Village

Ohio Village

Adjacent to the Ohio Historical Center is Ohio Village. The Village is open to the public for special public events, school groups and private events.

Ohio Muffin Baseball Team

Batter up at the Annual Vintage Baseball Festival at Ohio Village

Since 1981, the gentlemen of the Ohio Village Muffin baseball club have been dedicated to preserving vintage baseball throughout the country and preserving our Nation’s game. Each year from April to November, the club travels throuhout Ohio, giving visitors first hand accounts of the way the game of baseball was played in the 1860s. Historical authenticity is important in order to accurately portray the game.

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The buildings distinctive architecture

At its opening in 1970, the American Institute of Architects applauded the Ohio Historical Center as a "bold, imaginative, almost startling structure."

OHS

The Architectural Record called it "the most architecturally significant public structure built in Ohio since the State Capitol Building." W. Byron Ireland & Associates, a Columbus architectural firm, designed the Ohio Historical Center building. The building is an example of "Brutalism," a rational, structuralist, monumental style exported in the early 1950s by French and British architects. Distinguished by its structural honesty and undisguised, blunt use of materials, Brutalism departed from conventional bourgeois styles. Stone and marble were rejected in favor of form-textured concrete, or beton brut, a technique employed by the French architect LeCorbusier.

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Ohio Historical Society Museum

Ohio Historical Center

The Ohio Historical Center showcases more than 1.5 million objects about Ohio's history, from the ice age to the present and is the flagship museum in the Ohio Historical Society's statewide system of 60 historical sites. This 250,000 square-foot structure is also houses the gift shop, a 280 seat auditorium, and the society's Archives/Library, which includes the State Archives of Ohio. Other exhibits spotlighted in the Center is Ohio's archaeology, plants, animals, geology, geography, climate and weather.

Interior of OHS

The Ohio Historical Society

The Ohio Historical Society is a non-profit organization incorporated in 1885 with the mission "...to promote a knowledge of archaeology and history, especially in Ohio." The society exists to interpret, preserve, collect, and make available evidence of the past, and to provide leadership on furthering knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the prehistory and history of Ohio and of the broader cultural and natural environments of which Ohio is a part. The Society operates dozens of state historic sites across Ohio and is headquartered in the Ohio Historical Center.

Gift Shop

The Ohio History Gift Shop

Located inside the impressive building is the Ohio History Store. The store offers a variety of books, magazines, posters, ceramics, historical reproductions and fun products related to exhibits inside the museum.

Mastadon

Conway Mastadon that is on display at the Ohio Historical Center. This skeleton was found in 1887 in a swamp located between Champaign and Clark counties in Ohio. It is known as the Conway Mastadon because it was presented to The Ohio State University by Newton S. Conway in 1894. The skeleton came to the Ohio Historical Society in 1970. It is estimated that this mastadon was 20 to 30 years old when it died. It stands 10' high at the shoulder and each of its ivory tusks weighs more than 100 pounds.

Ohio Historical Center
1982 Velma Avenue Columbus 43211
(614) 297-2300

The Ohio Historical Center is located just off of I-71 on 17th Avenue (exit 111) about 4 miles north of downtown Columbus and the Ohio State Fairgrounds.