Field Notes Ohio

Ohio's parks, forests and wildlife areas with camping, the ancient mounds beside them, and the Buckeye Trail that links them. Stories, trails, wildlife, and where to eat and fuel up nearby. Book campsites on ReserveOhio.
Try:
The Buckeye TrailA 1,444-mile blue-blazed loop around Ohio, with all 26 sections.
Mounds & Earthworks43 ancient sites, including the Great Serpent Mound and the Newark Earthworks.
Historic Sites39 places, from Fort Steuben and Zoar to Camp Chase and the Rankin House, from the frontier to the Civil War.
Road Trips33 drives, from the Lincoln Highway to the Morgan Heritage Trail.
Lake Erie Beaches20 public beaches from Conneaut to Toledo and the islands, with a map.
Oddities & Roadside Attractions19 giants, ghosts and folk-art stops, plus a Mothman just over the line.
Caves & Caverns12 show caverns, recess caves and rock shelters, with a map.
Waterfalls34 falls from the Cuyahoga Valley to the Hocking Hills, with trail notes and a map.

Explore Ohio

One map for every park, mound, historic site, beach, cave, waterfall and oddity in the app.

Lake ErieWest Virginia27 places277 places77 places73 places35 places519 places1913 places1319 places1916 places168 places810 places1010 places109 places98 places820 places204 places43 places3Barkcamp State Park4 places47 places77 places76 places69 places917 places173 places3Harrison Lake State Park2 places2Forked Run State Park3 places32 places26 places610 places103 places32 places2

Tap a symbol for a preview, or search for a place. Open the key to show or hide categories.

117 parks in 7 regions

Oddities & Roadside Attractions

19 stops the tourism brochures skip
Giants, ghosts, folk art and one cryptid just over the line

Ohio is full of places that don't make the official visitor guides: a bucket you can climb into, a basket the size of an office building, a field of concrete corn, a tunnel with a lantern ghost. These are the roadside stops that give the state its character, good for a fun break on a road trip. One is in West Virginia, a short drive across the river.

Map of the oddities →
19 stops
Giants and odd buildings

Things built bigger, stranger or shinier than they had any reason to be.

Big Muskie's Bucket

McConnelsville · Morgan and Noble counties
The bucket of the world's largest dragline, big enough to climb inside.
Machine relic

Longaberger Basket Building

Newark · Licking County
A seven-story office building shaped like a picnic basket, with handles that are heated in winter.
Odd building

World's Largest Apple Basket

Frazeysburg · Muskingum County
A 20-foot basket of bright red apples in the abandoned Longaberger Village.
Giant object

Futuro House

Carlisle · Warren County
A 1960s flying-saucer-shaped house designed by a Finnish architect, one of about 100 built.
Odd building

Tower of VW Beetles

Defiance · Defiance County
Five 1960s Volkswagen Beetles stacked on end in the lot of Pack Rat's Pawn Shop.
Stack of cars

World's Largest Bobblehead

West Bellville · Richland County
A 35-foot Chef Jacques statue behind the Buckeye Express Diner whose head bobbles when the wind blows.
Giant statue

World's Largest Gavel

Columbus · Franklin County
A 12-by-30-by-15-foot steel gavel in a reflecting pool between two judicial buildings.
Giant object

World's Largest Teapot

Chester · Hancock County, West Virginia
A 14-foot teapot on the West Virginia bank of the Ohio River, built from a root-beer barrel that once belonged to the inventor of the banana split.
Giant objectJust over the line

Lux Mundi ("Hug Me Jesus")

Monroe · Warren County
A 52-foot fiberglass Christ with open arms beside I-75, built after lightning burned down its 62-foot predecessor, nicknamed Touchdown Jesus, in 2010.
Giant statue
Folk art and public art

Rock gardens, concrete crops and other places where someone had a vision.

Field of Corn (Cornhenge)

Dublin · Franklin County
109 six-foot ears of concrete corn standing in rows in a Columbus suburb.
Public art

Hartman Rock Garden

Springfield · Clark County
A Depression-era folk-art garden of rock replicas, from Independence Hall to a castle made of 20,000 stones.
Folk art

The Free Stamp

Cleveland · Cuyahoga County
A 35-ton steel rubber stamp reading FREE, tipped on its side in a downtown Cleveland park after the company that commissioned it changed its mind.
Public art
Legends, ghosts and movie sets

Places famous for what people say happened there, or what was filmed there.

Ohio State Reformatory (Shawshank Prison)

Mansfield · Richland County
The castle-like prison where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed, now a museum and paranormal tour site.
Movie set and prison

Moonville Tunnel

Zaleski · Vinton County
An abandoned railroad tunnel in Zaleski State Forest, said to be haunted by a lantern-carrying ghost.
Ghost story

Mothman Museum and Statue, Point Pleasant

Point Pleasant · Mason County, West Virginia
The world's only Mothman museum, across the Ohio River from Gallipolis, beside a 12-foot steel Mothman.
Cryptid museumJust over the line

The Loveland Frogman

Loveland · Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties
A frog-faced creature reported along the Little Miami River in 1955 and again by a police officer in 1972, now the small city's official mascot.
Cryptid legend
Small wonders

Tiny records and roadside curiosities.

McKinley Street, Bellefontaine

Bellefontaine · Logan County
A street listed as 20 feet long, once billed as the shortest in the world.
Record

The Y-Bridge

Zanesville · Muskingum County
A Y-shaped bridge over the meeting of the Muskingum and Licking rivers, famous for the joke that you can cross it and end up on the same side you started.
Bridge

American Sign Museum

Cincinnati · Hamilton County
A Camp Washington museum built around a walkable street of vintage neon and storefront signs, said to be the country's largest public collection devoted to signage.
Museum

More oddities already in the app

Take the stops with you

Load the stops into your maps app to plan a road trip.

The file holds 19 waypoints and a stop-by-stop route line. Locations are approximate, often a town center, so use the stop notes to find the exact spot. Your maps app chooses the roads between stops, usually the fastest, so follow the byway signs where they differ. The GPX arrives in a zip file; unzip it and open the .gpx in a GPS or hiking app. The CSV imports into Google My Maps.