Belpre, Where Lewis and Clark Passed Through

Belpre, Ohio, sits on the north bank of the Ohio River just across from Parkersburg, West Virginia, and it is one of the oldest settlements in the Northwest Territory. New England veterans of the Revolutionary War founded it in seventeen eighty-nine, naming it from the French for beautiful meadow. The town grew as a river trading stop, and Meriwether Lewis passed through on his way down the Ohio in the late summer of eighteen oh three, bound for Louisville to meet William Clark.

By the twentieth century the Ohio River economy had shifted to industry. Locks and dams transformed the upper Ohio into a series of navigable pools, and barge traffic replaced the flatboats and keelboats of the early republic. Today Belpre sits quietly between the working river and the wooded hills of southeastern Ohio.