How America’s Most Powerful State Quietly Lost Everything: Ohio

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Seven of the first 36 presidents of the United States were born in a single state, not Virginia, which claims eight, but a state that did not exist when the Constitution was signed. Ohio entered the Union in 1803 with a population smaller than modern-day Dayton. Within 60 years, it was the fourth most populous state in the country. An industrial colossus, a political kingmaker, and the incubator of fortune so large they reshaped the national economy. And then in the span of a single generation, it wasn't. The distance between those two versions of Ohio, the indispensable state and the forgotten one, is the story of what happens when a place does everything right, wins everything there is to win, and then watches the rules change. The land itself was the first prize. Before Ohio was a name on any map, it was a contested stretch of forest, river valley, and prairie grass that three empires and a dozen indigenous nations understood to be among the most valuable territory on the continent. The Shaune, the Wandot, the Miami, the Delaware.

[00:01:06]They had lived and fought over this ground for centuries. The French claimed it. The British took it from the French.

[00:01:13]And then in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the new United States found itself in possession of an enormous tract of land northwest of the Ohio River and had almost no idea what to do with it. The Federal Treasury was empty. The Continental Army was owed back pay. The states were quarreling over western land claims. The answer to all of these problems turned out to be the same answer. Sell Ohio. In 1787, the same summer the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a law that would prove more consequential for the physical shape of the country than anything the Convention produced that year. The ordinance created a framework for turning raw territory into states.

[00:01:55]It banned slavery north of the Ohio River. It established public education as a governmental obligation. and it created a system for surveying and selling land in orderly rectangular parcels, a grid imposed on wilderness drawn from a desk in New York. Ohio was the test case. Every state that followed, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eventually most of the West would be organized according to the template that was first applied here. If the Constitution was the nation's operating manual, the Northwest Ordinance was its real estate prospectus, and Ohio was the first lot on the market. The men who bought that lot were not frontiersmen. They were New England speculators, Revolutionary War veterans with land bounties to redeem, and congregational ministers who saw the Ohio country as an extension of the New England experiment. In March of 1786, 11 of them gathered at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston and formed the Ohio Company of Associates. Their leader was Manassa Cutler, a Yale educated minister who doubled as a lobbyist of considerable skill. Cutler negotiated a deal with Congress to buy a million and a half acres along the Ohio River for roughly 8 cents an acre, and he did it partly by bundling the purchase with a separate, more profitable deal for a group of well-connected congressmen. The first organized settlement in Ohio Marietta was founded in 1788 at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers. It was named for Marie Antuinet, a gesture of gratitude toward France for its help in the revolution. Gratitude that would seem darkly ironic within 5 years, but the grid on the map did not match the reality on the ground. The indigenous nations who held this land had never seeded it and the settlement of Ohio triggered a war.

[00:03:44]In 1790 and 1791, the United States Army marched into the Ohio country and was twice defeated, the second time catastrophically.

[00:03:54]General Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, led 1,400 men into the forests near present-day Fort Recovery and lost more than 600 of them in a single morning. It was the worst defeat the United States Army would suffer at the hands of indigenous forces until the little big horn. 85 years later, President Washington, furious, sent General Anthony Wayne West with a larger, better trained force.

[00:04:17]Wayne spent two years drilling his men before engaging the Western Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

[00:04:25]The Treaty of Greenville that followed opened most of southern and eastern Ohio to settlement. The cost to the Shaune, the Miami, the Wand dot, the Delaware was nearly everything. With the land question settled by force, Ohio filled up faster than any territory before it.

[00:04:43]Population went from 45,000 in 1800 to 230,000 in 1810.

[00:04:50]The pace was so fast that Ohio became a state in 1803 with a constitution written in 25 days and a capital placed temporarily in Chilikathy, a town on the Shiota River that had the advantage of existing. The first Ohio Constitution was a peculiar document. It created a legislature so powerful that the governor could not veto legislation and the Supreme Court was required to ride circuit to every county in the state every year. The legislature appointed judges, the secretary of state, and the treasurer. The governor had almost no independent authority. This was a deliberate choice. The men who wrote the 1803 Constitution were Jeffersonian Republicans who distrusted executive power, and they built a government that reflected that distrust. It would take half a century for the consequences to become unbearable. But even before Ohio had a functioning government, it was already fighting over its borders. The Northwest Ordinance had described the boundary between Ohio and what would become Michigan as a line drawn east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

[00:05:54]The problem was that nobody in 1787 knew exactly where the southern tip of Lake Michigan was. When Ohio drafted its constitution in 1802, its delegates drew the northern boundary slightly higher than the ordinance seemed to require, high enough to include the mouth of the Mami River and a small settlement called Toledo. Michigan objected. The dispute festered for 30 years, and when Michigan applied for statehood in 1835, it erupted into a genuine crisis. Both sides mobilized militias. Ohio's governor, Robert Lucas, marched troops to the border. Michigan's 23-year-old governor, Stevens T. Mason, the boy governor, passed a law threatening to jail any Ohio official who tried to exercise authority in the disputed strip. The only casualty of the so-called Toledo War was a Michigan sheriff stabbed with a pen knife in a tavern brawl. The wound was not serious.

[00:06:48]The outcome was. President Andrew Jackson sided with Ohio. Ohio was a state with electoral votes. Michigan was a territory with none. and Congress brokered a deal. Ohio kept Toledo and the mouth of the Mami. Michigan received statehood and as compensation the western threequarters of the upper peninsula, 9,000 square miles of land that the Detroit Free Press dismissed as a wilderness of perpetual snows. Within a decade, miners would find copper and iron there in quantities that made it one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in North America. Toed, meanwhile, became a respectable midsize city, but it never became the commercial capital that Ohio's delegates had imagined when they moved the border.

[00:07:32]What did transform Ohio from a frontier state into an economic power was not a border, but a ditch. Two of them, actually. By 1820, Ohio had more than half a million people, but most of them were subsistance farmers trapped by geography. The Appalachian Mountains cut off access to eastern markets. Sending goods overland by wagon cost $125 a ton.

[00:07:56]Floating produce south to New Orleans on flatboats was cheaper but slow and unreliable.

[00:08:02]Then New York began building the Eerie Canal and Ohio watched. Governor Ethan Allen Brown, no relation to the Vermont Revolutionary, championed a canal system that would connect Lake Erie in the north to the Ohio River in the south. On the 4th of July 1825, Governor Dwit Clinton of New York turned the first spade full of earth for the Ohio and Eerie Canal near the village of Licking Summit. The symbolism was intentional.

[00:08:28]New York's canal had made New York the commercial center of the nation and Ohio intended to follow the same playbook.

[00:08:36]The Ohio and Eerie Canal ran 308 miles from Cleveland on Lake Erie to Portsmouth on the Ohio River, passing through Akran, Kashakton, and Chilikova.

[00:08:46]A second canal, the Miami and Erie, connected Cincinnati to Toledo. The cost of shipping dropped from $125 a ton to 25. Crossing the state went from a journey of weeks to a journey of days.

[00:09:00]The effects were immediate and transformative. Along the canal route, villages became towns and towns became cities. A farmer named Steven Frzy, who in 1824 owned a single cow and lived in a log cabin along a stage coach road, by 1827 owned eight cows, was shipping dairy products on the canal and had built a two-story brick house facing the waterway. His house still stands on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a monument not to a man, but to a piece of infrastructure. By 1840, Ohio's population had passed 1.5 million. By 1850, it was the third most populous state in the Union, a position it would hold with minor variation for the next century. The canals built that, but the canals also built something else. The state's internal geography of power.

[00:09:52]Cleveland, sitting at the northern terminus of the Ohio and Erie Canal and on the shore of Lake Erie, became the gateway between the east coast and the interior. Cincinnati on the Ohio River became the gateway to the south and the Mississippi. Columbus, positioned near the geographic center of the state, but on neither a great lake nor a major navigable river, became the capital in 1816. a compromised location chosen specifically because it was not Cleveland and not Cincinnati. This triangle, Cleveland in the northeast, Cincinnati in the southwest, Columbus in the middle, would define Ohio's political and economic life for the next two centuries. It is the reason Ohio has never been a one city state. It is also the reason Ohio has always been internally divided in ways that most other states are not. The canals had one more consequence that no one at the time could have foreseen. When the state hired an engineer named James Gettys to survey the canal route, Gettys had to find the highest point between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, the watershed divide where water could flow in either direction. That point was near a small settlement that had been named Akran from the Greek word for high. The canal passed through Akran and the locks required to raise and lower boats created a steady supply of water power.

[00:11:12]A young doctor from Jamestown, New York, named Benjamin Franklin Goodrich was looking for a place to move his small rubber business. He considered Cleveland, but John D. Rockefeller's oil operations had already claimed the city's industrial infrastructure.

[00:11:27]Goodrich received a flyer from the Akran Board of Trade advertising cheap factory sites and abundant water from the canal.

[00:11:35]He moved his operation to Akran in 1871.

[00:11:39]Within 40 years, Akran would be the rubber capital of the world. Home to Goodrich, Goodyear, Firestone, and General Ty. And all of it traced back to the canal, to the locks, to the water, to the spot where James Gettys found the highest ground.

[00:11:56]The Civil War made Ohio an industrial state in a way that even the canals could not. Ohio was already the third most populous state in the Union and among the most fiercely anti-slavery, particularly in the northeast corner, the Western Reserve. This region had been settled almost entirely by New Englanders, specifically by families from Connecticut, who had bought land from the Connecticut Land Company in 1795. Connecticut had retained 3 million acres in the northeast corner of Ohio under the terms of its original royal charter, selling the land for $1.2 million to fund public schools back in Connecticut. The settlers who came brought their architecture, their town square layouts, their congregational churches, and their abolitionist convictions. John Brown, the militant abolitionist who would be hanged for his raid on Harper's Ferry, grew up in Hudson, Ohio, in the heart of the reserve. When telegraph wires carried the news of his execution in December 1859, communities across the Western Reserve told their church bells. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in Cincinnati for 18 years before riding Uncle Tom's Cabin, drew directly on what she had witnessed along the Ohio River, the border between freedom and slavery. Ohio sent more than 300,000 men to the Union Army, the third largest contribution of any state. But the war's most important impact on Ohio was economic. Cleveland's iron foundaries cast gun carriages and railroad equipment. By 1863, 22% of all ships built for the Great Lakes were built in Cleveland, a figure that jumped to 44% by 1865.

[00:13:33]The city's banks held $2.25 million in capital and $3.7 million in deposits.

[00:13:40]Coal production in eastern Ohio, which had been modest before the war, skyrocketed in the decades afterward, from 5 million tons annually in the early 1870s to 10 million by the early 1880s and 20 million by the turn of the century. The war found Cleveland a commercial village and left it a manufacturing city. A historian named Chrisfield Johnson wrote that at the time, and the line stands as the most concise summary of what the conflict did to Ohio. Then came the oil and the man who understood what oil meant before anyone else did. John D. Rockefeller arrived in Cleveland as a teenager in 1853, attended Central High School, enrolled in a commercial college, and got his first job as a bookkeeper earning 50 cents a day. By 1863, at the age of 24, he had parlayed wartime commodities profits into an oil refining business on the banks of the Kyahoga River.

[00:14:37]Cleveland's location was decisive.

[00:14:40]Railroads could bring crude oil from Pennsylvania and western Ohio, and Lake Erie provided shipping access to eastern markets. In 1870, Rockefeller, his brother William Henry Flaggler, and Samuel Andrews chartered the Standard Oil Company of Ohio. Within two years, Rockefeller had bought out, shut down, or bankrupted 22 of his 26 competitors in Cleveland, a campaign his rivals called the Cleveland Massacre. By 1880, Standard Oil controlled 90 to 95% of all oil refining in the United States. It was the most powerful corporation in the history of the nation, and it operated out of Cleveland. The Standard Oil Trust, a legal structure that placed the stock of 40 separate companies under the control of nine trustees, was organized in 1882. It was, in effect, the invention of the modern conglomerate.

[00:15:31]Ohio's own attorney general filed the lawsuit that dissolved the trust in 1892. And Ohio Senator John Sherman gave his name to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the federal law that would eventually be used to break Standard Oil into pieces in 1911. The irony is precise. The state that incubated the most powerful monopoly in American history also produced the legislation and the legal action that destroyed it.

[00:15:57]Ohio was simultaneously the problem and the solution. And this duality, this capacity to contain opposites, runs through the state's entire story. In the decades after the Civil War, Ohio produced presidents the way Texas later produced oil, reliably and in large quantities. Between 1869 and 1923, seven of the 12 presidents were either born in Ohio or claimed it as home.

[00:16:23]Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft, Harding. The list is so long it begins to sound like a roll call, and the political mechanics behind it are worth understanding. Ohio was the most populous swing state in the country during this period. It had enough electoral votes to decide close elections, and its population was diverse enough, urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, northern and southern in origin. that whichever candidate could carry Ohio could plausibly carry the nation. The parties understood this and nominated Ohioans for the same reason modern campaigns spend disproportionate time in Pennsylvania and Michigan because the math demanded it. No Republican won the White House without Ohio from 1860 to the present day. Between 1964 and 2016, the candidate who won Ohio won the presidency every single time. The longest such streak for any state in American history. But Ohio's golden age was not just political. By 1900, Cleveland was the seventh largest city in the country. Cincinnati was an industrial and cultural center whose residents called it the Queen City and whose over the Rine neighborhood was so densely German that English was a second language. Akran's rubber plants were beginning the expansion that would triple the city's population between 1910 and 1920 from 69,000 to 28,000 as the automobile created an insatiable demand for tires. Dayton, a smaller city on the great Miami River, was generating patents at a per capita rate that few American cities have ever matched. The cash register was invented there by James Riddy in 1879 and commercialized by John Henry Patterson whose national cash register company became one of the most successful businesses in the country. The Wright brothers ran their bicycle shop in their printing press on West Third Street in Dayton. They built and tested their first practical airplane, the 1905 Flyer 3, the one Orville later called the most important airplane they ever built at Huffman Prairie, 8 mi northeast of downtown. The first flight at Kittyhawk gets the credit, but the airplane was invented in Dayton. Then the water came. On Easter Sunday, March 23rd, 1913, a storm system stalled over Ohio and dropped 8 to 11 inches of rain in 5 days on soil already saturated from weeks of wet weather.

[00:18:48]Rivers across the state overwhelmed their banks. In Dayton, the Great Miami River rose nearly 2 ft an hour. The earth and levies, which the city had rebuilt after 10 previous major floods, each time choosing to repair rather than replace, failed catastrophically.

[00:19:04]250,000 cubic feet of water per second poured through a channel designed for 25,000. Downtown Dayton flooded to depths of 20 ft. Gas manses broke and fires erupted in streets already submerged. 467 people died statewide.

[00:19:21]123 in Dayton alone, 93 in Columbus, 100 in Hamilton. 65,000 were displaced.

[00:19:28]Property damage exceeded hund00 million, roughly 3 billion in today's currency.

[00:19:33]The canal system, already declining in the face of railroad competition, was destroyed. The floods of 1913 ended the canal era permanently and wrecked dozens of canal dependent towns that never recovered. The response in Dayton was extraordinary and revealed something essential about Ohio's character, an instinct for engineering solutions to problems that other states might simply endure. John H. Patterson, the president of NCR, converted his factory into a relief station and a construction site for rescue boats. More than 10,000 people were rescued by boats built in that factory. Governor James Cox, the same James Cox, who would later run for president against Warren Harding, declared martial law, and appealed to Washington for aid. But in 1913, disaster relief was not a federal function. The community rebuilt itself.

[00:20:27]The Dayton Citizens Relief Commission raised over $2 million. The state legislature passed the Vanderhaida Act, enabling the creation of conservancy districts, a legal framework that allowed regional flood control planning across political boundaries. The Miami Conservancy District, established in 1914 and operational by 1922, built five dry dams upstream of Dayton. The city has not flooded since. It was one of the first comprehensive flood control systems in the United States and the legal structure that made it possible.

[00:21:02]The conservancy district was copied by other states across the country.

[00:21:06]Dayton's catastrophe became Dayton's export. By 1920, Ohio was approaching the peak of its national influence. It was the fourth most populous state. Its industrial output was staggering. rubber in Akran, steel in Youngstown and Cleveland, glass in Toledo, machine tools in Cincinnati, cash registers and airplane parts in Dayton, oil refining scattered across the northern tier. Its political weight was unmatched. And yet by 1920, the structural weaknesses that would unravel everything were already embedded in the economy. 90% of Akran's industrial employment depended on rubber. Youngstown's economy was steel and almost nothing else. Cleveland's manufacturing base was broad but aging.

[00:21:50]Each city was essentially a company town or close to it and the prosperity that the companies generated made the dependence invisible. No one worries about concentration when the money is flowing. The Kuya Hoga River, which runs through the industrial heart of Cleveland, caught fire in 1868 and then again in 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1952. The 1952 fire caused over a million dollars in damage.

[00:22:23]None of these fires became national news. They were considered the cost of progress, the price a river paid for running past steel mills, oil refineries, and paint factories that discharged hundreds of millions of lers of industrial waste directly into the water every day. When the Kuya Hoga burned again on June 22nd, 1969, the fire was relatively minor. Some flames from an oil slick ignited by sparks from a passing train, extinguished by firefighters within half an hour. But the timing was different. The nation's mood had shifted. Time magazine ran the story alongside a photograph, which was actually from the 1952 fire, not the 1969 one. And the image of a river on fire, became the icon of a new movement.

[00:23:09]Cleveland's mayor, Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major American city, used the fire to push for federal clean water legislation. Within 3 years, the Environmental Protection Agency, was created, and the Clean Water Act was signed. Ohio's burning river did not start the environmental movement, but it gave the movement its most powerful visual. The irony of the Kuyahoga fires timing is that by 1969, the industries that had been polluting the river, were already leaving. De-industrialization, the defining economic catastrophe of the late 20th century, did not arrive in Ohio all at once. It arrived in waves, and each wave took a different city. The worst single day came on September 19th, 1977, Black Monday. That morning, at the Boardman offices of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, the company announced that the Campbell Works, the Mahoning Valley's largest steel mill, would close by the end of the week. 5,000 workers lost their jobs instantly. It was not an ending, but a beginning. Within two years, US Steel closed the Ohio Works.

[00:24:15]Then, Brier Hill went down. By 1984, Republic Steel was finished. In the space of 5 years, 50,000 jobs vanished from a metropolitan area with a population just under 150,000. Annual wages of 1.3 billion disappeared from the regional economy. Unemployment peaked at nearly 25%. A CBS reporter described Youngstown as having been hit by a neutron bomb. The buildings were standing, but the people were gone. The steel workers and an ecumenical coalition of clergy attempted something unprecedented. They tried to buy the Campbell Works and reopen it under worker community ownership. The idea was radical enough that the national leadership of the United Steel Workers Union wanted nothing to do with it. The coalition lobbyed the Carter administration for federal loan guarantees. After the midterm elections of 1978, the administration withdrew its support under pressure from industry lobbyists. The mills never reopened.

[00:25:15]Youngstown's population, which had been 170,000 at mid-century, fell below 65,000. The city's home ownership rate, once among the highest in the country, collapsed. Block after block of houses emptied. By 2013, Youngstown had 6,000 vacant buildings. Akran lost its rubber.

[00:25:35]The tire companies Goodyear, Firestone, General Tire, Goodrich did not disappear, but they moved their manufacturing to the Sunb Belt and overseas where labor was cheaper and unions were weaker. Akran's population, which had peaked above 290,000 in 1960, fell by more than a third. Cleveland lost steel, oil refining, automobile parts, and machine tools. Its population fell from 914,000 in 1950 to fewer than 400,000 by 2010, a loss of more than half a million people.

[00:26:11]Dayton lost NCR, which moved its headquarters to Georgia in 2009, and me paper and General Motors parts plants and 15,000 manufacturing jobs over three decades. Cincinnati lost less dramatically. Its economy was more diversified, but it still shed 66,000 residents between 1990 and 2016. Every major manufacturing city in Ohio lost population. The only exception was Columbus, the state capital, which grew by annexing surrounding suburbs and whose economy anchored by state government and Ohio State University had never depended on heavy industry in the first place. Columbus added nearly 200,000 people while the rest of the state contracted. It is now the largest city in Ohio by a wide margin. A reversal that would have been unthinkable in 1950 when Cleveland was four times its size. The university in Columbus, Ohio State, deserves its own accounting because its role in the state exceeds anything a typical university does. With a main campus enrollment that has exceeded 60,000 students, it is one of the largest universities in the country. its endowment, its medical center, its research expenditures, and its football program. A program so central to the state's identity that autumn Saturdays in Columbus essentially halt civic life. Make it an institution of a scale that functions less like a school and more like a small economy embedded within a larger one. For the audience that remembers Ohio, Ohio State is often the first word they associate with it. The Buckeyes football rivalry with Michigan, a state with which Ohio has been in competition since the Toledo War of 1835, is the longest running and most intense in college football. And it is not a coincidence that it maps onto a territorial dispute that is nearly two centuries old. Ohio's decline as an industrial state did not happen because the state made errors. It happened because the national economy shifted beneath the state's feet. Manufacturing moved south, moved overseas. Automated, the industries that had made Ohio powerful. Steel, rubber, machine tools, glass, automotive parts were the industries most exposed to foreign competition and most susceptible to automation. Ohio was not punished for weakness. It was punished for having been the strongest version of something the country no longer needed as much of.

[00:28:36]The state that had been the test case for western expansion, the laboratory for canal building, the birthplace of standard oil and the legislation that broke it up, the arsenal of two world wars, the swing state that picked every president for half a century. That state discovered that the qualities that had made it indispensable were the same qualities that made it vulnerable. The 1851 Constitution, which still governs Ohio today, was itself a product of crisis. The original 1803 document had concentrated so much power in the legislature that by the 1840s, Ohio's general assembly was widely perceived as corrupt, subsidizing private canal companies, granting special privileges and corporate charters, accumulating debt that the state could not service. A chalera epidemic forced the 1850 constitutional convention to relocate from Columbus to Cincinnati. The new constitution stripped the legislature of much of its power, created elected judgeships, imposed debt limits, and for the first time gave voters the ability to amend the constitution directly. In 1912, a progressive era constitutional convention added provisions for home rule for cities initiative and referendum, workers compensation, and a minimum wage for women. A package that made Ohio one of the most progressive states in the country, at least on paper. These provisions remain in the Constitution. They are part of the reason Ohio's political culture has never fit neatly into conservative or liberal categories. The state has always contained both impulses held in tension with the balance shifting depending on which Ohio you were standing in. There have always been at least two Ohio and sometimes three. The northeast, the old western reserve, is the Ohio of Cleveland and Akran and Youngstown, settled by New Englanders, shaped by heavy industry, reliably democratic until the de-industrialization that scattered its population and broke its Union base. The Southwest, Cincinnati and its hinterland was settled by Virginiaians and Kuckians connected to the south by the Ohio River. Culturally conservative, commercially sophisticated, home to Proctor and Gamble and Kroger and a German immigrant population that built breweries and concert halls and a sense of civic order that visitors from the northeast sometimes found oppressive. And then there is the middle. Columbus, the capital, the university town, the state government center, the city that avoided heavy industry and therefore avoided heavy industries collapsed. The city that grew while everything around it shrank. The people who came to Ohio tell the story as clearly as the industries they built. The earliest settlers were New Englanders in the northeast and Virginiaians and Kuckians in the south.

[00:31:18]a division that mapped onto the Mason Dixon line and reproduced within a single state the cultural split that would tear the nation apart. German immigrants arrived in enormous numbers in the middle decades of the 19th century concentrating in Cincinnati where the neighborhood of Over the Rine took its name from the Ry River and spreading across the central counties.

[00:31:39]By 1860, Ohio's foreignb born population was dominated by Germans and Irish. By 1910, Akran was drawing workers from Appalachia, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, men who came for the rubber factories and brought with them a mountain culture that had little in common with the Yankee establishment of the Western Reserve. The Great Migration brought black families from the Deep South to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, particularly during and after the two world wars. Each wave of migration reshaped the state's politics, its culture, and its economy. But none of them changed the fundamental structure.

[00:32:16]The triangle of cities, the internal division, the tension between industrial and agricultural, urban and rural, northern and southern. Ohio's relationship with the federal government has been less dramatic than that of states like New Mexico or Alaska, where federal presence defines the entire economy. But it has been consequential in specific ways. Wright Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton has been one of the largest military installations in the country for over a century and the research conducted there in material science, avionics, weapons systems, has anchored Dayton's economy even as its private manufacturing base eroded. The federal highway system, which routed Interstate 70 through Columbus and Interstate 80 across the northern tier, reshuffled the state's economic geography in ways that echoed what the canals had done a century earlier, elevating some towns, bypassing others, and making Columbus more central than it had been before. The Ohio River itself, the state's southern border for its entire length, is the thread that connects everything. It is the reason Ohio exists. The Northwest Ordinance defined the territory as the land northwest of the river. The river was the boundary between free and slave states, the route of the Underground Railroad, the highway for flatboats carrying corn and pork to New Orleans, the source of water power for Cincinnati's mills, the barrier that kept Kucky's influence on one side and Connecticut's influence on the other.

[00:33:42]Harriet Beecher Stow's Eliza crosses a frozen Ohio River in Uncle Tom's cabin.

[00:33:47]And the scene is set where it is because the Ohio River was the most important moral boundary in pre-Ivil War America.

[00:33:54]The river shaped the state's economy, its demographics, its politics, and its literature. It still does, though fewer people now live along it. The 1912 Constitutional Convention deserves a closer look because it reveals something about Ohio that the industrial statistics alone cannot capture. The delegates who gathered in Columbus that year were animated by the progressive movement and the amendments they proposed, 41 of them, of which 33 were adopted by voters, constituted one of the most ambitious reforms of state government attempted anywhere in the country. They gave cities home rule which freed Cleveland and Cincinnati from the stranglehold of a rural dominated legislature. They established the initiative and referendum allowing citizens to propose and vote on laws directly. They created a workers compensation system. They imposed limits on working hours and they came within a handful of votes of granting women's suffrage 8 years before the 19th amendment did it nationally. The 1912 convention was in many ways the high watermark of Ohio's capacity for self-reinvention. A moment when the state looked at its own problems and chose to address them structurally rather than incrementally. Whether that capacity still exists is a question the state has not yet answered. Today, Ohio's population is approximately 11 12 million, essentially unchanged from 1970. In that same period, the national population grew by more than 50%. States that were smaller than Ohio in 1960.

[00:35:26]Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, have surpassed it. Ohio's congressional delegation, which once numbered 24 seats and was the third or fourth largest in the House, has shrunk to 15. The state still manufactures more than all but a handful of states. It remains third in manufacturing employment behind only California and Texas. But the factories that remain employ fewer people, paid differently, and make different things.

[00:35:52]The steel mills that glowed orange over the Mahoning Valley at night are gone.

[00:35:56]The rubber factories that tripled Akran's population in a single decade are gone. The refineries along the Kyhoga are gone. What remains is a landscape shaped by those industries.

[00:36:08]the railards, the warehouse districts, the workers housing, the union halls, the grand civic buildings that companies and their owners built when they believed their presence was permanent.

[00:36:19]In Youngstown, the blast furnaces stood rusting for years before they were torn down. A few were left standing deliberately, the way some cities leave a ruin in the center of town as a reminder. At night, the sky over the Mahoning Valley is dark now. Residents who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s remember when it was orange. The glow from the mills visible for miles, a color so constant that people set their clocks by the shift change whistle and read the health of the local economy in the shade of the sky. The silence was the hardest thing to get used to.

[00:36:54]Several of them said later, "Not the unemployment, not the poverty, not the empty houses. The silence." The mills had made a sound that was always there.

[00:37:04]a low industrial hum that you stopped noticing until it stopped. And then its absence was the loudest thing in the city. On the canal tow path outside Akran, where mules once pulled barges loaded with grain and coal, joggers and cyclists now follow a paved trail through the Koyahoga Valley. The Frzy House, the brick house that the dairy farmer built when the canal made him prosperous in 1827, still stands facing the old waterway. It is a handsome building, solid, built to last by a man who believed the good times would continue. It is a monument to a particular kind of American faith that if you built the right piece of infrastructure in the right place, the prosperity that followed would be permanent. Ohio built more of that infrastructure and built it better and believed in it longer than almost any other state. The canal toe path is quiet now. The water barely moves.