Joe’s Run Trail StoryWalk

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – Muskingum County has many interesting trails and now one trail has an added attraction. 

A ribbon cutting ceremony was held today at Joe’s Run Recreational Trail behind the OUZ Campus to celebrate the addition of sequentially placed StoryWalk posts that designate the fully paved trail as a StoryWalk. 

Muskingum County Library System Youth Service Librarian Katie Merritt explained how the idea began by posting storyboards in successive order along designated outdoor routes in 2019 to encourage exercise and literacy.   

“The Park District, the City of Zanesville, the Straker Foundation, there’s a lot of people that make this possible,” Merritt said. “Because of everybody’s donations, the library, what we do is we create the stories. So you have to buy the stories first and then take it apart gently and put it in the frames. So yeah, there’s a lot of people that are involved. These frames are thanks to Xpressive Graphix. We teamed up with them and sat down and kind of created this design from scratch.”

J.W. and M.H. Straker Charitable Foundation President Susan Holdren noted how well the project fulfilled so many of their grant application’s requisites.  

“This is the kind of project we really like to fund,” Holdren said. “It has so many components that mean a lot to us. It has the outdoors, it has children’s involvement, it has reading and it has the library and exercise. So that’s altogether a great package and we were delighted to be part of the funding.”

Along with the Kidzville Trail at Riverside Park and the downtown sidewalk prototype, the addition of this StoryWalk feature to Joe’s Run designates it as the third StoryWalk pathway for residents and tourists to explore.