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© 2004 David Richard Introduction Essay for Ohio 24/7 The Middle of It All By Mike Harden Ohio was first called the "Promised Land" when the republic was in its infancy, and a grateful nation paid Revolutionary War veterans in virginal tracts of land west of the Alleghenies. They felled the hardwood forests and plowed the furrows, freckling the soft, billiard-table terrain with tilled fields, church spires, and silos. As they built new lives, so was the Buckeye State's reputation-as a crucible of industrial muscle and agrarian might-built upon their backs. The mines, mills, and factories made Ohio the engine of the heartland. A virtual sea of corn made it the breadbasket of the nation. Bounded by river and lake, the land cradled the American sons who gave light (Thomas Edison) and flight (the Wright brothers) to the world. Yet, a century after the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, the nation's Steel Belt became its Rust Belt as the business of blast furnacing shifted to the Far East and elsewhere. Depressed prices, soaring production costs, and monolithic agribusiness drove family farmers from landed legacies to city jobs. The changing face of the U.S. job market forced Ohio to reinvent and rediscover itself. Forsaking brawn for brain and trading on its central location, it became a shipping and business logistics hub for the eastern part of the country. Airborne Express headquartered in Wilmington; Victoria's Secret warehouses sprawled outside Columbus. From Crazy Glue to Grupo Bimbo's taco chips, foreign brands love Ohio. The fields of central Ohio that once produced corn began measuring productivity in Honda automobiles. In the deep reaches of Appalachian Ohio, when the coal played out, when mine tipples crumbled and thriving villages took on the look of ghost towns, bed-and-breakfasts sprang up to court blue-chip tourists. Interlopers from Columbus and Cincinnati arrived in SUVs to drink in the autumn foliage going saffron, sorrel, and crimson. River towns-that once beckoned runaway slaves to freedom and factories to the easy convenience of the Ohio's shipping lanes-reinvented themselves as havens of craft and antique stores, courting the latte and biscotti set. The central feature of Ohio today is its ongoing struggle for economic regeneration. As Ohioans confront that hurdle, they move about their labors and leisure as seemingly unruffled as a Norman Rockwell tableau. Valued by marketers as a microcosmic mirror of the nation's tastes and sensibilities, Ohio routinely plays the guinea pig when it comes to test-marketing everything from candy bars to candidates. The population is sufficiently comfortable with its role and its place in the heart of the heartland that it can chuckle, along with the cosmopolitan Babylonians of either coast, about the state with too many vowels and cows and all-you-can-eat buffets. Ohioans can be as quiet as the clop-clop of an Amish buggy on two-lane blacktop, yet as crazy as 100,000 football-frenzied Buckeye fans at a home game. They pray for salvation at coliseums as much as at country clapboard churches, taking pennants as seriously as penance. At the end of the day, they sleep content with the knowledge that they are in the middle of it all. For 21 years, Columbus native MIKE HARDEN has been writing his nationally syndicated column "In Essence" for The Columbus Dispatch. Browse    View All    The Middle of It All    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Ohio at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 121 Photographers: 42 Towns: 52

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