Tom and I recently spent a day looking for all the Ohio Historical Markers in Delaware County.  It was a history light scavenger hunt.  There are 22 Ohio Historical Markers in Delaware County.  Did we find all of them?  How long did it take?  Those are questions I will answer another day.  Today I’m going to focus on the three different kinds of historical markers in Ohio.

The first kind of Ohio Historical Markers are the ones placed by Ohio History Connection.  The program began in 1953 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Ohio’s statehood.  Today there are 1,750 unique markers that tell the state’s history as written by its communities.  The markers are administered by the Community Engagement Department of Ohio History Connection.  These markers help tell the unique stories of the people, places, things and events that helped shape individual communities, as well as Ohio and our nation.

Anyone can nominate a place or a story for inclusion on a marker.  You can find the information here.  The nominating body also has to get all ther permissions for placing a marker.  Approximately 20 new markers are accepted into the program each year.  Every marker contains a title, a text paragraph, a list of marker sponsors, the year the marker was created, and a county and sequence code.

The sequence code is interesting – like a secret code for those in the know.  There are 88 counties in Ohio and each one is assigned a number from 1 to 88 as the counties are listed alphabetically.  Then each marker in the county is assigned a number based on the order in which it was erected.  The order number is first and the county number is second.  For instance, Marker #31-25 is in Franklin County, the 25th county alphabetically.  And it was the 31st marker to be erected in Franklin County.

Some fun facts about these Ohio Historical Markers.  Marietta’s Sewah Studios has produced Ohio Historical Markers since 1957.  Cuyahoga County has the most historical markers with 164.  Franklin County and Hamilton County are the only other two counties with more than 100.  Carroll, Vinton and Madison Counties have the fewest number of historical markers with three each.  Most counties average between  8 and 25 markers.

You can find a list of all the Ohio Historical Makers at Remarkable Ohio.  There is also an interactive map, although it isn’t very good.  If you decide to visit the markers, I recommend reading the written directions to the site and looking at the map for the particular maker.

At the beginning I said there were three kinds of historical markers in Ohio.  The second kind of makers are Corporate Limit Markers.  These markers are shaped like the state of Ohio and are blue with white text.  These are administered through the same Ohio History Connection program that puts up the Ohio Historical Markers.

You will often see these Corporate Limit Markers at the edges of a town, city, or township.  They contain one fun, historical fact about the community you are entering.  These are short-form signs as opposed to the longer text in Ohio Historical Markers.  There are more than 500 Corporate Limit Markers in Ohio, but they are not numbered and there is not a current database for them.

The third kind of historical markers are those placed by communities, usually by local historical societies.  Tom recently noticed a new sign in Galena and we stopped to read it on our scavenger hunt.  It is not a state sign, but was erected by the town of Galena.  We saw another one of these signs in Radnor.  In fact, just about every house in that crossroads had some kind of historic sign on it or in front of it.

There are over 12,000 of these kinds of historical markers and war memorials in Ohio.  The historical markers and war memorials database lists all of them alphabetically by county.  There are 161 listed in Delaware County alone.  Many of these are just as interesting as the Ohio Historical Markers but there are so many of them.  These local markers allow more of the local history to be told.

Now that you know about the different kinds of markers in Ohio, I will move on to telling you about our hunt – next week.