Elise Meyers Walker: 7 books

As early as 1755, explorers found coal deposits in Ohio's Hocking Valley. The industry that followed created towns and canals and established a new way of life. The first shipment of coal rolled into Columbus in 1830 and has continued ever since. In 1890, the United Mine Workers of America was founded...

Ohio's capital city once teemed with crime bosses, rampant corruption and unpunished perversion. The Bad Lands of Columbus was a nationally recognized slum controlled by "Smoky" Hobbs. Columbus native Dr. Samuel B. Hartman, the world's most successful snake oil salesman, was almost single-handedly...

For more than 150 years, F&R Lazarus & Company was the heart of downtown Columbus. Headed by the "first family of American retailing"? with an eye for flair and a devotion to the customer, this uniquely midwestern institution won the hearts and minds of a community. Look to Lazarus draws on the memories...

A collection of true crime stories from the Ohio city, with photos included.   In Historic Columbus Crimes, a father-daughter research team looks back at sixteen tales of murder, mystery, and mayhem culled from city history, both the distant and the more recent past. There’s the rock star slain...

As "animal factories" go, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the worst. For 150 years, it housed some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States, including murderers, madmen and mobsters. Peer in on America's first vampire, accused of sucking his victims' blood five years before Bram Stoker's...

Inspired by Florida's famed Mai-Kai restaurant, Bill Sapp and Lee Henry opened the Kahiki Supper Club in 1961. They set out simply to build a nice Polynesian restaurant and ended up establishing the most magnificent one of them all. Patrons lined up for hours to see the celebrities who dined there--everyone...

In the late 19th century Ohio was reeling from a wave of lynchings and other acts of racially motivated mob violence. Many of these acts were attributed to well-known and respected men and women yet few of them were ever prosecuted—some were even lauded for taking the law into their own hands. In...