By Terry Kinney
The Associated Press
GEORGETOWN, Ohio - Ulysses S. Grant's boyhood home is similar to scores of small Ohio museums that rely on donations and unpaid volunteers. It is also different from many others: It has a single patron to watch over it.
Wildlife artist John Ruthven bought the home in 1977 to save it from demolition, invested nearly $100,000 to restore it and last year donated it to the U.S. Grant Homestead Foundation.
"It's been a labor of love, and tenderheartedly so," Mr. Ruthven said. "It represents so much more than the structure. When you think of all that Grant did - he literally saved the nation - and he lived here for 17 years. We felt a passion for that building."
Historians say small museums feel the effect of the economy's downturn but likely will survive because of the dedication of local groups and others. J.D. Britton, manager of the Ohio Association of Historical Societies and Museums, said many of Ohio's 600-plus museums operate on a shoestring, and that may ultimately help them.
"Many of them are all-volunteer organizations, and because they're volunteer, they have problems," Mr. Britton said. "But I don't think they're insurmountable. I think they'll find ways of solving their problems and be around for many years."
Terry Davis, executive director of the Nashville-based American Association for State and Local History, said even the smallest museums usually survive as long as there is someone who cares.
"Small nonprofits have struggled forever and probably always will," she said. "There's always going to be a small number who don't make it. But most seem to make it because people care at the local level."
One example is the Ohio Tobacco Museum in Ripley, once a lively tobacco auction town, where Edie Fath is president and secretary of what she said is the largest of only three museums in the United States dedicated to tobacco.
Mrs. Fath, and her husband, Ed, help maintain the museum because they are longtime tobacco growers. The museum is open weekend afternoons, on tobacco auction days and by appointment. But with fewer auctions scheduled, attendance is down from a year ago.
"We get about 2,500 visitors a year, but our expenses in a year's time outweigh our income," she said.
Ohio has some of the most active and effective historical organizations in the country, said Jim Strider, director of historic preservation and outreach services for the Ohio Historical Society.
"Ohio is a populous state and also extremely historical, especially when you look at the second half of the 19th century," Mr. Strider said. "Ohio was really one of the key engines that drove the United States, economically and politically."
The society has installed nearly 400 markers, in the shape of Ohio, to note historic events and hometowns. A drive around Ohio can be a history lesson.
For example, markers note that Manchester was the first settlement in the Virginia Military District (1791), and Andover was the site of the first law office of Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who became famous because of the Scopes "Monkey Trial."
