Marion, OH

Marion, Ohio elected a president from a front porch. In the summer of 1920 Warren G. Harding, publisher of the Marion Star, conducted his entire campaign from the veranda of his house on Mount Vernon Avenue, while hundreds of thousands of Americans travelled to this small industrial city to hear him; the house is preserved, and the white marble rotunda of the Harding Memorial, where the president and his wife rest, is among the most imposing presidential tombs in the country.

Marion's other fame is smaller and crunchier: the city was a capital of the popcorn industry, a heritage kept by the Wyandot Popcorn Museum — home to one of the world's great collections of antique poppers and wagons — and celebrated by the Marion Popcorn Festival, which fills downtown each September with one of the largest festivals in Ohio. The archive's stage is the Palace Theatre of 1928, a John Eberson "atmospheric" house whose auditorium imitates a Spanish castle courtyard under a ceiling of drifting clouds and twinkling stars; operated by the Palace Cultural Arts Association — the organisation named in the source records (a note for the registry) — it remains the region's hall for touring concerts, orchestras and film. Presidents, popcorn and a painted sky: Marion, in full.