Sgt. Ronald L. Niewahner

Union Township, OH

This marker honors the Vietnam veterans of Clermont County, Ohio, carried by the local Chapter 649 of Vietnam Veterans of America. The Vietnam War drew servicemembers from communities across the country, and for decades afterward veterans organized to support one another and secure recognition that was slow in coming home. Chapters like this one keep that memory and mutual aid alive at the county level.

Wilmington, OH

This memorial honors Kenneth W. Faul, a young man from the Wilmington area who gave his life in Vietnam in October 1968. That autumn fell within one of the war's most intense stretches, as American forces across South Vietnam pressed hard in the months following the Tet Offensive earlier that year. Markers like this one, planted in a small Ohio county seat, turned distant jungle combat into a name a community could gather around and remember.

Covington, KY

The broadcaster Durward Kirby was born in Covington in 1911 and spent his childhood on Greenup Street, attending St. Benedict School before his family moved to nearby Fort Thomas. He got his start at WLW radio, reporting on the devastating 1937 Ohio River flood and hosting big-band broadcasts from area nightclubs like the Lookout House. From those Cincinnati-area roots he rose to national fame in the early decades of television.

Cincinnati, OH

In 1821, the young congregation Kahal Kadosh Bene Israel—the first Jewish congregation founded west of the Allegheny Mountains—consecrated this burial ground in a Cincinnati that was then a bustling river-port gateway to the American frontier. For nearly three decades, until 1849, it served the region's small but growing Jewish community, many of them immigrant merchants and tradespeople drawn to the booming Ohio River economy. As the city expanded and its Jewish population grew, the congregation opened larger cemeteries elsewhere, leaving this early ground as a quiet witness to the community's pioneering beginnings.