Portsmouth and the Scioto Valley

Portsmouth, Ohio sits at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, and for much of its history that geography made it thrive. The city once had shoe factories, steel mills, brickyards, and an atomic energy plant. It had a floodwall decorated with murals stretching more than two thousand feet, telling its own story. Then everything changed.

Portsmouth was incorporated in eighteen fifteen, named by its founder, Henry Massie, for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Its location made it a natural hub for river commerce, and through the nineteenth century it grew steadily on industry and trade. The Ohio and Erie Canal, completed in eighteen thirty-two, brought the city into the inland waterway network connecting Lake Erie to the Ohio River, and Portsmouth became a significant stop on a commercial corridor that stretched hundreds of miles.

Through the twentieth century, the industrial base that employed generations of Scioto County families slowly hollowed out. Factories closed. Young people left for Ohio's cities or for industrial work in Michigan and Indiana. By the nineteen nineties, what replaced the factories was something darker: prescription opioids.

Portsmouth became, in the accounts of journalists and public health researchers, the ground zero of the American opioid crisis. Pain clinics multiplied and prescribed OxyContin at rates that stunned outside observers. By two thousand ten, Scioto County was dispensing nearly ten million opioid doses per year , roughly one hundred twenty-three doses for every man, woman, and child in the county. The pill mills eventually closed under federal pressure, but addiction transferred to heroin and then to fentanyl.

The city has been fighting back. The floodwall murals, painted through community effort across more than two thousand feet of concrete, remain one of the most ambitious public art projects in rural America. They depict Portsmouth's long history , the canals, the industries, the people. Locals describe the murals as a refusal to be only a story of decline.

Portsmouth is Appalachian Ohio in miniature: a place of real beauty and real grief, a river town that built things, lost them, and has not stopped trying to find its way back.