John Glenn grew up in a Sears kit house in New Concord. He left it to become the first American to orbit the Earth.
Ohio claims to have invented flight, sent the first American around the Earth, and put the first man on the Moon; all three men grew up within an afternoon's flight of each other. The Wrights were in Dayton. Neil Armstrong was in Wapakoneta. The middle of that arc is John Glenn, and it starts in a Sears mail-order house in New Concord, just east of Zanesville.
Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio in 1921 and grew up in New Concord, where his father ran a plumbing business and assembled the family home himself in 1923, a $1,500 kit from the Sears catalog that doubled as a rooming house through the Depression. He met Annie Castor there when both were toddlers; they married in April 1943 and stayed married 73 years. He learned to fly in the civilian pilot training program at Muskingum College in town, then flew F4U Corsairs in the Pacific and F9F Panthers over Korea: 149 combat missions, six Distinguished Flying Crosses. In 1957, as a Marine test pilot, he flew the first nonstop supersonic transcontinental flight, Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours 23 minutes. That flight made him famous. NASA made him a legend.
On February 20, 1962, Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral aboard Friendship 7 and circled the Earth three times in just under five hours, the first American to orbit the planet, at a moment when the country badly needed to catch the Soviets. A loose heat-shield warning during the flight had Mission Control quietly afraid he would burn up on reentry. He didn't. He came home to a ticker-tape parade, four terms in the U.S. Senate, and one more flight: in October 1998, at 77, he flew aboard shuttle Discovery and became the oldest human ever to go to space, a record that stood until 2021.
His boyhood home on Main Street, on the National Register now, is the John & Annie Glenn Museum, with a one-third-scale Friendship 7 inside. Living-history guides play his parents, and the house itself time-travels: some seasons it is furnished as the Depression year 1937 or the home-front year 1944, others as 1962, the year the town's son was suddenly the most famous man on Earth. Land at Zanesville (KZZV) and drive fifteen minutes east. His name rides on the Columbus airport you can see from the air (KCMH), his statue stands in the Ohio Statehouse downtown, and the NASA field at Cleveland that bears his name still runs jet engines on the lakefront. Fly Dayton, Zanesville, and Wapakoneta in one weekend and you've traced the whole thing: invented here, orbited from here, walked on the Moon from here.