Lower Salem, Ohio

You're passing near Lower Salem, Ohio, a village in Washington County that barely registers on the map today, and that's been true for a long time. The town site was not laid out until eighteen fifty, when German immigrant families put down roots here along the Old Plank Road, the corduroy timber road that ran through this valley toward Marietta. Those settlers were drawn to Washington County by the land and by the German communities already forming in the townships nearby.

The village once had a hotel, a general store, a doctor, and an armory, the kind of small commerce that stitched rural Ohio together in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Today around seventy-five people call it home, most of the old commercial life long gone, but the German families who laid it out in eighteen fifty gave this hollow its name and its start.