Road Trip!

Perkins Observatory is located two miles south of the city of Delaware. It was built in 1923 by a retired professor named Hiram Perkins. Tom Burns has been the observatory’s director for 20 years.

"Old Hiram Perkins never made more than $1200 a year teaching math and science. And yet, because he sold hogs during the Civil War to the Union Army and saved every penny he earned, managed to build what was at the time the third largest telescope and observatory in the world. What a guy!" says Burns.

There's a section of Northwest Ohio where the flat rich farmland is poked by a series of church steeples – like push pins marking places on a map. The churches are topped by Catholic Crosses – as they were built by a sweeping German Catholic immigration, which began back in the 1830s.

Here in Mercer county the Convent of Maria Stein is the heart of it all, built by Father Francis de Sales Brunner in 1846. The bishop in Cincinnati at the time was looking for a German-speaking priest to minister to the growing German Catholic population.

Hi I'm Scott Spears and for this Road Trip tour you'll be traveling with me along Zane’s Trace - now Rt 22. This is one of the earliest roads in Ohio. And one of the original towns here is Somerset. It was originally called Middletown because it was midway between Zanesville and Lancaster.

A lot of people are surprised to learn that there was a Battle of Lake Erie… but it was one of the most important victories in U.S. Naval history. It happened during The War of 1812. The British Navy controlled the great lakes and could rapidly move troops and supplies, so the Americans built a fleet of ships at Erie Pennsylvania to challenge the British on Lake Erie.

Ripley may seem like just another sleepy town on the Ohio River, but there was a time when it was a filled with secrets and controversies. In the days of slavery, this was part of the Borderlands that slaves crossed in order to make their way north to freedom in Canada. Ohio was always free, but slavery flourished just across the river in Kentucky.