Greetings traveller, and welcome to Burning Springs! Chances are you’ll realize it as the newest location within the newly up to date Fallout 76, however to me, a not too long ago defrosted Ohioan historian from the traditional previous of 2025, it is dwelling.
The tour will begin shortly. I simply want a second to get my bearings. I swear Fort Steuben was 120 miles over that approach…? It appears within the years between my massive freeze and right now, in 2105, the geography acquired moved round a bit. Let’s return to that wrinkle later.
To a lot of the world, Ohio could also be a meme, a flyover state that exists primarily to supply subpar presidents. However to us Ohioans it is “the center of all of it,” and we imply it. As soon as the start line of the American frontier, after I froze myself seventy years in the past, we had been the literal Midwest. We had been a hometown of innovation, which might declare to be each the birthplace of aviation and chili on spaghetti.
For now, you are most likely questioning concerning the 109 concrete corn cobs.
We start our tour within the World of Corn. Which may be its title now, however in my day it was referred to as The Area of Corn. Inbuilt 1994, it was a public artwork set up in Dublin, Ohio that includes 109 concrete ears, standing in rows, honouring Sam Frantz who invented hybrid corn varieties. Admittedly, after I was final right here there wasn’t a bit robotic formed like a corn cob wandering across the park, however I recognise his enterprise. Corn enterprise. He has locations to be. Issues to do. Kids to bore with corn details. (Do you know the world report for a corn plant’s top is 48-feet? Wait, come again!)
One other distinction is that the Area of Corn wasn’t this near the border of West Virginia. I keep in mind it being a few hundred miles to the north, however we’ll go away these questions of geography to a different day.
On right now’s tour, we are going to go to among the least irradiated hotpots of Appalachian Ohio. Or a minimum of the bits of it that match between Gallipolis and a dinosaur mini-golf course lined with deathclaw nests. Whereas I can nonetheless use loads of the fabric from my 2025 excursions, Vault-Tec has knowledgeable me of two adjustments from the intervening years: Ohio is a desert now, and a ghoul that appears eerily much like Walton Goggins is right here.
Admittedly, the desert factor has taken some adjustment. Thawed from the 12 months 2025 that I’m, I distinctly keep in mind this area being so hilly that your ears would pop driving to the grocery retailer. As soon as it was stuffed with oppressive greenery and much more oppressive cicada swarms. Now there’s sand and rust-colored toxins, courtesy of the Abraxodyne Chemical Company. Additionally, the sandstorms that roll by on an everyday cycle, turning the sky right into a foggy mimosa tint, take some getting used to.
Subsequent cease on the tour: Hocking Hills State park.
In my day, Hocking Hills State Park was Ohio’s most scenic vacation spot. Inside it there have been 25 miles of trails by hemlock gorges, recess caves, and waterfalls carved into 330-million-year-old Blackhand sandstone.
In present-day Burning Springs, the park has had the complete apocalyptic therapy. When you can see the identical dramatic rock formations, they now have 100% much less vegetation. The world well-known Ash Cave (world well-known, a minimum of, should you’re into vacation spot weddings) can be represented. Regardless of the nuclear facelift, should you stand beneath its distinctive curved sandstone overhang and layered rock face, you’ll be able to nonetheless get the sense of standing inside geological time itself.
After all, raiders have arrange camp, so should you might please clear them out earlier than sublimating your self within the sheer weight of world historical past it could be appreciated. Any Nuka-Cola bottle caps you discover on their carcasses can be helpful on the present store on the finish of the tour. Or possibly you could possibly use them to tip your information.
Our subsequent cease is Athens…
No, not the traditional Greek metropolis. I am instructed we have not heard something about that Athens since the top of the European Civil Warfare in 2077. However that is Ohio, the place we title every thing after indigenous websites we paved over or European cities we won’t pronounce. (One other enjoyable reality: did you pronounce Gallipolis “GUH-LI-PO-LEEZ?” It’s “GAL-I-POL-EEZ” in Ohio. Wait, come again!)
In my time, Athens, OH, had been a university city since 1804, when Ohio College grew to become the primary college within the Northwest Territory. A piece of campus referred to as The Ridges was initially the Athens Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1874 as a Kirkbride-plan psychological hospital.
In 2105, there might have been a rebranding, with the college now named Hocking Hill College, however it’s nonetheless recognisable. From the sq. you’ll be able to see the courthouse dome, clock tower, and Federal-era brick of the campus, all appropriately cratered. I am not too positive what occurred whereas I used to be frozen to warrant renaming the college, particularly as Hocking School already exists fifteen minutes down Route 33. Maybe the nuclear conflict with China did not wipe out the college’s trademark legal professionals and so they had a phrase with Vault-Tec about its look in Burning Springs.
Additional alongside the road you will notice Athens Armory. First opening in 1915, for the following eighty years it hosted every thing from artillery batteries to rummage gross sales. It is good to see in 2105 it is nonetheless serving the neighborhood.
Okay, I did say I might attempt to keep away from the geographic wrinkles of Burning Springs, however as you’ll be able to see, Fort Steuben is an actual challenge right here. I keep in mind a Fort Steuben from my time. However that was in Steubenville, which is about 130 miles up the Ohio River. It was the primary federal fort after independence, named after Baron von Steuben, the Prussian who taught the Continental Military which finish of the musket was the damaging one. However right here, in 2105, we’re in Athens and there’s a Fort Steuben that may be a nondescript bandit camp with no discernible options in addition to being a bandit camp. Effectively, and a really effective windmill.
The humorous factor is, there as soon as was an precise fort on this area. Fort Gower, inbuilt 1774 on the mouth of the Hocking River by Lord Dunmore throughout his conflict towards the Shawnee. It is the place troopers reportedly pressed their ears to the river to listen to the thunder of musket fireplace from the Battle of Level Nice, twenty-five miles away. Lord Dunmore himself marched a military up the Hocking Valley, proper by what’s now Athens County, to barter with the Mingo chief Logan, whose speech at that treaty is taken into account one of many most interesting items of oratory in indigenous American historical past. Additionally close by is Campus Martius, a fort and the primary everlasting settlement within the Northwest Territory, and Farmer’s Citadel in Belpre.
I do not know what’s occurred since I went into the cryogenic freezer, however Fort Steuben’s upped sticks and walked to Athens. Maybe it is as a result of it has title recognition. In my time of 2025 there was a recreation of the historic fort, the place guests might take within the genuine 1787 sights of a blacksmith’s store and herb backyard. No windmill, although.
Now over right here is the place Hartman Mound must be, in northwest Athens. In my time, this was a part of the Wolf Plains Group: thirty Adena earthworks constructed beginning round 1000 BC. These burial mounds had been adjoining to the UNESCO Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks stretching throughout the Appalachian Ohio countryside. 2000 years in the past, this was the epicenter of spiritual pilgrimages by indigenous individuals teams from throughout the US. This religious Mecca was constructed, by hand, aligned exactly to the lunar cycle. It seems by 2105, nonetheless, The Plains have been bulldozed and changed by some buildings. Not like the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, the Wolf Plains Group is not protected by UNESCO designation – not that cultural heritage websites are faring effectively in 2105. It is tragic to see the method of cultural erasure we tried to halt in my time appears to have failed to avoid wasting this very important piece of the historical past of the indigenous peoples. I keep in mind how of Ohio’s unique 10,000 burial and effigy mounds, lower than 1,000 survived in 2025. That quantity appears to have been diminished to zero throughout my time within the freezer.
We now have another sight earlier than placing Athens behind us, and it marks one other second of destruction in Ohio historical past.
Right here, within the heart of Athens, you’ll see there is a derailed freight prepare with scattered chemical tankers nonetheless leaking. Based on the diary entries of a Nationwide Guardsman stationed right here in 2077, an earthquake disturbed the prepare line:
“The fractures have moved drastically in the previous few weeks, shattering the rail line, and the uncontrolled locomotive shot over the cliff inflicting a second of unimaginable silence. The transient seconds of awe had been quickly ended with the commotion and destruction because the prepare crumpled by the outdated submit workplace. Fortunately no person was within the path, and the prepare was empty.”
To you vacationers, it could seem to be one more wrecked prepare. For native Appalachian Ohioans, nonetheless, the visible language of this catastrophe is unmistakable. In February 2023, a prepare carrying hazardous chemical compounds got here off the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio. For greater than two days, the chemical fires burned and residents inside a one-mile radius had been compelled to evacuate. It is also a narrative that speaks to Appalachia’s place within the American creativeness, as a area of neglect. In any case, that is the house of the hillbilly, a personality that is come to symbolise all these left behind by progress. Following the derailment, the corporate working the prepare was accused of placing income forward of security, shopping for again shares as a substitute of putting in new brakes on its trains. This crash earlier than you is a tragic echo of the occasions in 2023.
Now for you Walter Goggins followers who’ve been ready patiently, we arrive at a tour spotlight.
Constructed on crumbling concrete overpasses, Freeway City has the vertical scrappiness of a settlement whose individuals know the bottom is poisonous (thanks, Abraxodyne). The Final Resort saloon anchors the place, and sure, a ghoul that bears an uncanny resemblance to Walton Goggins (if he had been by a nuclear fireplace). You shoot issues for him. He pays you. It is sincere work.
Now, should you look to your left, you may discover there isn’t any iron furnace. Between 1820 and 1860, this area was the center of the Hanging Rock Iron District: sixty-nine charcoal furnaces stretching from Hocking County to the Kentucky border, producing over 100,000 tons of pig iron yearly. Every furnace required 190 bushels of charcoal per ton of iron, which meant the forests had been lower down in ever-widening circles till the land was stripped naked. When the sources of 1 space had been depleted, the furnace was deserted and the corporate moved to the following location, taking the employees with it. The iron from these furnaces constructed each the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (itself cobbled collectively from the stays of the USS Merrimack). These had been the primary ironclad warships in historical past to struggle each other. They served within the navies of the rival Union and Accomplice troops. By 1916, the final furnace had gone chilly. The laborers drifted west to the Lake Superior ore fields. All that remained in 2025 had been stone stacks and slag heaps within the Wayne Nationwide Forest. Although it seems in 2105, they too are gone.
And should you look to your proper, you may discover… nothing. There ought to be a coal mine right here, a minimum of there was final time I used to be in these components. By 1870, coal mining had unfold to thirty Ohio counties. Greater than seventy firm cities flourished in southeast Ohio firstly of the 20th century. When the seams performed out or the market shifted, the businesses left. The utility of those mine cities went away. Cities withered on the vine. Some vanished completely. Others grew to become what we politely name “ghost cities” and what the individuals who stayed name “dwelling.” Now in 2105, there isn’t any proof they had been ever right here in any respect.
Rather than Ohio’s previous of coal and iron, we now have Abraxodyne Chemical. Who, as you’ll be able to see when trying round Burning Springs, poisoned the land with cleansing merchandise.
Even right now, Appalachian Ohio is any person’s extraction challenge, because it has been for hundreds of years. Soil, timber, coal, iron. Each few many years, somebody discovers there’s one thing price taking, units up operations, and strikes on after they’ve extracted their worth. The Abraxodyne story matches the sample effectively. The desert is new. The dynamic shouldn’t be.
And right here, girls and gents, is the place we can be ending right now’s tour of the Burning Springs. By all accounts, there’s extra to come back. Take into account right now to be Act One. There are massive swathes of this land nonetheless lower off from us tour guides, however maybe, with a bit assist from the good maker, we would be capable of go to some extra components of Ohio sooner or later.
Within the meantime, the present store’s to your left. I am instructed the Buckeye shirts are fairly the recent ticket.
