Ohio Village is a living history museum in Columbus, Ohio, United States. It is operated by the non-profit Ohio Historical Society.
The village, intended to provide a firsthand view of life in Ohio during the American Civil War, opened July 27, 1974 on 15 acres (61,000 m2) adjacent to the Ohio Historical Center in north Columbus. The 22 buildings that make up the village are a mixture of reproductions and historic structures moved to the site. Among those currently standing are the Town Hall, Print Shop, General Store and Masonic Lodge, Education Center, Pharmacy, Blacksmith Shop, Tinsmith Shop, Broom and Basket Shop, Cabinetmaker/Undertaker's Shop, Harnessmaker's and Weaver's shops, Ladies' Soldiers Aid Society, Village Bakery, Market House, Livery Stable, Schoolhouse, Doctor's Office and Residence, the Ohio Village Bank, the Colonel Crawford Inn and the Elk's Head Tavern. In 1995 a large traditional church was constructed to allow formal weddings to be scheduled in the village. The church is the village's most recent new construction.
The Ohio Village is open to visitors Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend starting in 2012. Visitors enter through the Ohio History Center museum and can enjoy the Village as part of their visit.
One of the most popular of the village's annual signature events is the All Hallow's Eve, an 1860s-style celebration of Halloween that has taken place in late October every year since 1985. The festivities include fortunetelling, costumed interpretation of beliefs and superstitions related to the season, and a parade for the dead through the town center meant to appease roaming spirits. The night culminates in a production of Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Ohio Village is also home to two historic baseball teams, the Ohio Village Muffins and Lady Diamonds. Both teams play by the 19th century rules of the game, very similar to those first set down by the New York Knickerbockers, America's first baseball club, in 1845. The Ohio Cup Vintage Baseball Festival, held at the village every year in the late summer, draws teams from across the country to compete in a tournament played by the old rules.
Famous quotes containing the words ohio and/or village:
“All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)