Breaking News

Local Columns

The difference between an Art-A-Tack and an Art-I-Fact

One of the reasons people get into journalism is that they want to know a little about a lot. Along the way you become an eyewitness to the events that shape a community. Stick around long enough and your knowledge of current events becomes knowledge of recent history, and if you stick around a really long time, not-so-recent history. When I was in college I minored in history. Once, my academic adviser, Chuck Scott, asked me what in the world I was going to do with all the history I was taking. I wished I had told him that I was going to write a column that frequently covered some ...

Adams’ Marietta visit focused on founders

John Quincy Adams, who was president from 1825 until 1829, was well into his post presidential life when he visited Marietta in 1843. He is one of only a handful of presidents to visit Marietta. It became known in the summer of 1843 that Adams would be in Cincinnati later that year to lay a cornerstone for an observatory being built. An invitation was extended to him to stop in Marietta on his way back. He agreed to stop if, according to the History of Washington County, published in 1881, “if he should have no duties to perform which would conflict with him doing so.” In other ...

Becky had a rough life before, during, and after her stay in Marietta

About a year after I came to Marietta in the 1970s another newcomer arrived in town. Sadly, she is no longer with us. Becky Thatcher, or more properly, the sternwheeler Becky Thatcher, spent much of her hard life along the banks of the Muskingum River in Marietta. She arrived in town in 1975 as part of a bicentennial project designed to bring entertainment and good food to the riverbank. The city made a lot of improvements to the area behind the armory so that people could board the boat for melodrama plays and to dine at the restaurant on the second deck of the boat. The boat had a ...

Three Black pioneers who called Washington County home

Here are profiles of three remarkable Black men, who lived as free men in the Northwest Territory and State of Ohio where slavery was prohibited. Christopher Malbone, aka “Kitt Putnam,” panicked as the flatboat started to sink crossing the Ohio River in 1793. He was helping Aaron Waldo ...

Giant once towered over Rathbone neighborhood

If you stand at Lookout Point on Harmar Hill and gaze across Marietta in the summer, the town, except for the business district, looks like a forest sweeping upward from the Muskingum River. Except for the steeples of churches, the town has a roof of leaves above the roofs of shingles and slate topped homes. Sycamores, oaks and sweet gum trees fill the tree strips and backyards of the town. There was a time not that long ago that Marietta had a tree that was so large, it was actually a tourist attraction for the city. The Rathbone Elm was once the largest elm tree in the United ...

Be empathetic of winter woes

Three days after Christmas I was chatting with an acquaintance who said rather huffily “I took all my Christmas decorations down yesterday. It’s all put away. I couldn’t stand it!” My jaw dropped. In a way, I understood. Looking around the living room … and the entire first floor, really … I, too, had been briefly seized by the idea that I needed to clean it all up. But that madness passed. Even if I had managed to grab every last scrap of wrapping paper off the floor, I would have been reluctant to touch the decorations themselves. The shimmering bulbs and tiny lights ...