By Wendy Korwin

I walk through the world with boarding passes, restaurant napkins and loser raffle tickets tucked in my pockets and swimming around in tote bags. So it makes sense that I love scrapbooks.

If you love a few big things, you can pass them down in your will, or keep them in a safe deposit box. But scrapbooks help us hold onto other things, the stuff that might otherwise float into the trash or, in the case of the napkins, be dispatched for a sneeze. For me, they are proof that we can love many things, even if they’re little things and we love them each just a little.

For archivists, though, scrapbooks can be trickier. Historically, many scrapbook creators have followed the rule, “If it’s kind of flat, it kind of fits.” (Like a cat.) The problem is that the world comes in odd shapes. Newspaper columns happen in long, skinny rectangles that get amputated or folded so they don't dangle off the page. Other things are emphatically three dimensional, but we still invite them into our albums. Bindings hold together pages weighed down by all sorts of hitchhikers: clipped poems, ticket stubs, ribbons -- and organic stuff like flowers, feathers and hair.

These coinciding realities -- of ephemera saved, but not permanently safe -- mean that the people who care for them look for ways to extend their lives, physically as well as digitally.

Take a closer look at the scrapbooks from the Viola D. Roman Papers below!

I'm sure you've gotten the question at some point from a student or wondered aloud yourself: "What did the people who lived where I live eat 3000 years ago?"

Almost universally, it was taught that ancient Ohioans ate corn, beans, and squash as their main domesticated crops, known as the "Three Sisters." We now know that was wrong!

Over the last 30 years, scientists have discovered a bevy of plants once thought of as annual weeds that were domesticated by the people who lived in this land. Between about 2000 and 1000 BCE, communities in Ohio's river valleys domesticated sunflower, squash, goosefoot, and sumpweed, then folded in maygrass, erect knotweed, and little barley. This was the Eastern Agricultural Complex, a group of domesticated crops that were grown and harvested seasonally together. Corn and beans arrived late and spent centuries as a minor character. That makes Eastern North America one of roughly ten places on Earth where people invented agriculture from scratch. And the first farmers in what became Ohio bred their harvest out of the plants that now grow through the cracks in your school parking lot!

Botany calls them weeds today, but for 3000 years (from around 2000 BCE - 1000 CE), they were the main harvest of Ohioans. One rockshelter in the Hocking Hills held a goosefoot cache that Bruce Smith estimated at nine million seeds, the largest store of native domesticated grain ever found. In 1998, an Ohio University field school dug into a low rise where Sunday Creek meets the Hocking River and found the leftovers of a very large dinner from around 2000 BCE. There were five cooking pits, some big enough to feed 60 people in one sitting. Sifted out of the ash, by the thousand, were charred seeds of goosefoot, marshelder, maygrass, and squash.

This week's lesson puts your third, fourth, and fifth graders to work as chefs in Ohio's oldest restaurant. The will learn the real ingredients, real cooking methods, and a menu that predates the entire Bronze Age of European history. Along the way they will learn heredity (seeds change when you keep planting the big ones), geography (rivers make farmland), and a little humility about the word "weed.

Check out the lessons and activity packet now.

Blog Image Citation: Resource Roundup. Columbus: Ohio History Connection, 2026.

Week of August 3-7, 2026

Aug 7

This week I can finally share some of the data we have collected from the post molds about the construction of the fort. This data comes from the northern wall and bastion, where we uncovered 201 post molds across twenty-nine 2m x 1m units. We then took the east/west diameter measurements from 100 post molds from across the wall and bastion and compared them (Photo 1 below).

We found that the posts from the bastion are approximately one inch larger in diameter than the posts in the northern curtain wall. The mean diameter of post molds from the bastion is 8.16 in., while the curtain wall has a mean post mold size of 7.16, a size difference of 1 in. The median size of the bastion post molds follows the same conventions and is 1.12 in. larger than those in the curtain wall, suggesting that this size difference is not due to statistical outliers, or, in this case, not due to the presence of a few unconventionally large post molds. The bastion posts are also more consistent in size, with an overall relative variation of 23.2% and a within-unit relative variation of 19.4%. The post molds in the northern curtain wall have an overall relative variation of 25.8% and an in-unit relative variation of 22.9%.

This pattern fits the construction records of the fort, which indicate that the bastion walls were built first, even though the curtain walls make up 85% of the total fort perimeter (Photo 2). The curtain walls have smaller and more irregular post molds, which could reflect a combination of the dwindling selection of choice nearby timber, pressure to finish the build and a lack of nutrients for the builders. It took 4-5 men to fell and carry one log and they traveled up to a mile away to locate them. Each log weighs between 300 and 400 lbs, or approximately 46.3lbs per cubic foot. The human body uses 80% of its energy on vital functions like breathing, leaving only 20% for extracurricular activities like building a fort. The soldiers were already eating limited rations and were not clothed for the winter, so much of their energy went towards keeping their bodies warm.

All of this data corroborates the written records of the fort's construction. The bastion’s larger and more consistently sized posts are consistent with the men using the best timbers for their primary defensive areas and also possibly due to having more energy to construct evenly. The northern curtain wall having smaller and more irregular posts may show that the men were under pressure from multiple angles to finish the construction as quickly as possible. If they spent their energy and good timber on the bastions, it makes sense that the walls are a bit wonky. In our first blog post, I talked about the interesting inner bastion corners, where clusters of large logs were placed. We think this is evidence of deliberate structural reinforcement in these corners. The northern curtain wall has more gaps between the postmolds, where the soldiers would have put smaller tree limbs or chinking, rather than keeping the posts tight and reinforced like the bastion.

It is a shame that the Ohio-Erie Canal removed the eastern bastions and walls, as getting data from all four walls could help us determine which order they were built in (Photo 3). We assume the western and southern walls were built first. Our logic goes like this: the frozen river provided an eastern barrier to the fort and they could see long-distance to the west and north/northwest, but the hills to the south/southwest posed real danger to the fort (Photo 4).

The hills in the southern end of the modern park are where the British-aligned indigenous groups ambushed and killed twenty men. From a defensive point, the southern and western walls seem to be the most important (Photo 5). To confirm this, we will look for consistently sized post molds with regular spacing in the fort’s remaining southern bastion. Unfortunately, our units in the southern portion of the western wall did not yield many post molds, and we haven’t crunched the numbers for the northern half of the western wall. The data eludes us, but we will find it!

Onto this weeks work…

This week, in the southern half of the western wall, we dug six 2M x 1M units just southeast of the museum and found post molds in one of them (Photo 6). This is a huge difference from the units in the northern half of the fort, where we only had one or two units without post molds. Our current theory is the difference in the fill techniques used by Dr. Gramly in the previous 1970s excavations. We refer to this fill layer of soil as “Gramly fill.” In the northern half of the fort, the Gramly fill consisted of a layer of sand placed atop a layer of gravel, effectively creating a French drain. Thus far in the southern half, the fill consists of mixed soil and gravel (see Photo 7). This difference in fill affects the way the soil absorbs water - a French drain collects water and provides it a place to go, but the mixed soil and rocks soak up water in the same way ground soil does. Perhaps this difference in water draining changes the way the post molds look. We’re not really sure.

By Rosalyn DeMattia, Project Assistant

In 2025, the Ohio History Connection (OHC) was awarded a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to preserve  fragile magnetic media – U-Matic, VHS, audio cassettes and 3/4" audiotape – that were reaching the end of their lifespan. The grant made it possible to work with Scene Savers to digitize material from seven LGBTQ+ collections, documenting 35 years of Ohio’s gay history from 1968-2003. I’m excited to share that our processing is complete, and these amazing materials are now available to view in our online catalog for the very first time.

As Project Assistant, part of my job was to watch or listen to all 195 of the new files. Here are three of my favorite moments from this group of new arrivals.

In 1989, a portion of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt stopped in Ohio on its second nationwide tour. Independent filmmaker Bill Wilson produced this documentary about the quilt while it was on display at the Cincinnati Convention Center. The film shows the quilt sections being ceremonially unfolded while the names of those memorialized are read aloud. Later, onlookers approach to interact with the quilt, and several share their thoughts in brief interviews: “The NAMES Project Quilt is a wonderfully diverse piece of evidence that everyone is different, and everyone is beautiful, and that everyone feels something about their loved ones…. I hope that all gay people, all lesbian people everywhere, will listen to the message of the quilt.”

[View more from this collection]

With this grant, we were able to digitize more than 80 episodes of the L/G/B Report, a cable access television show produced by Stonewall Union (now Stonewall Columbus). In this episode, the hosts interview workers from the AIDS Service Connection, a Columbus nonprofit that that provided long-term home care to people with AIDS. This episode is unique because of the face-to-face interviews with AIDS patients in the late 1990s, after the disease was out of the national spotlight. Beyond the home care services, the clients are especially thankful for the personal connections they have with their caregivers, and the social events held by the organization. “I can’t say it enough, that ASC is a blessing to me,” says patient Penny Brown.

[View more from this collection]

I was bowled over by this session from the Shepherd Initiative’s 2003 Amazing Grace conference in Columbus, Ohio. The conference gathered priests and congregation members from all over the country to discuss Christianity’s relationship with homosexuality, and how churches could become more welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ people. Roberta Showalter Kreider was “against all homosexuality” until, at the age of 58, she felt called by God to turn around and “learn to know” gay people. She became a published author in her 70s, sharing her “Fifteen Reasons” along with personal narratives from gay Christians in the book From Wounded Hearts. In her speech, she describes her transformation and the challenges she faced as she tried to change hearts in her own Mennonite community.

[Hear more from this collection]

Week of July 20th-24th

Jul 24

Welcome to the Fort Laurens Underground blog! This edition, ‘This Week at Fort Laurens" will come out on Fridays, detailing a bit of the work we completed for the week along with any interesting finds and the history behind them.

But first, a very brief backstory of the fort and the work we have done. Fort Laurens was established in November 1778 by Commander Lachlan McIntosh as a strategic point to attack the British-held Fort Detroit. It was named after Henry Laurens, the President of the Continental Congress at the time, and built in ten days.

Fort Laurens was a nightmare. The troops that joined McIntosh were outfitted in linen clothes and with limited rations. They were were under siege by the British and the indigenous groups that joined them; feeling too threatened to venture out once the siege had begun, they were not able to hunt or fish and ran out of nails before they finished the fort—none of the barracks had doors. Twenty men died in an ambush, and their bodies were left where they perished because the no one wanted to be the next victim of the siege. Their bodies were subsequently ravaged by wolves. When McIntosh led a relief party to the men, the soldiers at the fort saw them coming, raised their guns, fired in salute and frightened all the packhorses, who ran off and spewed their goods everywhere. Fort Laurens was shortly abandoned in August of 1779.

In the early 1900’s, Fort Laurens was turned from farmland into a public park for the town of Bolivar. In the 1970’s, an archaeologist was called in to dig the entire fort in preparation for the museum. In the early 2000’s, a small portion of the fort was excavated and in 2024, the Fort Laurens 250 Project started. In 2028, the state of Ohio hopes to have completed the reconstruction of the remaining walls of the fort, as well as a museum revamp.

That wasn’t brief at all.

This summer, we started on the northern wall of the fort. We completed thirty meters of the wall and are now working on the northwestern side of the northern bastion (see map below!). Most of our finds have been pre-contact lithics and 18th-19th century material, but what we’re really after is the post molds in the original trench. When wood rots in an anaerobic (without oxygen) environment, like underground, it turns black and stains the dirt around it. The wood rots almost completely away, but the stain in the dirt is left. This means that if we dig below the fill from the 1970’s dig, we (sometimes) get a perfect line of post molds showing exactly where the individual logs for the wall were placed. In doing this, we also reveal the original soldier’s trench walls—and let me tell you, there is definitely an A Team, a B Team, and a Z Team digging these things. The bastions, which were built first, have been really nice. The northern wall was chunky.

This week, we completed the northeastern half of the northern bastion and the tip revealed something interesting. Instead of the palisade wall leading up to the fort, what we found was the palisade wall, the tip of the bastion and other post molds placed in the interior of the tip. We have seen this before, on the corner where the bastion extends from the wall.

The bastion of a fort is a defensive strategic point where soldiers would build a platform or pile up dirt so they could stand and fire over the wall. Could these interior post molds be platform posts? Or could they be part of an interior anchoring system to keep the fort upright?

Whatever the reason, we did not see this pattern repeated in the northeastern corner of the bastion, only where the bastion meets the wall and where the outer tip of the bastion is (see image left). It certainly gives us something to think about for the next bastion/wall connection at the western wall, and for the southwestern bastion. We know the engineer for the fort was French and he utilized multiple aspects from 18th-century European fort construction, making Fort Laurens not a true European Star Fort, but a square fort with four pointed bastions.

For now, this will remain a fun puzzle for us to figure out. The dirt tells us so many things that physical artifacts and contemporary writing can’t. When the soldiers were building the fort, they weren’t thinking of the importance of bastion support, or writing down the minutiae of their day. They were trying to build a fort and survive. Colonel John Gibson wrote on December 12, 1778, “I’ve already finished setting up the pickets, and in a few days, I think I can bid defiance to the enemy.”

The references we have to the construction of the fort are few and far between. There is debate about whether the credited engineer, a Frenchman named Louis Antoine Jean Baptiste de Cambray-Digny, actually constructed the fort or if they just used his ideas from the construction of Fort McIntosh. When the entire fort was excavated in the 70s, they didn’t record the post molds, only the position of the walls. We are lucky enough to have the privilege of recording these molds for the first time and possibly shining new light on the architecture of the fort.