Tom Cross, longtime Adams County tourism director and columnist, profiled

The People’s Defender published a profile of Tom Cross on March 6, 2026, spotlighting the 72-year-old executive director of the Adams County Travel and Visitors Bureau and a longtime People’s Defender columnist based in West Union. Cross has served as the bureau’s executive director for more than 25 years and has written a regular column for The People’s Defender since 1982.

Cross traces his writing career to 1972, when he wrote a fishing column for The Clermont Sun while still in high school and later freelanced for papers in Hillsboro and Georgetown. “I always did kind of gravitate toward writing,” he said. “It was just kind of in me.” The Ohio Outdoor News feature by Mike Moore documents that early start and Cross’s steady turn from freelance pieces to a decades-long local column.

His outdoor roots reach back to a family homestead in Adams County and a youth spent fishing and hunting in southern Ohio. In 1972 Cross lived in Amelia in Clermont County, drove a red Ford Falcon and received a 12-foot jon boat from his parents for his high school graduation. “We had unlimited woods and access to creeks,” Cross said of the homestead. “We caught crawdads, dug nightcrawlers, we did everything outdoors … It was different in those days than it is today. Mom would open the door about daylight and about dark we’d come straggling back in.”

As executive director Cross curates tourism and outdoor content for the Adams County Visitors and Community Guide and the Adams County Travel and Visitors Bureau website, authoring pieces on local recreation, paddling and hunting. He has said he once delayed taking the bureau job until after that year’s spring turkey season, an anecdote the Outdoor News feature repeats. The bureau guide contains practical listings Cross wrote, including public hunting areas and public fishing spots, and marks public boat ramps and canoe launches on its maps.

The Visitors and Community Guide credited to Cross lists public hunting areas by name: Tranquility Wildlife Area, Shawnee State Forest, Brush Creek State Forest and The Edge of Appalachia Preserve, the last by permit only. Public fishing areas named include the Ohio River, Ohio Brush Creek, Adams Lake, Winchester Lake and the ponds at Tranquility Wildlife Area. The guide also lists local outfitters Real McCoy Outdoors, Riverhills Whitetail and Ohio Premier Trophy Outfitters, and a canoe rental, MoonDoggie LIVERee, with phone 513.208.4635. The guide records that the Adams County shooting range reopened in November 2022 and highlights a new local landing, captioned, “ABOVE: The entrance to the new Mackkenzie Run Boat Ramp on Ohio Brush Creek,” with an interior photo captioned, “LEFT: Rich Carter with a smallmouth he caught in Ohio Brush Creek.”

Cross’s guide pieces range from paddling advice to local curiosities. One feature titled “Bigfoot in Adams County,” by Tom Cross, reports that “Two visitors to Adams County claim to have seen Bigfoot in the area. [...] recall many times when they replay the audio tapes of that night at Bigfoot conferences, roadshows and talks throughout the nation. The “Night Stalkers” as they call themselves will again be in Adams County this summer and fall searching for and trying to find more proof that Bigfoot exist.”

A photo caption carried in the Outdoor News material reads, “Tom Cross, shown here with anice smallmouth bass, is the Executice Director of the Adams County Travel and Visitors Bureau. But his true passion is hunting and fishing in his native southern Ohio.” Cross remains an active promoter of Adams County outdoor recreation through the bureau, the Visitors and Community Guide and his West Union column.