The 1976 Tour of Fayette County

In 1976 four members of the South Central Ohio Preservation Society* organized a tour of Fayette County homes and landmarks. They borrowed a bus from the Boy Scouts and headed out to show 40 locations to those who signed up to join them.

Those four people were  B.E. Kelley, Kenneth Craig, George Robinson and my mother, Jane Rankin. **

I knew them all, some better than others, and I can imagine them that day as the most entertaining tour guides, telling anecdotes and answering questions from their vast, collective knowledge. They handed out a listing of the tour sites and a hand-drawn map (shown above) with comments; in some cases detailed and in others just a short note about each stop along the route that they had worked together to create.

They started at the court house, of course. They ended up at the Fayette County Museum where guests were served cider and cookies. They looked at homes and cemeteries. Their notes say they stopped at the last remnants of an old toll house (sadly not marked on the map), an old barn (also not marked), a schoolhouse converted into a motel, and pointed to locations where structures were long gone such as the double covered bridge that was torn down in the 1930’s.

I plan on re-tracing their tour route to see if I can find all their landmarks and in future postings will list all 40 tour stops. Please add your comments about these or any sites you feel should be part of a tour of Fayette County landmarks.

If you have old photos that you would like to have posted on this blog, please e-mail your submission to fayettehistory@gmail.com.




*Founded in 1966, the mission of SCOPS is to preserve the natural and cultural history in the South Central Ohio area.


** At the time, Mr. Kelley, Mr. Craig and Mr. Robinson were Fayette County Historical Society board members and my mother would also later become a board member. However, for this tour, it appears they were organizing this tour as a SCOPS project.