About This Stamp
With the issuance of this stamp in 2003, the U.S. Postal Service commemorated the bicentennial of Ohio’s statehood.
Comprised of land ceded to the United States after the Revolutionary War, the Northwest Territory included present-day Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In 1787 Congress enacted a plan to organize and govern this large area. The following year its first permanent settlement was established in Marietta, Ohio. On February 19, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson approved Ohio’s constitution, and on March 1, 1803, Ohio became the first state carved from the territory and the 17th admitted to the Union.
Known as the Buckeye State, Ohio has been the birthplace of seven presidents — including Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley — and has produced some of the nation’s greatest scientific and technological pioneers. Inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, and the Dayton bicycle shop owned by the Wright brothers was the site of some of their earliest experiments. Ohio has also been home to great writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African-American poets to enjoy national acclaim, and Sherwood Anderson, who used the state as the backdrop for his classic collection of stories, Winesburg, Ohio.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Phil Jordan
Phil Jordan grew up in New Bern, North Carolina, and attended East Carolina University. After Army service in Alaska, he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in visual communications. He worked in advertising and in design at a trade association before joining Beveridge and Associates, Inc., where he provided art direction for corporate, institutional, and government design projects. A partner in the firm, he left after 18 years to establish his own design firm where he managed projects for USAir, NASA, McGraw-Hill, IBM, and Smithsonian Books, among others. He was Design Director of Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine for 15 years. His work appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications such as Graphis and Communications Arts. A past president of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, he was an art director for the U.S. Postal Service from 1991 to 2014. A resident of Falls Church, Virginia, he is a retired glider pilot and a member of the Skyline Soaring Club.