Creek is among the most popular and is genuinely excellent. The local cheesemakers, particularly Guggisberg Cheese in Charm, produce Swiss and other varieties that have won national awards. The bakeries throughout the region sell bread, cookies, and pastries of exceptional quality at remarkably modest prices.
Antiquing is a major draw in Amish country, with numerous multi-dealer antique malls and individual shops offering a full range of American country furniture, quilts, glassware, and farm equipment in a setting where the context makes browsing feel entirely appropriate. The handmade quilts produced by Amish women are particularly prized by collectors and range in price from the modest to the considerable depending on complexity and maker.
Visitors to Amish country should be respectful of the community they are passing through. Photographing individuals, particularly in close-up or without any indication of consent, is widely considered disrespectful and intrusive. The Amish are not a tourist attraction but a living community, and treating them with the courtesy one would extend to any person whose home and neighborhood you are visiting is both ethically correct and practically conducive to a more genuine and rewarding experience.
LAKE ERIE AND THE NORTH COAST
Ohio’s northern border is defined by Lake Erie, and the one hundred miles of shoreline between the Pennsylvania border and the Toledo area offer beaches, islands, wineries, and wildlife refuges that constitute Ohio’s answer to a coastal vacation. Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes, which makes its Ohio shores genuinely swimmable in summer in a way that the waters of the other Great Lakes often are not.
The Lake Erie Islands, accessible by ferry from the Port Clinton and Sandusky areas, are among the most popular summer destinations in Ohio. Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island is the liveliest of the island communities, a small town whose summer population explodes with visitors who come for the beaches, the bars, the golf cart rentals, and the genuinely impressive Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, a Doric column nearly four hundred feet tall commemorating Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s decisive victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The memorial’s observation deck, accessible by elevator, provides a panoramic view of the lake and the surrounding islands on clear days.
Kelleys Island, a short ferry ride from Marblehead, is the quieter and more nature-oriented of the main islands. The Glacial Grooves State Memorial on Kelleys Island preserves the largest easily accessible glacial grooves in the world, deep channels carved into the limestone bedrock by the advancing glaciers of the last ice age. The grooves are startlingly clear and immediate evidence of geological forces operating on an almost incomprehensible scale.
The Marblehead Peninsula and the surrounding communities of Lakeside, Catawba Island, and Port Clinton are packed with rental cottages, fish fry restaurants, charter fishing operations, and marina facilities that create the full flavor of a Great Lakes vacation culture that has been drawing visitors from Ohio’s interior cities since the late nineteenth century. The Lakeside Chautauqua community, a gated summer community with a long tradition of cultural programming including lectures, concerts, and performances, is a fascinating anachronism that preserves a particular vision of improving summertime leisure.
The Lake Erie wine region, stretching along the lakeshore west of Cleveland through Lake, Lorain, Erie, and Ottawa counties, benefits from the moderating influence of the lake on temperatures, creating a microclimate that extends the growing season and allows the cultivation of wine grapes in latitudes that would otherwise be too cold. The wineries of this region, including Grand River Cellars, Ferrante Winery, and Firelands Winery, produce wines from Riesling, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Gris, and other varieties that have earned growing recognition. A driving tour of the Lake Erie wine trail in late summer or early autumn, when the vineyards are heavy with fruit and the lake light has turned golden, is one of the most pleasurable and least crowded wine experiences available in the eastern United States.
The Magee Marsh Wildlife Area west of Port Clinton is one of the most celebrated birding destinations in North America. During the spring songbird migration in May, warblers, thrushes, vireos, and dozens of other species pile up along the Lake Erie shoreline before crossing the open water, and Magee Marsh’s boardwalk trail through the lakeside trees offers views of birds at arm’s length that would be extraordinary anywhere else and are simply miraculous here. The Biggest Week in American Birding festival, held at Magee Marsh each May, draws thousands of birders from around the world and is a joyful and slightly obsessive gathering of people united by a shared passion for small, colorful, fast-moving creatures.
DAYTON: BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION
Dayton occupies a unique place in the history of human civilization. It was here that Wilbur and Orville Wright ran their bicycle shop, conducted their aeronautical research, and developed the mechanical and theoretical foundations for the first successful powered airplane flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903. The Wright brothers’ connection to Dayton is honored with remarkable depth and comprehensiveness at the Wright Brothers National Memorial sites managed by the National Park Service.
The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park encompasses several sites in and around the city, including the Wright Cycle Company Complex where the brothers operated their bicycle business, Huffman Prairie Flying Field where they conducted their post-Kitty Hawk test flights and developed the world’s first practical airplane, and Carillon Historical Park, which houses the Wright Flyer III, the third airplane the brothers built and the one that Orville Wright considered the world’s first practical airplane. The Wright Flyer III is a UNESCO World Heritage Site artifact and can be examined at close range in the Dayton History museum within the park.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just east of Dayton is the world’s largest military aviation museum and is entirely free to visit. The collection spans the entire history of powered flight from the Wright brothers to the present day, encompassing nearly four hundred aircraft and missiles displayed across four massive hangars. Presidential aircraft including Air Force One planes used by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and subsequent presidents are on display. The restored cockpits of aircraft from both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars bring the history of air combat into immediate, visceral focus.
TOLEDO: THE GLASS CITY
Toledo, at the western end of Lake Erie, is known historically as the Glass City, a nickname earned by its extraordinary concentration of glass manufacturing that made it a world center of that industry for over a century. The legacy of that concentration is the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion, one of the finest collections of art glass and the finest building dedicated to glass art anywhere in the world. The pavilion itself, designed by the firm SANAA, is a stunning structure of curved glass walls enclosing glass galleries within a glass building, creating a luminous environment in which glass artwork is displayed against a constantly changing backdrop of natural light and reflection.
The main building of the Toledo Museum of Art is an equally rewarding destination, its permanent collection including a particularly distinguished group of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities, European old masters, and American art. The museum is free to the public and is regarded as one of the finest mid-sized art museums in the United States.
The Toledo Zoo, situated along the Maumee River south of downtown, is one of the highly rated zoos in the country, with strong collections of large mammals, a particularly acclaimed hippopotamus facility, and beautifully designed habitats that give the animals genuine space and the visitors genuine views.
PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION
Ohio is served by five major airports, with Columbus John Glenn International, Cleveland Hopkins International, and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International being the primary hubs. Dayton and Toledo have regional airports with connecting service. Amtrak serves several Ohio cities, including Cleveland, Toledo, and a Cleveland-to-Cincinnati corridor, though service is less frequent than in the Northeast and requires careful advance planning.
Within Ohio’s cities, public transit ranges from adequate in Cleveland and Columbus to limited in smaller centers. A car is strongly recommended for exploring the state beyond the major urban cores, and Ohio’s highway system, anchored by several intersecting interstates, makes driving between cities fast and easy.
Ohio experiences four genuine seasons. Summers are warm and humid, particularly in the south and along Lake Erie. Winters are cold, with significant lake-effect snow in the northern counties closest to Lake Erie, where snowfall can be dramatic and road conditions challenging from November through March. Spring arrives gradually but beautifully, with wildflower blooms in the state parks beginning in April. Autumn is arguably Ohio’s finest season, when the hardwood forests of the Hocking Hills, Cuyahoga Valley, and eastern hills put on a color display that rivals anything in New England, with far smaller crowds.
Ohio is a relatively affordable travel destination. Hotel rates in Columbus, Dayton, and smaller cities are modest by national standards, and many of the state’s premier cultural attractions, including the Cleveland and Cincinnati art museums, are free. State park facilities are excellent and inexpensive, and the food culture across the state rewards those willing to seek out local institutions rather than national chains.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Ohio is a state that has been taken for granted for too long, even by many of its own residents. It is the state that gave America its aviation pioneers, its most beloved president in Abraham Lincoln’s era, its first professional baseball club, and its astronaut who first stood on the moon. It has produced more than its share of writers, artists, musicians, and inventors. Its landscapes range from the Great Lakes shore to ancient sandstone gorges to rolling Amish farmland to urban neighborhoods of genuine distinction.
The traveler who approaches Ohio with curiosity and without condescension will discover a state that rewards both attitudes generously. Ohio does not boast loudly about what it has to offer, which is itself a kind of Midwestern virtue. It simply offers, quietly and in abundance, and trusts that those who look closely enough will see the value of what is there. Those who do look closely will find themselves surprised, delighted, and almost certainly planning a return visit.
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