OHIO , the farthest east of the Great Lakes states, lies to the south of shallow Lake Erie. This is one of the nation's most industrialized regions, but the industry is largely concentrated in the east, near the Ohio River. To the south the landscape becomes less populated and more forested. Ohio also has the world's largest Amish population. They farm in the northeast and west into mid-Indiana, and are much less of a tourist attraction than the highly publicized Pennsylvania Dutch.

Enigmatic traces of Ohio's earliest inhabitants can be seen at the Great Serpent Mound , a grassy state park sixty miles east of Cincinnati, where a cleared hilltop high above a river was reshaped to represent a giant snake swallowing an egg, possibly by the Adena Indians around 800 BC. When the French claimed the area in 1699, it was inhabited by the Iroquois , in whose language Ohio means "something great." In the eighteenth century, its prime position between Lake Erie and the Ohio River made it the subject of fierce contention between the French and British. Once the British had acquired control of most of the French land east of the Mississippi, settlers from New England began to establish communities along both the Ohio River and the Iroquois War Trail paths on the shores of the lake.

During the Civil War, Ohio was at the forefront of the struggle, producing two great Union generals, Ulysses Grant and William Sherman, and sending more than twice its quota of volunteers to fight for the North. Its progress thereafter has followed the classic "Rust Belt" pattern: rapid industrialization, aided by its natural resources and crucial location, which during the 1970s foundered alarmingly and has only recently shown any signs of resurgence.

Although the state is dominated by its triumvirate of "C"s ( Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati ), its most visited destinations are the Lake Erie Islands , which have benefited from the recent cleanup of the polluted lake and now attract thousands of partying mainlanders. Cincinnati and Cleveland, the latter hit especially hard by the recession, have both undergone major face-lifts and are surprisingly attractive, as is the comparatively unassuming state capital of Columbus.