Lawrence County, Ohio, 1978 to present

In December 1978, I was taken into a corner office and told I was being sent to the Ironton bureau. At first, I thought I had been shipped to Siberia. But it didn't take long to learn that covering Lawrence County OH was a great beat at the newspaper for a young reporter who liked to develop his own story ideas.

Way back 30 years ago, industry was all along the Ohio River from South Point to Ironton. There were some shuttered factories and similar facilities, such as the Carlyle Tile plant at Coal Grove and the Alpha Portland cement plant on Ironton's upper end. But Allied Chemical was making fertilizer near South Point, Ironton Coke was spewing clouds of thick gray smoke into the air, Allied was processing tar in Ironton and Dayton Malleable Iron was churning out cast iron parts for the transportation industry.

Today those plants are all closed. Some have been demolished. The DT&I Railroad, if it still exists, gave up on Ironton two decades ago.

I was looking for some statistical data on Lawrence County earlier today, and I came across some compiled by the Ohio Department of Development. Some of it made me realize how much the Lawrence County had changed from 1978 to 2006.

According to the ODOD, Lawrence County had 742 manufacturing jobs in 2006. Huh. I remember covering a strike at one plant where maybe that many people were out.

And 58 percent of Lawrence County residents with jobs commute to other counties. At 31 percent going to Cabell County WV, 12.6 percent to Boyd County KY, 3.1 percent to Greenup County KY and 2.7 percent to Wayne County WV, you get nearly half of the work force crossing the Ohio River and going out of state to work.

When someone asked me today who the largest employers in Lawrence County were, I clicked off the ones that came to mind: Cabell Huntington Hospital, St. Mary's Medical Center, Marshall University and King's Daughters Medical Center.

So yeah, things have changed in Lawrence County in the past 30 years, just as they did in the 30 years before 1978.

One more thing: In 1987, when the Huntington Museum of Art had its Ohio River Odyssey exhibit, they asked me to lend a family photo. It was of my grandparents' boat that worked the Ohio River around 1900. Fred Way, a prominent river historian, said it was the best photo of this particular kind of boat he had seen. I brought my mother down to Huntington to see the exhibit and the photo of her father and two uncles.

As we came down Route 7, I said we would take a side trip on Ohio 243, also known as Beulah Lane. She said she remembered Beulah Lane. It was full of fruit orchards.

That must have been the 1950s or 1960s when she was there last. She was amazed the orchards were gone and replaced with subdivisions.