08/26/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/19AYbYMCiq/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Thirty-two of Ohio's eighty-eight counties are officially designated Appalachian, covering the entire southeastern third of the state, and almost nothing anyone says about Ohio applies to them.
The geology explains most of it. The last glacier stopped partway down Ohio and never reached the southeast. Everything north and west of that line got flattened, scoured and filled with rich glacial till, which is why that part of the state is farm country laid out in a grid. The southeast was left alone. Steep ridges, narrow hollows, sandstone cliffs, twisting creeks and roads that follow the water because there was no other option.
That means Appalachian Ohio does not look like the rest of Ohio at all. It looks like West Virginia, because it is the same landform continuing across the river.
The economy went a different direction too. Coal, iron, clay, salt and timber, rather than corn and soybeans. The Hanging Rock Iron Region in the south ran furnaces that supplied iron for the Civil War, and you can still find stone furnace stacks standing in the woods. Coal camps and company towns dotted the hills. When those industries left, they left the same way they left everywhere else in Appalachia, all at once and without a replacement.
Ohio's poorest counties are here. Athens, Vinton, Meigs, Adams, Pike, Morgan. Vinton County has fewer than 13,000 people and no traffic light on some accounts.
But the culture is distinct and worth taking seriously. Old-time and bluegrass music traditions. Foodways that came up through Virginia and Kentucky rather than from Germany and Poland like the north. Deep family networks. Hunting and gathering as real parts of the household economy, from ramps to morels to ginseng.
The land is the other asset. Wayne National Forest, Hocking Hills, Shawnee State Forest, Serpent Mound, the Ohio River towns of Marietta and Gallipolis.
Athens and Ohio University sit in the middle of it, which gives the region a university town that does not resemble anything else nearby.
Most of Ohio drives past it on the way to somewhere else.
