Uncovering Ohio
Brian Koscho brings Athens County history to a wider audience
Brian Koscho brings Athens County history to a wider audience
By Lilia Santeramo | Design by Lee Mallamaci
Brian Koscho spent his years as an undergrad in Athens falling in love with the various communities and rich history of the city. Shortly after graduating from Ohio University with a degree in integrated social studies education, Koscho got a summer job at the West State Street Cemetery doing maintenance work.
“I was 23 and trying to figure out what to do with my life, and spending eight hours a day by myself at this very, very old cemetery,” Koscho says.
The cemetery became a point of fascination for Koscho, who noticed it contained a vast history, from Revolutionary War veterans to Black Civil War soldiers to people whose names are echoed on Athens buildings and street signs. Many tombstones have short narratives inscribed on them telling the life stories of the people buried there, which planted the seeds of Koscho’s interest in history, taught not just in books, but in physical spaces.
“I became very interested in the idea of, like, you could walk around in there and not know anything, and then learn these things,” Koscho says. “It was very public history.”
Years later, Koscho returned to OU and pursued a Master of Fine Arts in communication media arts, where he acquired multimedia skills that allowed him to bring his project, Invisible Ground, to life.
Invisible Ground tells local history through a podcast, augmented reality, an app and markers and QR codes located at important historic sites in Athens County. The project has covered the West State Street Cemetery, Mount Zion Baptist Church, The Berry Hotel, The Athens Insane Asylum and other places outside the city of Athens, like Baileys Coal Mine in Chauncey and Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville.
While Koscho was developing the project, it was important to him that people were able to connect with the power of being in the physical space where something happened, especially in cases when those spaces were no longer the way they once were. But it was also important that the project was accessible and gave people multiple avenues through which they could engage with the history of the space they were in.
“It was the idea of trying to play with different ways to showcase the same information and engage people,” Koscho says. “I come from being an educator and an artist. Those worlds of trying to think about how people take in information and what makes people interested, and how do you reach as many people as possible?”
Koscho chooses what topics he covers by thinking about a place’s connection to big ideas and national history, as well as by finding gaps in people’s knowledge and speaking with people who can tell the story of a place with an underrepresented history. The project also serves to challenge people’s assumptions.
“You’ll often hear Appalachia referred to as a monolith. It gets viewed as one thing,” Koscho says. “Growing up in the Rust Belt, growing up in Lorraine and then coming here, there's a lot of overlap in seeing communities that have been forgotten about.”
Koscho says that there is a strong history of non-white people in Athens and Appalachia, dating back to Indigenous peoples, but white narratives are often centered. He notes, though, that if one stops to notice the difference in the size of homes in the East and West Sides of Athens, the physical spaces still make their history known, as there was once a large Black neighborhood on the West side of town, where the homes are smaller.
“Your space, your history, can tell you a lot about how things develop and change,” Koscho says.
Notably, Booker T. Washington was married in the front yard of a home that still stands on the West Side of Athens. Right on Court Street, the first Black lawyer practiced in the municipal courthouse in the 1870s and the Black-owned Berry Hotel stood until 1974.
“The minute you know the story of a place, the minute you know how it's connected to things, it's not just a building anymore,” Koscho says.
Invisible Ground receives assistance in funding from the Southeast Ohio History Center, also known as SEOHC, that changed its name from The Athens County Historical Society in 2016 as a move to expand its reach beyond Athens. SEOHC functions as an archive and museum, but it also works to connect historians and communities with resources to preserve the history of the Southeast Ohio region.
Logan Lambert, SEOHC’s operations and membership manager, says SEOHC helps keep the history of Southeast Ohio alive by having a regional instead of statewide focus. Lambert notes that this is particularly important for Southeast Ohio because it’s more difficult to find funding to preserve history in this area than it is in other parts of the state.
“By having a home that celebrates and helps this region, it allows the entire region to flourish and to showcase their history," Lambert says.
SEOHC achieves this by working to connect the community of local historians.
“One thing we do is we have this group called the Southeast Ohio History Coalition, and it's made up of over 100 historical societies, heritage centers and other small museums across the 22 counties here in Southeast Ohio, all coming together to get a conversation started, because a lot of the centers here are volunteer-ran, and so it's a lot of people putting in their own effort, their own time. And sometimes what they need is funds,” Lambert says.
“[There are] many different funding sources out there,” Lambert continues. “It's just a lot of these volunteer brand organizations don't know where to look. One thing that we want to do here, and we have done with the coalition, is to shed light on those things, because we've made it pretty good on trying to find grants, but someone else might just be starting out.”
Connecting community members with grants and other funding opportunities is how SEOHC helped Invisible Ground become a reality. Recently, however, the National Endowment for the Humanities, also known as NEH, reported in a press release that it will cancel federal grants and awards.
According to the press release, “In collaboration with the Administration, NEH has cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice, as well as awards that may not inspire public confidence in the use of taxpayer funds.”
The cancellation of federal grants has made SEOHC’s mission to connect local historical societies with funding more difficult, and Lambert says they have been directing people to state and local grants. It’s possible that, in the future, states could follow the example set by NEH, that would endanger the work being done by local historians.
Koscho says last year he received a small grant from NEH, and it was a milestone that gave a certain legitimacy to Invisible Ground. Now that NEH has changed its priorities, Koscho says it will be interesting to try to navigate the work he’s doing, but he plans to continue regardless of changes.
“To continue to be someone that's there with those folks trying to also do the same work feels more important now than it did,” says Koscho.
Though the funding from up top looks different, locals are still interested in Invisible Ground, and Koscho says it continues to add to the historical narrative of the community. b
