America 250-Ohio Celebrates Agriculture with Road Trip Guide

As our America 250-Ohio celebratory events roll into fall, there is a full slate of ways to connect with how Ohio has shaped our nation. From Ohio's Ag-Venture Guide, which maps out a way to connect and learn about farms and the role of agriculture in our state, to the collection of barn murals painted by artist Scott Hagan to documenting the Ohio graves of Revolutionary War veterans, these experiences share how our state has shaped the story of the United States. 


Ohio’s Ag-Venture Guide
Explore the state’s agricultural history through these fall farm experiences and festivals. 

For historian Lacey Bonar Hull, agriculture connects Ohio’s past, present and future. Its farms and other agricultural gems are slices of living history, and fall is one of the best times to visit. 

“Agriculture is part of the fabric of the state,” says Bonar Hull, who is the monthly themes project coordinator for the America 250-Ohio Commission. “Ohio provided a developing country with the food that they need to survive on a daily basis, and its [geographic] placement made it possible to transport goods that came from Ohio.”

Bonar Hull helped put together the commission’s Ag-Venture Guide, a more than 60-site digital cornucopia of fall farm events. 

A celebration of the state’s rural and farming communities, the self-guided trek serves as a way for Ohioans to engage in their own history at spots such as Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, which dates to 1869. The destination is also a modern family-fun spot with two miniature golf courses and a cow-filled carousel. Visitors can watch cows being milked and then try cheese and ice cream made on-site. 

Bonar Hull also highlights McPeek’s Mighty Maze at the Coshocton KOA Holiday campground as a can’t-miss experience. Carved into a shape inspired by the America 250-Ohio logo, the corn maze includes a scavenger hunt and Ohio agricultural facts strewn throughout the paths. 

The guide features a handful of U-Pick pumpkin and apple spots, but the Petal Post in Jefferson offers a pick-your-own flowers experience with varieties such as sunflowers and tulips. 

“You can do a build-your-own-bouquet thing, and you get to learn about how they grow the flowers,” says Bonar Hull. “And you don’t get much more scenic than Ashtabula County as a backdrop.” 

The Ag-Venture Guide also features spots such as Indian Hill Winery, which offers tours and tastings, and festivals such as the French and Indian War-era Great Trail Festival and the Paul Bunyan Show, a forestry and logging event. 

Bonar Hull says the Ag-Venture Guide will continue to be available beyond this year’s America 250 festivities.  

“Whether you want to go 15 minutes down the road and see something in your own county or take a two-hour drive to an area of the state that you haven’t been to before,” Bonar Hull says, “you’ll be able to find something that is a quintessential fall experience.” For more information, visit america250-ohio.org.

America 250-Ohio Barns
Scott Hagan, the painter of our state’s bicentennial barns, has added designs to nine more structures across the state in celebration of our nation’s semiquincentennial. 

To say Joe Rice’s Wayne County farm was the perfect spot to honor Ohio’s agricultural roots with the first of nine America 250-Ohio barn murals is an understatement. The 1818 farm’s deed, which Rice still has, was signed by President James Monroe. 

Rice’s grandkids represent the ninth generation of his family to live on the farm. And, in a too-good-to-pass-up happenstance, U.S. Route 250 runs alongside it. 

“I’m honored that they chose our farm for this,” Rice says. “My great-great-great grandfather, Frederick Rice, served with George Washington [during the American Revolutionary War].”

Farms are a regular sight in Ohio, so Rice says painting murals on barns is a great way to show how significant agriculture was and still is in the state. Including the mural on his barn, which features a U.S. Route 250 road sign as part of its design, many of the barns carry a theme or design element tied to their locations or Ohio’s history. 

Seven of the nine, including Rice’s, are creations of barn artist Scott Hagan, who painted 89 Ohio Bicentennial barns — one in each of the state’s 88 counties in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (The sixth barn he painted was destroyed by a tornado before he was finished.)

“I haven’t quit barn painting since I started in 1997,” Hagan says. “And all these years later, it’s just great to have the opportunity to do these ones.” 

Hagan’s other America 250-Ohio designs include one in Perrysville paying homage to Johnny Appleseed. In Middleburg Heights, he painted over a former Bicentennial barn, replacing that logo with the America 250-Ohio one. 

“It really took me back,” Hagan says. “You could feel the excitement in the town because people were stopping by and making comments. It’s a great-looking logo.” For more information, visit america250-ohio.org/barn-map.


‘Portraits of Courage’ in Columbus  
The National Veterans Memorial and Museum features paintings of post-9/11 military veterans painted by George W. Bush.

Walking through The National Veterans Memorial and Museum’s newest exhibition, visitors are greeted by the faces of men and women staring back from the walls. In some, you can see turmoil and struggle but also resilience and hope.

“Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors” runs through Dec. 31 and includes 66 paintings and a four-panel mural honoring 98 post-9/11 veterans. Among them is Zachariah Collett, a retired U.S. Army Staff Sgt. from Washington Court House whose story is one of combat, trauma and perseverance.

“When former President Bush called and said he was going to paint a picture of me and put it in a book, I didn’t believe the phone call,” Collett says. “It was surreal.”

Collett enlisted in the military in 2002 at age 17. During eight years of service, he spent 28 months in combat, survived multiple improvised explosive device attacks and suffered a traumatic brain injury that led to his medical retirement at 25.

Collett is one of three Ohio veterans featured in the exhibition. Each portrait is accompanied by an essay, written by Bush, which visitors can find in his Portraits of Courage book. The project began with Bush’s interest in painting following his presidency. Sedrick Huckaby, a Texas-based artist who became a painting mentor to Bush, encouraged him to “paint the faces of the unknown,” according to Frederic Bertley, CEO of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum.

“What you see here is humanity for the individual,” Bertley says, “the happiness and obstacles.”

Retired U.S. Army Col. William J. Butler, president of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum, says the exhibit is representative of the men and women he served with.

“I hope the community response is reverence and gratitude, and if anything, a little bit of grace for ourselves,” Collett says. 300 W. Broad St., Columbus 43215, 614/362-2800, nationalvmm.org

Revolutionary War Veteran Graves Project
One dedicated volunteer has traveled more than 8,000 miles to document Ohio’s Revolutionary War veterans’ graves and their stories.

Matthew Lucas brakes for Revolutionary War graves. At least that’s what the bumper sticker on his car says — a car that’s racked up more than 8,000 miles over the last year-plus searching Ohio as part of the Ohio’s Revolutionary War Veteran Graves Project. 

Lucas is one of a small band of volunteers working on the America 250-Ohio project to verify each of an estimated 7,000 final resting places of veterans who served in the American Revolutionary War. After seeing a Facebook post about the project in 2025, he set out to find the three graves within 2 miles of his house. But those three quickly snowballed to 10, 20, 100 and 933 as of August 2026.

“I just kept going because as I was finding these graves and cemeteries in such horrible condition, I thought, People are going to forget these Revolutionary War soldiers are even here,” Lucas says. 

As of August, 3,968 grave markers in 1,546 cemeteries have been documented in the project’s interactive online dashboard — more than 20 percent of them have “Matthew Lucas” in the “Recorder” field. 

“We kept seeing his name over and over again,” says Krista Horrocks, department manager of the State Historic Preservation Office. “He was so all over Ohio that we couldn’t even tell where he was from.”

Using historical records, Horrocks has helped manage the project that began on Memorial Day 2025 and should be completed by Veterans Day 2026. She says a great aspect of the effort has been uncovering veterans’ stories. For example, John Gray was the last living Revolutionary War veteran. The Mount Vernon, Virginia native served under George Washington at the Battle of Yorktown and lived to be 104, dying in 1868. He’s buried in a small cemetery in Noble County. 

“These aren’t just gravesites,” Horrocks says. “Every single one of these guys has a story.” For more information about this project, visit america250-ohio.org.

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