With the City of Portsmouth as your gateway, explore two-thousand years of human and natural history in the Shawnee State Forest Region of Scioto and Adams counties. With its misty hollows, forested ridges, and rolling hills and its spring wildflowers and dramatic fall colors, the region has become known as Ohio’s Little Smokies.

Its history stretches from the time of prehistoric Native Americans who built the Portsmouth Earthworks Complex over two-thousand years ago to more recent historical events in the 1930s when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built the modern infrastructure of Shawnee State Park and Forest. Complete the tour in person or virtually using the Scioto Historical mobile app and website.

Start your tour at the Tremper Mound Preserve, which protects one of the most significant ceremonial and mortuary sites of the ancient Hopewell people. And, move forward in time to the era of colonial and frontier conflict when the Shawnee established their village at the Mouth of the Scioto in the early 1730s and the French sent Céloron’s Expedition down the Ohio in 1749, setting in motion what became the French and Indian War and the eventual abandonment of Lower Shawnee Town in the early 1750s.

Learn about the myths and legends surrounding the Raven Rock Lookout, whose view of the Ohio River and hills of Kentucky has attracted human attention since prehistoric times. Consider the history of the first white settlement on Turkey Creek, the construction of the Ohio & Erie Canal and Lock 50, where the Union Mills Distillery stood in the 19th century.

Learn about the history of the Underground Railroad in the region, where James Ashley, the future author of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, once worked with local residents to assist freedom seekers escape their enslavement. Explore the history of the Roosevelt Game Preserve in the 1920s and the transformative work of the New Deal’s CCC in the 1930s. Visit locations of former CCC camps and hike the trails that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “tree army” built for visitors to Shawnee State Park and Forest. Thanks to the larger conservation movement of early 20th century and the work of the CCC the region would be opened to auto-tourism, outdoor recreation, and commercial logging operations, transforming Ohio’s largest state forest into the Little Smokies of today.