Maysville, KY
A Maysville dining tradition since the 1930s, when it fed railroad workers as a sandwich shop; the Caproni family bought it in 1945 and brought their recipes from Barga, Italy, and when Alfred Caproni died in 1966 his widow Lea remodeled the room so the north wall of windows gives nearly every table the Ohio River. Freight and passenger trains still roar past within feet of the diners; the address is the base of Rosemary Clooney Street, and the restaurant has been a Clooney-family favorite for decades. Closed for a stretch, it was bought by a Maysville-born caterer in 1999 and reopened in December 2000. Fresh pasta made to order, Kentucky classics, and the local transparent pie for dessert; a Kentucky sportswriter named it one of the state's ten best places to eat back in 1975. Open from 3 pm Monday through Saturday, until 10 on Friday and Saturday; closed Sundays, and there is no lunch, so plan a dinner run. The floodwall murals downtown are a short walk.
Maysville sits at the mouth of Limestone Creek on the Ohio River — originally called Limestone, founded by Simon Kenton in 1775 and incorporated as Maysville in 1787. The town was a major Ohio River port and gateway for settlers crossing into Kentucky; Daniel Boone's brother ran a trading post and tavern here. In the antebellum era it was a critical Underground Railroad crossing — fugitive slaves boarded skiffs at Limestone Landing to reach the free state of Ohio across the river. Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing Uncle Tom's Cabin while visiting nearby Washington, Kentucky in 1833 after witnessing a slave auction. The Russell Theatre, built 1930, premiered Rosemary Clooney's first film The Stars Are Singing in 1953; Clooney was born in Maysville in 1928. Fleming-Mason Airport occupies 77 acres with a single 5,001-foot asphalt runway.
Maysville sits on the Ohio River north of the Fleming-Mason field, an old river-landing town once called Limestone where pioneers came ashore to reach the Bluegrass. It carries an outsized place in American history: this is the Maysville-to-Ripley crossing where the very term "Underground Railroad" is said to have been coined, after an enslaved man named Tice Davids swam the Ohio here in 1830 and his pursuer said he must have escaped on "an underground road." The 1837 Bierbower House holds the National Underground Railroad Museum. Just south, the Old Washington historic district was the first town in the nation named for George Washington — and where Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed a slave auction in 1833 that fed Uncle Tom's Cabin. The blue Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge and a long painted floodwall mark the riverfront. Maysville is also the hometown of singer Rosemary Clooney.
A 1,348-foot earthwork in the shape of a serpent swallowing an egg, built by ancient Native Americans (Adena or Fort Ancient cultures, dating contested between 320 BC and 1070 AD). The largest serpent effigy in the world. The site sits on a meteorite impact crater, which may have inspired its location. Best viewed from the air or from the on-site observation tower. The effigy aligns with the summer solstice sunset and may have functioned as an astronomical calendar.
Where the Scioto meets the Ohio, Portsmouth turned its flood defenses into art. Along roughly 2,000 feet of concrete floodwall, muralist Robert Dafford painted some fifty panels — 2,000 years of Ohio Valley history, from the Hopewell mound builders and the Shawnee through the steamboat era — one of the largest single-artist mural projects anywhere. (Dafford is the same hand behind the floodwall murals down the river at Maysville and Paducah, Kentucky.) Behind the town rise the ridges of Shawnee State Forest, the "Little Smokies of Ohio" and one of the state's largest forests. Greater Portsmouth's airport sits up in Minford, northeast of the river.
This is a pilgrimage field. Clermont County Airport is better known as Sporty's — it's where Hal Shevers built Sporty's Pilot Shop, which started in 1961 with handheld radios sold from the trunk of his car and grew into the world's largest pilot shop and one of general aviation's great institutions. (Shevers learned to fly in the Purdue Flying Club — the same Purdue whose airport anchors a pin up in Indiana.) The field is home to Sporty's headquarters, Sporty's Academy — the Part 141 school that runs the University of Cincinnati's professional pilot program — and the famous Saturday-morning fly-in cookout. East of Cincinnati, it's exactly the kind of place a cross-country ought to detour for.