Celina, OH
On the shore of Grand Lake St. Marys — the largest inland lake in Ohio (over 13,500 acres), built in the 1840s as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal. The lake has struggled with algal blooms in recent years but remains a major recreation hub for west-central Ohio. Celina sits on the lake's northern shore. The Mercer County area is heavy German Catholic — beautiful 19th-century churches dot the landscape (the "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches").
The largest inland lake in Ohio (13,500 acres) — built in the 1840s as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, briefly the world's largest man-made lake. Today the lake is a recreation hub for west-central Ohio. The surrounding Mercer County is heavily German Catholic, and the "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches" — over a dozen 19th-century churches with prominent crosses, visible for miles across the flat farmland. Maria Stein, Saint Henry, Cassella, and Minster all have stunning historic churches.
A striking dome-shaped museum in Neil Armstrong's hometown of Wapakoneta, OH. Houses Armstrong's Gemini 8 spacecraft, his pre-flight Apollo 11 training suit, an actual Moon rock, and an F5D Skylancer Armstrong flew as a NASA test pilot. Operated by the Ohio History Connection. The Summer Moon Festival each July (around the Apollo 11 anniversary, July 20) brings the town alive with concerts and reenactments. Smaller than the Air Force Museum but more focused — and Armstrong is buried at sea, so this is the closest thing to a memorial.
In the Quaker village of Fountain City, Indiana — called Newport before the Civil War — Levi and Catharine Coffin sheltered an estimated 2,000 freedom seekers escaping slavery between 1826 and 1847. So many passed through, and so reliably, that the Coffin house became known as the "Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad" and Levi Coffin as its unofficial "President." Not one person known to have been in the Coffins'' care was ever recaptured. The Coffins were Quakers who had moved north from North Carolina specifically to live where slavery was illegal. Their brick Federal house sat where three escape routes coming up out of the South converged, near the National Road corridor that made it a natural waypoint. Catharine organized a sewing society to clothe arrivals who had fled with nothing. The house had a concealed upstairs room behind a bed, a well inside the building so neighbors could not gauge from the household''s water use how many people were actually hidden inside, and a barn for hiding wagons. The Coffins later moved to Cincinnati and continued the work; Levi''s memoirs are a primary historical source, and the couple are widely believed to be the models for the Quaker couple Simeon and Rachel Halliday in Harriet Beecher Stowe''s Uncle Tom''s Cabin. The house is now the Levi & Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark, with an adjacent interpretive center telling the broader story of the Underground Railroad through Indiana.
In the 1920s, the modest Gennett Records studio in Richmond recorded Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, and Charley Patton — capturing the birth of jazz, country, and blues. Gennett was the first to record many of these legends. The Walk of Fame downtown has bronze plaques at the original studio site in the Whitewater Gorge — a dramatic limestone canyon cut by the Whitewater River right through downtown Richmond. Earlham College (1847) is one of America's top Quaker institutions and adds a vibrant intellectual core to town.