A surplus commodities line, circa 1938, in Cleveland, Ohio. This photograph appeared in "The Ohio Guide," published in 1940, which highlighted top sights in the state. COLUMBUS, Ohio — Once upon a time, a guidebook to Ohio advised visitors who might be driving along old state route 76 in Holmes County to turn down a side road that dipped into the Mohican Valley just outside the tiny town of Killbuck.
The project put unemployed writers to work in the Great Depression exploring the highways and folkways of America. The fruits of their labors, the American Guide Series — which explores each of the then-48 states — is getting fresh attention thanks to a new book chronicling the effort.Scott Borchert illuminates an epic effort. Between 1935 and 1943, an army of some 5,000 out-of-work writers, editors, teachers, typists and clerks fanned out across the land to document life and times.
Ohio barely ranks a mention in Borchert’s book. “The Ohio Guide” came late in the series and apparently launched no one toward literary fame. But it is worthy of attention. It attracted its own interesting characters, including editor Harlan Hatcher, an English professor at Ohio State University and the future president of the University of Michigan. It was one of the more complex guide books in the series, as it covered what was then and still is one of the most populous and complex states.
“By the time these people faced an OWP supervisor in a dingy project office, they were in a desperate situation,” Webber writes. “They had probably been out of work for a year or more.” From that first Ohio sighting of John Chapman — Johnny Appleseed — we learn of a man who walked barefoot across the state for three decades, planting apple trees and befriending pioneers and Indians alike, before his death in 1845He became almost completely legend; and now and then someone announces that he never really existed. Ohioans know better and have erected three monuments to him, their greatest folk hero.
By day, the city is often overhung with clouds of smoke and soot, but this means that the steel mills are having good runs, and Steubenville accepts this mantle of prosperity cheerfully. At night, lights along the valley climb the slopes of the back hills to quiet residential sections, while along the river, steel converters redden the sky.
"The Dinner Call," by Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration, for use in "The Ohio Guide," published in 1940. This photograph shows a length of rubber moving down a conveyor belt and being fed into a machine with two large rollers, which appear to be grinding or mashing the rubber into a thinner strip. This is most likely the B.F. Goodrich Co. plant or the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant, both in Akron.