Tom O’Grady will talk about The Burr Oak Connection:  Interesting Characters from Morgan, Athens and Perry Counties at the Multicultural Genealogical Center in Chesterhill, Ohio.  Once asked to give a history of the area that became Burr Oak Lake, Tom realized he was ignorant of the story of the farms and churches along the tributaries of Sunday Creek that were inundated with the installation of the Congressman Tom Jenkins Dam.  But, he could tell stories about some of the interesting characters.

Tom O’Grady sailed as a deck worker on the Great Lakes aboard the ore carrier, S.S. Middletown, a sister-ship of the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald. He served two years in the armed forces with a tour in South Korea. Tom surveyed for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In 1984 he launched the first comprehensive curbside recycling program in the state of Ohio in Athens County. Tom has been promoting waste reduction and a sustainable economy for more than forty years.  He has been a voice for the preservation of the historic Athens Asylum.  O’Grady has also been an instructor of Observational Astronomy in the evenings at Ohio University for forty years. He has spent the past twenty-five years as a student of Ohio history researching its natural and cultural geography, the mound builders, the barnbuilders and regional settlement, Ohio canals, iron furnaces, and several of Ohio’s interesting characters and their stories. O’Grady is a founding board member of Friends of Ohio Barns and serves on the board of Ohio’s Hill Country Heritage Area. Tom has been working with the leadership of the Athens County Historical Society, now the Southeast Ohio History Center, for more than 25 years.