The National Road & Zane Grey Museum makes sense of Zanesville’s place on America’s first federally funded highway. Exhibits cover the road, the traffic it brought through Ohio, and the local industries that grew up around that movement, especially pottery and ceramics.
The Zane Grey material adds a literary thread, connecting the city to the popular Western novelist who was born nearby. It is a compact museum, but a useful one if you are following old-road history or trying to understand why Zanesville mattered as more than a stop on the map.