Qualla: Portsmouth

Portsmouth: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spongefan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk west along the Ohio River in Portsmouth and you walk past a painted city. Sixty murals, each twenty feet tall, run for over 2,000 feet along the floodwall the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built after the 1937 flood almost erased the town. The paintings cover Hopewell mound-builders, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, the Underground Railroad, the Portsmouth Spartans who became the Detroit Lions, and the steel mills that closed in 1980. Most cities tell their history on plaques. Portsmouth told its on the wall that holds back the river that built it.

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Image: Spongefan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Portsmouth: A Town at the Confluence

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spongefan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Portsmouth sits where the Scioto River meets the Ohio, a confluence the Hopewell culture chose for ceremonial earthworks between 100 BC and 500 AD. The Portsmouth Earthworks were one of the largest mound complexes in the Ohio Valley. By the time the first European-American settle...

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Image: Spongefan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Portsmouth: The Underground Railroad and a 13th Amendment

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vasiliymeshko, CC BY 4.0. Despite settler demographics that leaned anti-abolitionist - many had migrated up from the South - Portsmouth became an important Underground Railroad crossing. Self-emancipating people crossed the Ohio from Kentucky to free soil here, often continuing up the Scioto toward Detroi...

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Image: Vasiliymeshko | CC BY 4.0

Portsmouth: The Boom Years

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spongefan, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1916 Portsmouth had become the fourth-largest shoe manufacturing center in the United States and the country's largest producer of fire and paving bricks. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, later Empire-Detroit Steel, employed over 1,000 workers. One hundred other manufacturers turned...

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Image: Spongefan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Portsmouth: Floodwall and Comeback

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niagara66, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 1937 flood was catastrophic. The Corps of Engineers responded with a floodwall that has held back two more major floods, in 1964 and 1997. By 1980 the steel was gone too - Armco closed the Portsmouth Works rather than rebuild the open-hearth furnaces, laying off 1,200 workers...

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Image: Niagara66 | CC BY-SA 4.0