Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: Ohio

  • A visit to the American Sign Museum

    Photos of neon signs and more from inside the American Sign Museum.

  • Photo: Brick section of the National Road in Ohio

  • Photo: Peacock Road, a part of the National Road in Ohio

  • Goodbye Rife’s Market

    Word reached me the other day that Rife’s Market, in the Grandview neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, has closed. It was a five-aisle mom-and-pop grocery that would have been a throwback even 30 years ago. Fortunately, I photographed it in 2012 while it was still operating. I was shooting Kodak Tri-X in my Pentax ME with…

  • Captured: Peacock Road

    Indiana definitely has some cool old alignments of the National Road and US 40, all of which I shared on Monday. But if there were an old-alignment contest on the National Road, Ohio would win. When the road was new in the early 1800s, especially in the rough, hilly terrain east of Zanesville, it had…

  • How the modern potato chip was ruined, and what you can do about it

    I love a good potato chip. And good ones are hard to find. That’s because most chips today are just salt and crunch. We want our salty snacks, but we don’t want them to be too bad for us. Most chipmakers have responded by frying in so-called “good oils” low in saturated fat and trans fat, such…

  • The last drivable National Road S bridge closed due to heavy trucks

    You can’t drive over any of Ohio’s historic National Road S bridges anymore. The last S bridge still open to traffic crossed Salt Fork about four miles east of Old Washington in eastern Ohio’s Guernsey County. A natural-gas boom in the area has brought an increase in heavy-truck traffic. Many drivers have been ignoring the…

  • Captured: Rife’s Market

    I visited my friend Alice in Columbus, Ohio, the weekend before last. We ended up taking in the galleries, thrift stores, and specialty shops along Grandview Ave. and 5th Ave. near the Upper Arlington neighborhood. Rife’s Market stands on the southeast corner of 5th and Grandview. It’s a real throwback – meat and produce in…

  • The house on Best Road, on Ohio’s National Road

    In the rugged terrain of eastern Ohio, 20th-century improvements to US 40 left plenty of old National Road alignments behind. One of them in Guernsey County is signed as Best Road. There are two reasons I stopped to photograph Best Road. The first was that it towers over current US 40. The road’s realignment cut…

  • Crooked little bridges, well preserved

    Snow is on the ground as I write this and my next road trip is months away. To slake my road-trip thirst during these cold months, I’ve slowly been writing a full trip report of last spring’s tour of Ohio’s National Road. (You can see my other long-form trip reports here). In the process, I’ve…

  • Roadside flowers 2011

    I remember on childhood trips to visit my grandparents in southwest Michigan that I’d gaze out the car window and watch the world whiz by. I could see that flowers grew along the roadside, but I never paid much attention to them. I was too busy looking for the old cars that farmers left out…

  • I stopped at McDonald’s on my trip down Ohio’s National Road

    As we drive around on America’s highways today we encounter the usual fast-food franchises over and over again. McDonald’s is everywhere! In the early 20th century, a McDonald’s sprouted up at the corner of US 40 and US 127, about 10 miles east of the Indiana state line. This was long before the first McDonald’s…