Portsmouth, OH

Portsmouth, Ohio is a river town that turned its own defences into art. At the meeting of the Scioto and the Ohio, the city flooded catastrophically in 1937 and walled itself off from the water — and from 1993 to 2002 the muralist Robert Dafford transformed that concrete barrier into one of the largest outdoor artworks in America: more than fifty murals, twenty feet high and two thousand feet long, painting two millennia of local history from the Hopewell earthworks to the steel mills and shoe factories that once employed thousands.

The wall tells remarkable stories. The Portsmouth Spartans, the town's NFL team, could not survive the Depression and moved away in 1934 to become the Detroit Lions. Branch Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson and broke baseball's colour line, appears here; so does Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, a local boy. The city's modern stage bears the name of another native son, the long-serving Ohio statesman Vern Riffe: the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts at Shawnee State University, the hall that now brings touring opera and concerts to the river's edge. Portsmouth is what an American river town looks like when it refuses to forget itself — history on the wall, murals facing the water, and the trains still passing behind.