Steubenville Murals

The "City of Murals" nickname is well earned. More than 25 giant historical murals are painted on the exterior walls of downtown buildings, depicting scenes from Steubenville's history going back to the frontier era. Maps and guided tour routes are available from the visitor bureau at 120 South Third Street, and the walk covers about a mile of downtown streets.

The murals vary in quality — some are striking, others merely competent — but the project as a whole is an unusually ambitious piece of urban storytelling. The steel-industry panels have a particular raw energy, and the ones depicting the river trade era are vivid and detailed. Even on a short visit, the murals give you a more nuanced picture of the city's history than most small American towns manage to provide.

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The mural project began in 1976 as a bicentennial initiative and has grown ever since, now covering over 25 building-sized walls. Each mural depicts a specific moment or scene from Steubenville's history — iron furnaces, river steamboats, immigrant steelworkers, the Dean Martin era — and together they form a kind of open-air history book of a town that has been through industrial boom and post-industrial quiet. Artists are sometimes visible at work on new panels between May and October.