Lost Ohio: More Travels Into Haunted Landscapes, Ghost Towns, and Forgotten Lives

by Randy McNutt

  Lost Ohio

  Lost

  Ohio

  More Travels into

  Haunted Landscapes,

  Ghost Towns,

  and Forgotten Lives

  Randy McNutt

  The Kent State University Press · Kent, Ohio

  © 2006 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2006000385

  ISBN-10: 0-87338-872-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0-87338-872-6

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  McNutt, Randy.

  Lost Ohio : more travels into haunted landscapes, ghost towns, and forgotten lives / Randy McNutt.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-87338-872-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞

  ISBN-10: 0-87338-872-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞

  1. Ohio—Guidebooks. 2. Ghost towns—Ohio. 3. Legends—Ohio.

  4. Ohio—History, Local. I. Title.

  F489.3.M38 2006

  917.710444—dc22 2006000385

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

  For my nephews, Zane and Ian Bauer

  People do not live in the present always, at one with it. They live at all kinds of and manners of distance from it, as difficult to measure as the course of planets. Fears and traumas make their journeys slanted, peripheral, uneven, evasive.

  —Anaïs Nin

  Contents

  Introduction: Forgotten Ohio

  Part One: Big Dreams

  1 The Life and Times of Fizzleville

  2 Death of the Patriarch

  3 Venice Times Two

  4 Footville Is Where the Worlds Meet

  5 Sodaville or Bust

  Part Two: Lost Legends

  6 Journey to the Center of Obscurity

  7 Separate Spirits

  8 The Song of Mount Nebo

  9 A View from the Tower

  10 Louisa’s Legacy

  11 Travels in the Great Black Swamp

  12 The Marrying Kind

  13 The King of Ashville

  Part Three: Vanishing Ohio

  14 A Little Good News

  15 The Riders of Bentonville

  16 Satisfying an Agrarian Myth

  17 Harry and the Midway

  18 By Any Other Name:

  Ghost Towns and Fabled Obscurities

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction: Forgotten Ohio

  While working in my mother’s basement one snowy morning, I opened the top drawer of an old wooden chest and caught a glimpse of something red—a small box from my boyhood. It must have been hidden in there for thirty-five years, but I didn’t rediscover it until 2000, when I was preparing to buy her yellow Cape Cod—the house where I grew up—in Hamilton, Ohio.

  I sat down on the cold concrete floor, pulled off the lid, and peered in. I found mostly paper things from Ohio vacations in the early 1960s: three colorful state maps, five postcards of roadside scenes, a souvenir pen from LeSourdsville Lake Amusement Park, a faded brochure that read, “See Ohio Caverns, a Fairyland, West Liberty, Ohio,” and a tiny black-and-white photograph of my father washing his finned Plymouth in front of a cabin at Indian Lake.

  As I inspected each piece, early vacation memories ran through my mind as vividly as home movies. I could almost see my father driving the Plymouth and smoking his familiar brown King Edward cigar. A plume of white smoke blew out of his cozy wing like a ghostly interloper while my mother provided unsolicited directions. In the back seat, my younger sister, Robyn, sang the latest Top-40 hits, while I chanted, “When will we get there?”

  Because of budget restrictions, our family vacations were short and regional in those days. (To us, an out-of-state vacation meant Santa Claus, Indiana.) We mostly stayed in Ohio in the early years. Even for those journeys, my father always packed his latest gasoline-company maps, just in case a route had been changed. Now, some people might ask, “What’s so interesting about Ohio?” The attraction of the road and the family. The state was much more rural in the early 1960s, especially in the southwest, and we’d explore it during the summer. All winter, I’d go to sleep dreaming of pioneers and blue-coated soldiers and historic places. My father’s road maps—and my imagination—could take me wherever I wanted to go. I’d spread them across the kitchen table for easy viewing, and in red ink I’d circle the towns and attractions that interested me. “Mom,” I’d say, “what is a Wapakoneta?”

  Finding my father’s musty maps encouraged me to resume traveling in Ohio. I had stopped for a few years to write about other parts of the country, but even then I missed the back roads.

  As an adult, I started my Ohio travels in 1981, the year I married, bought a house, and began writing for magazines. I set out on drives across my native state and as interesting a universe as any I have visited. (Marriage did not provoke my restlessness. Curiosity did.) I sought communities that thrived long before the interstate highways, MTV, computers, and inflated baseball statistics. On nearly every trip, I’d discover vanishing things: celebrations, motels, road art, drive-in theaters, traditions, inventions, folk tales, crusades, battlefields, forts, points of reference, geography, myths, attitudes, tall tales, gothic places. I much preferred to search for the metaphorical, the more abstract ghosts of the past, although along the way I heard folk tales about spirits in small towns. In my mind, they all blended into one big quilt of Ohio history.

  By 1990, I noticed that we were losing rural places and quirky characters that were a direct link to the early 1900s and the time when Ohio was distinctly agrarian. Talking to these people was like talking to someone from a place far away. Now, watching our culture and history disappear under the juggernauts of time and development, I realize that we’re losing an odd assortment of things—from legends to towns to the quintessential independent Buckeye. So I search for ghosts of many kinds: the supernatural, man-made specters, Ohio’s past, and the mist of our vanishing culture. Sometimes I think I see my father’s Plymouth passing me on the way to Ohio Caverns.

  Today is simply a good time to look for ghosts. They walk among us.

  My latest round of trips—I will never complete the mission, only the present sortie—ended in our bicentennial year, a significant time to wrap up things in a loose binding. On longer trips usually I traveled with my editor, Buckeye native, and wife, Cheryl, who helped me explore endangered places and rediscover Ohio and its back roads as an intrepid motorist might have found them in the 1930s. I took along a soft briefcase filled with a number of gasoline-company maps from the 1940s to the present; my tattered 1915 Rand McNally Ohio map and its counterpart from 2002; a 1937 Ohio map published by the Ohio Department of Transportation; and two little books, Scenic and Historic Ohio from 1925 and Let’s Explore Ohio from 1961. The state map inside Scenic and Historic Ohio guided me to places that had existed when automobiles first arrived in the rugged countryside. It offered a stark comparison to modern maps. The other booklet, which sold for twenty-five cents, came out when I was in the eighth grade. Its color photographs remind me of an Ohio that no longer exists, but whose outline is still visible when the light is just right.

  One bright September morning in 2003, a pivotal moment in my travels occurred only about fifteen miles from home, in the historic city of Montgomery. On that day,
Ohio’s past and present came clearly into focus when preservationists Diane “Dee” Eberhard and Mary O’Driscoll took me through the Universalist Church, built about 1837 at Montgomery and Remington Roads in what is now known as the Heritage District. In the cool air I pondered the colonial brick exterior’s four big columns and small cupola. The simple architecture is reminiscent of the Christopher Wren and Williamsburg styles. Although it is not the oldest church in this Hamilton County city of ten thousand people, the Universalist is the most easily recognized, aesthetically, architecturally, and historically. It has touched everyone in town.

  “Church members fired the bricks on site, including special wedge-shaped ones to make the pillars,” O’Driscoll said as we walked between them. “Supposedly the workers left a bottle of whiskey inside one pillar.”

  Eberhard rubbed her fingers gently across the brick and said, “If you look closely you will see that the builders left impressions of their door keys on each pillar. I think that was their way of saying, ‘I made this.’”

  When church founders cast the bell, they dropped silver coins into the hot metal to foster a clear ring. The town still rings the bell on holidays, special occasions, and for weddings. The sound soothes O’Driscoll’s mind.

  “The church has been the heart of our city and my love, but in 1960 it was ready to be torn down by people who wanted to build a gas station,” she said. “I can’t imagine Montgomery without it. When Iran released the American embassy hostages in 1981, almost every person in town came over to help ring the bell in thanksgiving. It was a sacred moment.”

  Churches—especially the early Methodist, Presbyterian, and Universalist—hold an important status in Montgomery’s history. In addition to their architectural and religious contributions, the churches provided a little local controversy. In the early nineteenth century, the more conservative Presbyterians decided that the Methodists had become too vocal and cocky for their own good. “The radical element among the Presbyterians waited until the Methodists were kneeling in prayer, then pricked them with pins attached to long poles,” Eberhard said.

  “Ouch,” O’Driscoll said, and winced.

  The two women looked at each other solemnly, as if ready to make a major pronouncement. Then at once they broke into laughter like schoolgirls. They know each other that well, for they have shared a love of history and community for decades. Eberhard, president of the Montgomery Historical Preservation Association, and O’Driscoll, vice president, live on the same street in an old part of town. A Cleveland native, O’Driscoll worked overseas for the Red Cross during World War II. She met her late husband at a Red Cross conference in Toledo, and eventually they married and moved to Montgomery, which felt like home. In 1970 she finally became involved in preservation, when the Presbyterian manse was to be torn down to make way for a large bicycle shop. “We took around petitions,” she recalled. “We picketed. The events were shown on television. My husband was going to lunch with some men who complained about ‘those hysterical ladies.’ My husband said, ‘One of them is my wife.’”

  Though a generation younger, Eberhard is equally enthusiastic. She has channeled her affinity for preservation into pen-and-ink sketches of the city’s historical landmarks, including the Universalist Church. She’s also drawn her home, the elegant Crain-Eberhard House. The two-story brick house, built in 1882 by manufacturer George Crain, features elements of the Greek Revival style and a gable wing added in 1968. It is one of thirty-two buildings in Montgomery designated as city landmarks.

  As we walked around the austere but elegant sanctuary, the women pointed proudly to an ornately carved pulpit, a pump organ that still works, a brass chandelier, a black Burnside heating stove, and three rows of white wooden pews. Originally, a board ran down the center of the middle pew, separating the men from the women. I can still remember what O’Driscoll said: “If you look carefully, you’ll see where the board was taken out a few years ago and the hole was filled in. The outline is still visible at just the proper angle, when the light falls on it. In our trade, this faded image is called a ghost. To a preservationist, a ghost means evidence of something that used to be there.”

  Her definition struck me in a literary sense, for I’d already seen my share of ghosts all across Ohio. In 1996 I wrote about them in Ghosts: Ohio’s Haunted Landscapes, Lost Arts, and Forgotten Places. O’Driscoll’s comment gave my trips both meaning and metaphor. I’d been searching for many kinds of ghosts—missing pieces of our past that reflect a state of mind as well as a collection of landscapes. Suddenly I understood that vanishing Ohio is a place where rural America converges with small cities and fading history and disappearing culture. It is a place we’re losing to burgeoning technology, global economy, technological immediacy, and, most of all, time.

  One day in early summer, when the temperature and my sensibilities finally cooled, I wandered into the real Ohio. I didn’t bother taking the interstates. Instead, I drove the back roads to search for forgotten small towns—those offbeat, indigenous places that once elected native-son presidents and enforced local dry laws long after Prohibition ended. (Some still do.)

  I drove a used Jeep Wrangler, a Sahara with a tan cloth top that I never did pull down because the wind gave me a sinus headache. I bought the Jeep because it also provided four-wheel-drive in rough and muddy terrain. (More accurately, I bought it simply because I felt like it.)

  Vanishing Ohio was not difficult to find. As rural horizons disappear, Ohio slowly transforms itself: farmland into subdivisions, meadows into shopping centers, old town characters into soccer moms. Sprawl knows no boundaries, no limits. It’s all over the place—even in ghost towns like Rialto in Butler County. Recently, I noticed a big sign that had popped up in a field: “Coming … Rialto Place.” Developers want to build a shopping strip near the site where a paper mill, the old canal town’s only large employer, once operated. Meanwhile, more small towns decline or die across the state, victims of a changing economy and social fragmentation.

  Like the pioneers of two centuries ago, modern suburbanites continue to push farther into the country, stripping the land and setting up far-flung outposts called subdivisions and shopping centers. Just when you think the process is slowing, it rises again. Rural Ohio is losing its cloistered innocence while being homogenized by Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and cyberspace. Old-fashioned, rural heritage, the kind on which Ohio was built, continues to disappear as the countryside gains more sophistication—or at least a higher level of communication. Development invades even the most unlikely of places, turning farms and historic battlefields into subdivisions, shopping centers, and ubiquitous fast-food pit stops.

  A town can’t change its location, yet location means the difference between death and survival. “I was hiking in Vinton County,” rural sociologist Joseph Donnermeyer told me, “and walked by three places where towns used to be. A lot of rural towns like these die because what caused them to exist went away—railroad, iron-ore developments, and industry. Towns not linked to another destiny have been most vulnerable.”

  Old towns are disappearing around Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, and other cities that are expanding like miniature galaxies. (Geauga County in suburban Cleveland has been identified as one of the top three examples of sprawl in the nation.) In my native Butler County in Greater Cincinnati, on land along Tylersville Road where farms once prospered, sprawl has edged into neighboring Liberty and Fairfield townships and is moving toward rural areas. Ignoring nearly two centuries of tradition, Union Township officials renamed their community West Chester Township. By encouraging development and erasing the township’s original name, the community has created a totally new facade. Local officials sought to market their product, or township, to other suburban people. Somebody who was ready to move to the Cincinnati area from, say, suburban New York, could more easily identify with the name West Chester than the more common Union Township. I can identify with a headline I recently read: “Driving on Tylersville? Pack a lunch.”


  Three decades after the suburban invasion started in full, Union Township’s small communities, including Tylersville and Gano, are ghost towns that have been replaced by subdivisions. I see the continuing losses as evolution, the end of an earlier lifestyle and heritage that dates to the founding of Ohio in 1803.

  Ghost towns fascinate me because they represent lost dreams. They don’t have to embody the ghost-town cliché: abandoned buildings, dusty floors, rotting joists. They can be any kind of town, even the inhabited. Ghost towns are scattered across the state and too numerous to count. Some came and went with the canals and railroads. Tornado, flood, fire, and disease killed others. Still others decreased in population when their people moved away. To qualify as a ghost town, a community must be declining, already gone, or taken over by a larger neighbor. Many are abbreviations of their former selves or buried beneath subdivisions. Most are forgotten or ignored. Some were planned but never developed. They remain towns only in name—ghostly places unknown to most people.

  I saw it all across the land. While driving along busy U.S. Route 35 in the Greene County city of Beavercreek, I passed strip malls and apartments. I wondered if local people knew that they live near Pants Down, a notorious woods known in the late 1800s for its large number of robberies. On Dayton-Xenia Road, near a ghost town called Marsetta, groups of unsavory drifters routinely grabbed travelers and stole their wallets and pants, thus assuring themselves that no victims would go looking for the police until nightfall.

  Such tales are disappearing now in a state in transition.

  I go on the road for a few days, return home to write, file chapters in manila folders, and head out again to see more towns and people. In cold type, no one ever moves away. No one ages. No one dies. (But in reality, a number of kind people have passed). Sometimes I return to towns so many times that I have to compress my visits for the story to make sense.