Appalachian Community Histories – South Portsmouth, Greenup County: From Springville to the Railroad and Ohio River Bridges
Along the southern bank of the Ohio River in Greenup County, Kentucky, South Portsmouth occupies a landscape that has connected people, commerce, and communities for centuries. Directly across the water from Portsmouth, Ohio, the community developed around a river crossing that was important long before railroads, highways, and steel bridges transformed travel through the Ohio Valley.
The history of South Portsmouth extends far beyond its present name. During the eighteenth century, the surrounding area was home to Lower Shawneetown, one of the most important Shawnee settlements in the Ohio Valley. By the nineteenth century, another community had emerged along the Kentucky riverbank under the name Springville, eventually developing into a transportation center where ferries, railroads, and automobile bridges connected northeastern Kentucky with southern Ohio.
The community’s surviving historical record is unusually varied. Early explorers described the Shawnee settlement, nineteenth-century legislative records documented Springville’s incorporation, and photographs preserved the railroad depot and ferry landing. Contemporary newspapers also recorded two devastating disasters, a factory fire in 1917 and a schoolhouse tragedy in 1923, while engineering records documented the bridges that permanently altered the relationship between the two sides of the Ohio River.
Before South Portsmouth: The Ancient Earthworks
Long before the development of Springville or the establishment of Lower Shawneetown, Indigenous communities occupied the Ohio River valley near present-day South Portsmouth. The surrounding landscape contains evidence of several distinct periods of Native American settlement, including the remains of monumental earthworks associated with the Middle Woodland period.
Among these archaeological resources are the Old Fort Earthworks, a surviving portion of the extensive Portsmouth earthwork complex. The Kentucky Archaeological Survey identifies Old Fort as a Middle Woodland enclosure dating approximately from 200 BC to AD 500. Its square enclosure surrounded roughly thirteen and a half acres, with walls extending more than eight hundred feet along each side and additional parallel embankments projecting outward from the structure.
These features belonged to a much earlier cultural landscape than the eighteenth-century Shawnee settlement. Although both occupied the broader Portsmouth area, the earthworks and Lower Shawneetown should not be understood as the same community. Their presence instead demonstrates that the meeting of the Ohio and Scioto rivers attracted Indigenous populations over an extraordinarily long period of time.
Lower Shawneetown: An Eighteenth-Century Shawnee Center
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Lower Shawneetown, also known as Shannoah, had become a major center of Shawnee settlement, diplomacy, and trade. Established during the 1730s, the settlement occupied portions of both sides of the Ohio River near its confluence with the Scioto, extending into the area surrounding present-day South Portsmouth.
The Kentucky Archaeological Survey identifies Lower Shawneetown as a principal Shawnee village from approximately the mid-1730s until 1758. During its most influential years, the settlement operated as an important diplomatic center where Indigenous nations negotiated with one another and representatives of the competing British and French colonial powers attempted to establish commercial and political relationships.
Its importance extended well beyond the immediate river valley. Lower Shawneetown occupied a strategic position within a trading network that carried deerskins and other commodities between Indigenous communities and European merchants. English trading houses operated in the settlement, and archaeological evidence demonstrates that imported European goods circulated alongside tools, pottery, and other objects associated with longstanding Native traditions.
One of the most revealing descriptions of Lower Shawneetown survives in the journal of Christopher Gist, a surveyor employed by the Ohio Company. Traveling through the Ohio Valley with George Croghan and Andrew Montour, Gist reached the settlement on January 29, 1751. After arriving opposite the town near the mouth of the Scioto, the travelers announced their presence by firing their guns, prompting traders to cross the river and ferry them into the settlement.
Gist described a substantial community containing approximately forty houses on the southern side of the Ohio River and another hundred on the northern side. He also recorded a council house measuring approximately ninety feet in length, providing evidence of the community’s political organization and its role as a gathering place. Although his account remains an invaluable firsthand description, it reflects the observations and interests of an English colonial surveyor rather than the perspective of the Shawnee inhabitants themselves.
Archaeological investigations have provided an important additional record of the settlement. Excavations conducted by University of Kentucky researchers during the late 1930s and again during the 1980s examined several sites associated with Lower Shawneetown, including Bentley, Thompson, Forest Home, and Laughlin. At the Bentley site, investigators discovered Native pottery and stone tools alongside imported objects such as gunflints, knives, scissors, and ornamental goods.
These discoveries demonstrate that Indigenous residents continued producing and using their own material culture while participating in extensive international trade networks. The association of Native-made objects with imported goods helps archaeologists reconstruct daily life in a settlement that occupied a central position in the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley.
Lower Shawneetown’s significance has also been recognized through historic preservation. In June 1946, the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Kentucky erected a historical marker commemorating Shannoah and the 1751 visit of Gist and his companions. The archaeological resources surrounding the settlement have likewise received federal recognition, preserving an important record of the area’s Indigenous history.
The Emergence of Springville
Following the colonial period and the expansion of European-American settlement into the Ohio Valley, a new community developed along the Greenup County riverbank opposite Portsmouth. Known as Springville, reportedly because of the numerous natural springs in the surrounding area, it occupied a position that made the river an essential part of local transportation and economic activity.
By the early 1870s, Springville had developed into an identifiable community with residents, occupations, and commercial relationships extending across the Ohio River. One unusually detailed account of an early resident appears in the United States Supreme Court case Warnock v. Davis. The legal proceedings reproduced an agreement dated February 27, 1872, identifying Henry L. Crosser as a twenty-seven-year-old tanner residing in Springville, Greenup County.
Crosser had entered into a life insurance arrangement with the Scioto Trust Association of Portsmouth, Ohio, and the resulting dispute eventually reached the nation’s highest court. Although primarily concerned with insurance law, the case provides direct evidence of a Springville resident’s occupation, age, and commercial connections with Portsmouth during the years immediately preceding the town’s incorporation.
Springville’s incorporation presents an interesting discrepancy in the historical record. Many later accounts identify March 3, 1876, as the date when the community was formally incorporated, but the published acts of the Kentucky General Assembly contain evidence of an earlier date.
In its 1878 legislative session, Kentucky adopted an amendment to Springville’s charter. The published title of that amendment explicitly identifies the original incorporation act as having been approved on March 3, 1873. This makes 1873 the earlier date documented by the legislative record, although the original charter should still be examined to establish its complete provisions and resolve the discrepancy with later accounts.
Another important contemporary description appeared in Richard H. Collins’s History of Kentucky, published in 1874. In his account of Greenup County, Collins identified Springville as a community situated along the Ohio River directly opposite Portsmouth and estimated its population at approximately 250 residents.
This brief description establishes that Springville was already a recognizable river settlement during the nineteenth century, several decades before the railroad depot and automobile bridges became defining features of South Portsmouth.
From Springville to South Portsmouth
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the community’s identity became increasingly associated with its position across the Ohio River from Portsmouth. The eventual adoption of the name South Portsmouth reflected that geographical relationship and the growing importance of transportation between Kentucky and Ohio.
The precise date and circumstances of the formal name change deserve further documentary investigation. Nevertheless, surviving historical postcards demonstrate that South Portsmouth was in established use by the early twentieth century, while the older Springville name continued to survive in descriptions of nearby landmarks.
One particularly interesting example is a postcard published in 1909 by H. A. Lorberg depicting the Devil’s Den on Springville Hill. The postcard shows visitors among the large rock formations overlooking the community, preserving both an early recreational landmark and a reference to the settlement’s previous name.
The Scioto County Public Library also preserves a 1910 panoramic postcard taken from the Kentucky hills. Looking across the river toward Portsmouth, the image places South Portsmouth in the foreground and illustrates the close physical relationship between the communities on opposite banks.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the River Ferry
The arrival of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway transformed South Portsmouth’s transportation connections during the early twentieth century. Railroad facilities developed along the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, and the South Portsmouth depot became an important passenger and transportation landmark for the surrounding region.
Historical photographs and postcards preserved by the Scioto County Public Library provide an unusually detailed visual record of these facilities. A postcard published for F. W. Woolworth in 1913 depicts the Chesapeake and Ohio depot as viewed from the Ohio River, showing the station’s relationship to the waterfront and the steep wooded hills rising behind the community.
Other contemporary postcards depict the depot from different angles, including views of passengers along the railway tracks and the nearby storage buildings and water tower. Although some of these postcards were labeled as views of the Portsmouth depot, the library’s historical descriptions establish that the buildings were actually located across the river in South Portsmouth, Kentucky.
The river ferry complemented the railroad by providing a direct crossing between South Portsmouth and Portsmouth. Before the construction of a permanent automobile bridge, ferryboats offered an essential connection for residents and travelers moving between the Kentucky railroad facilities and the Ohio city.
One historical postcard, preserved under the title C & O Depot and Ferry, Portsmouth, Ohio, depicts both the railroad station and the ferry together. Their appearance in the same image illustrates the interconnected transportation system that served the community before the first Grant Bridge opened in 1927.
The depot remained part of South Portsmouth’s landscape for much of the twentieth century. A photographic negative dated 1948 shows a Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train approaching the station, documenting its continued operation long after the first automobile bridge had opened. The building survived into the Chessie System era but was destroyed by fire on May 1, 1975, ending the existence of one of the community’s most recognizable historical structures.
The Portsmouth Cap Company and the Factory Fire of 1917
South Portsmouth’s connection to Portsmouth was not limited to transportation. During the early twentieth century, manufacturing enterprises operating in southern Ohio also established facilities across the river, bringing industrial employment and economic activity into the Kentucky community.
Among these businesses was the Portsmouth Cap Company, established in South Portsmouth in 1906 by the Lloyd-Adams manufacturing interests. The company was associated with the production of toy pistol caps and other novelty products, part of a wider manufacturing enterprise that also produced toy pistols and footwear.
The company’s history, documented in the Scioto County Public Library’s local-history study The Toy Pistol Factory, reflects the variety of manufacturing activities occurring in the Portsmouth area during this period. The toy pistol business eventually operated under the name Buster Novelty, distributing its products well beyond the immediate Ohio Valley.
On May 1, 1917, a devastating fire struck the company’s South Portsmouth plant. The disaster killed a twelve-year-old girl, making the incident one of the community’s recorded industrial tragedies.
The library’s historical account notes that the initial news reaching company officials described an explosion, although employees subsequently denied that an explosion had occurred. The precise cause of the fire was never conclusively established in the account, but one theory suggested that a cap might have ignited during the operation of a cutting machine.
The tragedy exposed the dangers associated with manufacturing combustible products at a time when industrial safety protections differed considerably from modern standards. The Portsmouth Cap Company and its associated manufacturing enterprises were dissolved in 1922, only a few years after the disaster.
The South Portsmouth School Disaster of March 1923
Another tragedy struck South Portsmouth on March 12, 1923, when destructive winds swept through the region and tore the roof from the community’s school building. The resulting disaster killed a child and injured several others, drawing attention from newspapers far beyond northeastern Kentucky.
Contemporary reporting provides a particularly valuable record of the incident. On the afternoon of March 12, the Florence Daily Times in South Carolina published an Associated Press report describing widespread storms across several states. Among the Kentucky incidents was the destruction at South Portsmouth, where strong winds reportedly carried the schoolhouse roof into the yard while children were playing.
The newspaper reported that one child had been killed and five others injured. Subsequent reporting in the Morning Register of Eugene, Oregon, repeated the account of the schoolhouse roof being torn away and identified the South Portsmouth disaster as part of a much larger storm system that caused deaths and extensive property damage throughout the region.
The incident was also recorded in a contemporary personal diary preserved by the Scioto County Public Library. The diarist noted that high winds had blown the roof from the South Portsmouth schoolhouse, killing a boy and injuring others. This firsthand record is especially valuable because it demonstrates how news of the tragedy entered the daily conversations and private writings of residents in the surrounding Ohio Valley.
Although the available newspaper accounts establish the basic circumstances of the disaster, additional local reporting and school records would be needed to reconstruct the experiences of the affected families and establish the complete circumstances of the victims. Later educational records demonstrate the continued importance of the school to the community, including a surviving South Portsmouth Elementary School yearbook from the 1970–1971 academic year.
The General U. S. Grant Bridge and a New Era of Transportation
For generations, the Ohio River had provided South Portsmouth with commercial opportunities while simultaneously creating an obstacle to dependable travel. Ferry service connected the community to Portsmouth, but changes in weather, river conditions, and increasing automobile traffic demonstrated the limitations of relying entirely on boats.
During the 1920s, civic leaders and transportation advocates began advancing plans for a permanent automobile bridge. The resulting General U. S. Grant Bridge, also known as the Fullerton-Portsmouth Bridge, became one of the most significant transportation developments in South Portsmouth’s history.
Construction began in 1926, with the groundbreaking ceremony taking place on May 5 of that year. The project involved substantial engineering work, including the excavation of riverbank anchorages, construction of reinforced concrete piers, and erection of steel towers and suspension cables. Local bridge advocate A. T. Pack of South Portsmouth was among the individuals who participated in the groundbreaking ceremony.
Designed by engineers Holton Robinson and David B. Steinman, the suspension bridge featured a main span measuring approximately seven hundred feet, with additional suspension spans extending toward the riverbanks. The Dravo Contracting Company handled the fabrication and erection of the superstructure, while the J. E. Greiner Company was responsible for the substructure and approach works.
The bridge’s design incorporated several innovative features, including rocker-type towers, a continuous stiffening truss, and reinforced concrete anchorages filled with compacted sand. These engineering characteristics later contributed to its recognition as a historically significant American suspension bridge.
The bridge opened to pedestrian and automobile traffic in stages during late August and early September 1927. Its formal dedication followed on September 22, drawing large crowds to the Portsmouth riverfront and the Kentucky shore.
The ceremony attracted prominent officials from both states and members of the Grant family, including Ulysses S. Grant III, the grandson of the former president and Civil War general for whom the crossing was named. Contemporary accounts describe public celebrations, speeches, processions, and crowds gathered along the riverbanks to witness an event that substantially altered regional transportation.
Originally operated as a toll bridge, the Grant Bridge provided a dependable automobile crossing between southern Ohio and northeastern Kentucky. Its importance extended beyond South Portsmouth, offering travelers a direct route across a stretch of the Ohio River that had previously depended heavily on ferry service.
The crossing remained a toll facility until 1974, when the Ohio Department of Transportation acquired it and eliminated the charges. Its history thereafter reflected the growing challenges of maintaining an aging suspension bridge that carried increasing volumes of automobile traffic.
Bridge Repairs, Replacement, and the Changing Riverfront
By the late 1970s, deterioration of the original Grant Bridge had created significant concerns about its continued operation. An inspection in July 1978 discovered serious problems with the suspension cables, leading to restrictions and eventually a complete closure while major repairs were undertaken.
The closure demonstrated how thoroughly communities on both sides of the Ohio River had become dependent on the crossing. Ferry service returned as a temporary transportation solution, but the available boats struggled to accommodate the volume of traffic previously handled by the bridge. Workers commuting between northeastern Kentucky and Portsmouth faced substantial disruptions, including longer travel times and lengthy alternative routes.
A major rehabilitation project involved replacing the suspension cables and removing sections of the bridge for repairs before reinstalling them. The bridge reopened in December 1979, followed by formal rededication ceremonies in January 1980.
Additional transportation improvements soon followed. The Carl D. Perkins Bridge, completed during the late 1980s, established another automobile crossing between Ohio and the South Portsmouth area, providing an alternative to the aging Grant Bridge and strengthening transportation connections along the Kentucky riverfront.
Despite repeated rehabilitation projects, the original Grant Bridge eventually reached the end of its useful service life. It received recognition through its listing on the National Register of Historic Places on May 31, 2001, acknowledging its engineering importance and its role in the development of interstate automobile transportation.
The old suspension bridge was permanently closed later that year and subsequently dismantled. Construction of its replacement followed, and the new U. S. Grant Bridge opened to traffic in October 2006, continuing the crossing that had transformed South Portsmouth nearly eighty years earlier.
The Railroad, the School, and the Memory of Springville
Although the bridges came to dominate the modern transportation landscape, South Portsmouth’s older history remains visible through photographs, records, archaeological investigations, and the institutions that served generations of local residents.
The surviving railroad postcards preserve a riverfront that no longer exists in its early twentieth-century form. The 1948 photograph of the Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train documents the former depot during its later years, while earlier views of the station and ferry offer an important record of the period when railroad and river transportation operated together.
The community’s educational history is similarly preserved through surviving school records and yearbooks. The 1970–1971 South Portsmouth Elementary School yearbook provides photographs and evidence of school life decades after the 1923 disaster, documenting an institution that remained central to the lives of local families.
The older Springville name also survives through historical documents and landmarks. The nineteenth-century legislative record establishes the community’s early municipal history, while the 1909 Devil’s Den postcard preserves the former name in the landscape above the river. Together, these sources connect the modern community with the earlier settlement that developed along the Greenup County riverbank.
South Portsmouth’s history also remains connected to the much older Indigenous landscape beneath and around the modern community. The archaeological investigations of Lower Shawneetown and the ancient Portsmouth earthworks demonstrate that the geographical advantages of the Ohio and Scioto river junction were recognized long before the development of European-American towns, railroads, or automobile bridges.
Why South Portsmouth’s History Matters
South Portsmouth’s story illustrates how a relatively small Kentucky community could occupy an important position within the much larger history of the Ohio Valley. Its geographical setting brought together Indigenous settlement, international trade, nineteenth-century community development, industrial manufacturing, and successive generations of transportation infrastructure.
The history of Lower Shawneetown reveals a major center of Native American diplomacy and commerce during the eighteenth century, while the records of Springville demonstrate the emergence of a nineteenth-century river community with substantial connections across the Ohio. The arrival of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the eventual construction of the Grant Bridge transformed those connections, making South Portsmouth an important point of movement between Kentucky and Ohio.
Yet the community’s history cannot be understood through transportation and commerce alone. The factory fire of 1917 and the school disaster of 1923 preserve painful episodes in local memory, while photographs, yearbooks, and historical postcards document the ordinary institutions and landscapes that gave South Portsmouth its identity.
Today, the surviving archaeological resources, historical records, and photographs provide an opportunity to reconstruct the many layers of the community’s past. The river that once connected the settlements of Lower Shawneetown continues to define South Portsmouth’s landscape, even as modern bridges and highways have changed the ways people cross it.
From the council houses of an eighteenth-century Shawnee settlement to the railroad depot and bridges of the twentieth century, South Portsmouth’s history is inseparable from the Ohio River and the generations of people who lived, worked, traveled, and built their communities along its southern shore.
Sources & Further Reading
Gist, Christopher. Christopher Gist’s Journals: With Historical, Geographical and Ethnological Notes and Biographies of His Contemporaries. Edited by William M. Darlington. Pittsburgh: J. R. Weldin & Co., 1893. https://archive.org/details/christophergists00gistuoft.
Kentucky General Assembly. Acts Passed at the Session of the General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Frankfort, KY, 1878, 58. Contains an amendment identifying March 3, 1873, as the date of Springville’s original incorporation act. https://books.google.com/books?id=dDlNAQAAMAAJ.
Collins, Richard H. History of Kentucky. Vol. 2. Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874. https://archive.org/details/collinshistorica02coll.
United States Supreme Court. Warnock v. Davis, 104 U.S. 775 (1882). https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USREPORTS-104/USREPORTS-104-775.
Squier, Ephraim George, and Edwin Hamilton Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 1. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1848. https://repository.si.edu/items/1718fb41-78c6-4063-841f-a46f72b03ad4.
“The Florence Daily Times.” March 12, 1923, 1. Historical Newspapers of South Carolina, University of South Carolina Libraries. https://historicnewspapers.sc.edu/lccn/sn86063771/1923-03-12/ed-1/seq-1/.
Morning Register (Eugene, OR). March 13, 1923, 1. Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn96088115/1923-03-13/ed-1/seq-1/.
Burton, Martha Appel. “General U.S. Grant Bridge.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Prepared April 2000. National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/08809822-8440-4d74-b193-a2e0ef6b0c91.
National Park Service. “Lower Shawneetown Archeological District.” National Register of Historic Places, November 29, 1985. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/85003334.
F. W. Woolworth Co. “South Portsmouth, KY, Showing C. & O. Depot from Ohio River.” Postcard, 1913. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/17343.
Lorberg, H. A. “The C. & O. Railway Depot, Portsmouth, Ohio.” Postcard, early twentieth century. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/17012.
Leighton, Hugh C., Company. “Portsmouth, O., Looking Up the Ohio River, from Kentucky Hills, Showing South Portsmouth and Portsmouth.” Postcard, 1910. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/893.
Lorberg, H. A. “The Devil’s Den Springville Hill, Portsmouth, Ohio.” Postcard, 1909. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/857.
Lorberg, Henry A. “Portsmouth Looking Up the Ohio River; South Portsmouth; Birds Eye View; Kentucky Hills.” Undated scrapbook page. Henry A. Lorberg Scrapbook, vol. 2. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/show/24565.
Scioto County Public Library. “Contemporary Diary Entry Describing the South Portsmouth School Disaster, March 1923.” Transcribed by Megan, Local History Department, 2022. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/files/original/0f2e9983d720b2b3d2eb1ce468891f38.pdf.
South Portsmouth Elementary School. 1970–1971 South Portsmouth Elementary School Yearbook. Scioto County Public Library Local History Digital Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/items/browse/page/4?page=5&tag=yearbook.
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “Lower Shawneetown.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Lower-Shawneetown.aspx.
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “Old Fort Earthworks.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Old-Fort-Earthworks.aspx.
Pollack, David, ed. The Archaeology of Kentucky: An Update. Vol. 2. State Historic Preservation Comprehensive Plan Report No. 3. Frankfort: Kentucky Heritage Council, 2008. https://heritage.ky.gov/Documents/TheArchaeologyofKYAnUpdateVol2.pdf.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Shannoah.” Historical Marker No. 31, South Portsmouth, Greenup County, Kentucky. Erected June 1946. https://history.ky.gov/markers/shannoah.
Works Progress Administration and Historical Records Survey. “Greenup County.” 1936. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 35. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/35/.
Rennick, Robert M. “Greenup County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 71. Morehead State University, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/71/.
Rennick, Robert M. “Jake Savage, Bertha Savage and Lucille Maynard Interview (Greenup County).” Oral history, August 18, 1977. Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection, no. 312. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_oh_collection/312/.
Scioto County Public Library. The Toy Pistol Factory. Local History Collection. https://www.sciotolibrary.org/history/files/original/3dcf34f77e14aa49e81716afd093ff8f.pdf.
Author Note: South Portsmouth’s story reaches from the Indigenous communities of the Ohio Valley to the railroad depot, schools, and river crossings that shaped the lives of later generations. I hope this article helps preserve the community’s history and encourages readers to explore the surviving records of northeastern Kentucky.