Greetings traveller, and welcome to Burning Springs! You may know it as the latest location in the newly updated Fallout 76, but to me, a recently defrosted Ohioan historian from the ancient past of 2025, it’s home.
The tour will start shortly. I just need a moment to get my bearings. I swear Fort Steuben was 120 miles over that way…? It seems in the years between my big freeze and today, in 2105, the geography got moved around a little. Let’s return to that wrinkle later.
To much of the world, Ohio may be a meme, a flyover state that exists primarily to produce subpar presidents. But to us Ohioans it’s “the heart of it all,” and we mean it. Once the starting point of the American frontier, when I froze myself seventy years ago, we were the literal Midwest. We were a hometown of innovation, which could claim to be both the birthplace of aviation and chili on spaghetti.
For now, you’re probably wondering about the 109 concrete corn cobs.
We begin our tour in the World of Corn. That may be its name now, but in my day it was called The Field of Corn. Built in 1994, it was a public art installation in Dublin, Ohio featuring 109 concrete ears, standing in rows, honouring Sam Frantz who invented hybrid corn varieties. Admittedly, when I was last here there wasn’t a little robot shaped like a corn cob wandering around the park, but I recognise his business. Corn business. He has places to be. Things to do. Children to bore with corn facts. (Did you know the world record for a corn plant’s height is 48-feet? Wait, come back!)
Another difference is that the Field of Corn wasn’t this close to the border of West Virginia. I remember it being a couple of hundred miles to the north, but we’ll leave these questions of geography to another day.
On today’s tour, we will visit some of the least irradiated hotpots of Appalachian Ohio. Or at least the bits of it that fit between Gallipolis and a dinosaur mini-golf course lined with deathclaw nests. While I can still use a lot of the material from my 2025 tours, Vault-Tec has informed me of two changes from the intervening years: Ohio is a desert now, and a ghoul that looks eerily similar to Walton Goggins is here.
Admittedly, the desert thing has taken some adjustment. Thawed from the year 2025 that I am, I distinctly remember this region being so hilly that your ears would pop driving to the grocery store. Once it was filled with oppressive greenery and even more oppressive cicada swarms. Now there’s sand and rust-colored toxins, courtesy of the Abraxodyne Chemical Corporation. Also, the sandstorms that roll through on a regular cycle, turning the sky into a foggy mimosa tint, take some getting used to.
Next stop on the tour: Hocking Hills State park.
In my day, Hocking Hills State Park was Ohio’s most scenic destination. Within it there were 25 miles of trails through hemlock gorges, recess caves, and waterfalls carved into 330-million-year-old Blackhand sandstone.
In present-day Burning Springs, the park has had the full apocalyptic treatment. While you can see the same dramatic rock formations, they now have 100% less vegetation. The world famous Ash Cave (world famous, at least, if you’re into destination weddings) is also represented. Despite the nuclear facelift, if you stand beneath its distinctive curved sandstone overhang and layered rock face, you can still get the sense of standing inside geological time itself.
Of course, raiders have set up camp, so if you could please clear them out before sublimating yourself in the sheer weight of world history it would be appreciated. Any Nuka-Cola bottle caps you find on their carcasses will be useful at the gift shop at the end of the tour. Or maybe you could use them to tip your guide.
Our next stop is Athens…
No, not the ancient Greek city. I’m told we’ve not heard anything about that Athens since the end of the European Civil War in 2077. But this is Ohio, where we name everything after indigenous sites we paved over or European cities we can’t pronounce. (Another fun fact: did you pronounce Gallipolis “GUH-LI-PO-LEEZ?” It’s “GAL-I-POL-EEZ” in Ohio. Wait, come back!)
In my time, Athens, OH, had been a college town since 1804, when Ohio University became the first university in the Northwest Territory. A section of campus known as The Ridges was originally the Athens Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1874 as a Kirkbride-plan mental hospital.
In 2105, there may have been a rebranding, with the school now named Hocking Hill University, but it’s still recognisable. From the square you can see the courthouse dome, clock tower, and Federal-era brick of the campus, all appropriately cratered. I’m not too sure what happened while I was frozen to warrant renaming the university, especially as Hocking College already exists fifteen minutes down Route 33. Perhaps the nuclear war with China didn’t wipe out the school’s trademark lawyers and they had a word with Vault-Tec about its appearance in Burning Springs.
Further along the street you will see Athens Armory. First opening in 1915, for the next eighty years it hosted everything from artillery batteries to rummage sales. It’s good to see in 2105 it’s still serving the community.
Okay, I did say I would try to avoid the geographic wrinkles of Burning Springs, but as you can see, Fort Steuben is a real issue here. I remember a Fort Steuben from my time. But that was in Steubenville, which is about 130 miles up the Ohio River. It was the first federal fort after independence, named after Baron von Steuben, the Prussian who taught the Continental Army which end of the musket was the dangerous one. But here, in 2105, we are in Athens and there is a Fort Steuben that is a nondescript bandit camp with no discernible features besides being a bandit camp. Well, and a very fine windmill.
The funny thing is, there once was an actual fort in this region. Fort Gower, built in 1774 at the mouth of the Hocking River by Lord Dunmore during his war against the Shawnee. It’s where soldiers reportedly pressed their ears to the river to hear the thunder of musket fire from the Battle of Point Pleasant, twenty-five miles away. Lord Dunmore himself marched an army up the Hocking Valley, right through what is now Athens County, to negotiate with the Mingo chief Logan, whose speech at that treaty is considered one of the finest pieces of oratory in indigenous American history. Also nearby is Campus Martius, a fort and the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory, and Farmer’s Castle in Belpre.
I don’t know what’s happened since I went into the cryogenic freezer, but Fort Steuben’s upped sticks and walked to Athens. Perhaps it’s because it has name recognition. In my time of 2025 there was a recreation of the historic fort, where visitors could take in the authentic 1787 sights of a blacksmith’s shop and herb garden. No windmill, though.
Now over here is where Hartman Mound ought to be, in northwest Athens. In my time, this was part of the Wolf Plains Group: thirty Adena earthworks built starting around 1000 BC. These burial mounds were adjacent to the UNESCO Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks stretching across the Appalachian Ohio countryside. 2000 years ago, this was the epicenter of religious pilgrimages by indigenous people groups from across the United States. This spiritual Mecca was built, by hand, aligned precisely to the lunar cycle. It appears by 2105, however, The Plains have been bulldozed and replaced by some buildings. Unlike the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, the Wolf Plains Group isn’t protected by UNESCO designation – not that cultural heritage sites are faring well in 2105. It’s tragic to see the process of cultural erasure we tried to halt in my time seems to have failed to save this vital piece of the history of the indigenous peoples. I remember how of Ohio’s original 10,000 burial and effigy mounds, less than 1,000 survived in 2025. That number looks to have been reduced to zero during my time in the freezer.
We have one more sight before putting Athens behind us, and it marks another moment of destruction in Ohio history.
Here, in the center of Athens, you’ll see there’s a derailed freight train with scattered chemical tankers still leaking. According to the diary entries of a National Guardsman stationed here in 2077, an earthquake disturbed the train line:
“The fractures have moved drastically in the last few weeks, shattering the rail line, and the out of control locomotive shot over the cliff causing a moment of incredible silence. The brief seconds of awe were soon ended with the commotion and destruction as the train crumpled through the old post office. Thankfully nobody was in the path, and the train was empty.”
To you tourists, it may seem like yet another wrecked train. For native Appalachian Ohioans, however, the visual language of this disaster is unmistakable. In February 2023, a train carrying hazardous chemicals came off the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio. For more than two days, the chemical fires burned and residents within a one-mile radius were forced to evacuate. It’s also a story that speaks to Appalachia’s place in the American imagination, as a region of neglect. After all, this is the home of the hillbilly, a character that’s come to symbolise all those left behind by progress. Following the derailment, the company operating the train was accused of putting profits ahead of safety, buying back shares instead of installing new brakes on its trains. This crash before you is a tragic echo of the events in 2023.
Now for you Walter Goggins fans who have been waiting patiently, we arrive at a tour highlight.
Built on crumbling concrete overpasses, Highway Town has the vertical scrappiness of a settlement whose people know the ground is toxic (thanks, Abraxodyne). The Last Resort saloon anchors the place, and yes, a ghoul that bears an uncanny resemblance to Walton Goggins (if he had been through a nuclear fire). You shoot things for him. He pays you. It’s honest work.
Now, if you look to your left, you’ll notice there’s no iron furnace. Between 1820 and 1860, this region was the heart 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 annually. Each furnace required 190 bushels of charcoal per ton of iron, which meant the forests were cut down in ever-widening circles until the land was stripped bare. When the resources of one area were depleted, the furnace was abandoned and the company moved to the next location, taking the workers with it. The iron from these furnaces built both the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (itself cobbled together from the remains of the USS Merrimack). These were the first ironclad warships in history to fight one another. They served in the navies of the rival Union and Confederate troops. By 1916, the last furnace had gone cold. The laborers drifted west to the Lake Superior ore fields. All that remained in 2025 were stone stacks and slag heaps in the Wayne National Forest. Though it appears in 2105, they too are gone.
And if you look to your right, you’ll notice… nothing. There should be a coal mine here, at least there was last time I was in these parts. By 1870, coal mining had spread to thirty Ohio counties. More than seventy company towns flourished in southeast Ohio at the beginning of the twentieth century. When the seams played out or the market shifted, the companies left. The utility of these mine towns went away. Towns withered on the vine. Some vanished entirely. Others became what we politely call “ghost towns” and what the people who stayed call “home.” Now in 2105, there is no evidence they were ever here at all.
In place of Ohio’s past of coal and iron, we have Abraxodyne Chemical. Who, as you can see when looking around Burning Springs, poisoned the land with cleaning products.
Even today, Appalachian Ohio is somebody’s extraction project, as it has been for thousands of years. Soil, timber, coal, iron. Every few decades, someone discovers there’s something worth taking, sets up operations, and moves on when they’ve extracted their value. The Abraxodyne story fits the pattern well. The desert is new. The dynamic is not.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where we will be ending today’s tour of the Burning Springs. By all accounts, there is more to come. Consider today to be Act One. There are large swathes of this land still cut off from us tour guides, but perhaps, with a little help from the great maker, we might be able to visit some more parts of Ohio in the future.
In the meantime, the gift shop’s to your left. I’m told the Buckeye shirts are quite the hot ticket.