FREE Zoar Speaker Series: History of Ohio Barns

Join Historic Zoar Village in the School House for a FREE presentation about the history and significance of Ohio barns. Speaker Tom O’Grady sailed as a deck worker on the Great Lakes aboard the ore carrier, S.S. Middletown, a sister-ship of the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald. He served two years in the armed forces with a tour in South Korea. He surveyed for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In 1984 he launched the first comprehensive curbside recycling program in the state of Ohio in Athens County, and has been promoting waste reduction and sustainable economy for forty years. He served as a gubernatorial appointee on the advisory board of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Recycling and Litter Prevention. O’Grady has also been an instructor of Observational Astronomy in the evenings at Ohio University for thirty-seven years. He has spent the past twenty-five years as a student of Ohio heritage researching its natural and cultural geography and settlement – from the mound builders to the barn builders, Ohio canals, and several of its interesting characters and their stories. He is a founding board member of Friends of Ohio Barns and serves on the board of Ohio’s Hill Country Heritage Area. Tom has been heading up the leadership of the Athens County Historical Society, now the Southeast Ohio History Center, for more than 20 years.