GREEN, Ohio — Visitors to the MAPS Air Museum in Green will be able to look far beyond aviation history this weekend, when a long-running collectibles show adds an exhibit on the earliest people of Ohio. The Big Show, an American Political Items Collectors regional event, runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 30 and 31 at the museum, 2267 International Parkway, according to reporting by The Repository in Canton.
The highlight, The Repository reported, will be a display put together by members of the Mahoning Valley Archaeological Society illustrating the ancestors of the Indigenous residents of Ohio and the nation. Show organizer Jack Dixey told The Repository the display will cover arrowheads, dinosaur bones and prehistoric tools, and he said the society members are excited about presenting it.
The exhibit arrives in the year the United States marks its 250th anniversary, a contrast The Repository noted between modern political collectibles and material left behind thousands of years earlier. Information from the National Park Service website quoted by The Repository says humans have lived for more than 14,000 years in the region between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, and that artifacts such as broken pottery, stone tools and food remains give archaeologists clues to how cultures changed over time.
Lora Brady, president of the Mahoning Valley Archaeological Society, will put together the exhibit for the show, The Repository reported. Brady told The Repository her work includes digs in Ohio and western Pennsylvania and a dig in Kentucky studying early people and their interaction with mastodons, and she described recently uncovering a 54-inch tusk in perfect shape along with a molar attached to part of a mandible. She told The Repository that holding a tool thousands of years old after it sees the light of day again is breathtaking and surreal.
The Big Show itself has been staged in the Akron-Canton area for nearly two decades and has grown well beyond political items, according to The Repository. Dixey told The Repository dealers will offer antique advertising items and smalls such as buttons, pocket mirrors, pocket knives and watch fobs, along with photography, comic books, coins, jewelry, general antiques and country store items.
Dealers are coming from across the country for the event. Dixey told The Repository they will travel from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, as well as from more distant places including Texas, California and Portland, Oregon. Two authors will also attend — Paul Rohrbaugh, who wrote about President William McKinley, and Jim Lowe, whose book looks at the home front during World War II — The Repository reported.
Tickets are $10 and include admission to both the show and the museum exhibits, according to The Repository. A silent auction is planned for Saturday morning, and free appraisals of collectibles visitors bring will be offered throughout the event in Summit County.
Photo: Jedischultz, CC BY-SA