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

by Randy McNutt

  “The area around the resort had an interesting mix of people—the native country folks and the city dwellers who came to the spa,” Kelley said. “They had little in common and probably didn’t have that much contact inside the town. For years a lot of local people have tried desperately to help this county live down its tough reputation. The truth is, it was a wild, rough county. One hill feud continued for twenty years. When the old man of a feuding hill clan died many years ago, he was buried with a loaded shotgun and a fiddle. In the early 1900s, a newspaper reporter wrote, ‘All was quiet this week. Not one killing in Adams County.’ During Prohibition, the county sheriff sold moonshine out of the basement of the courthouse. On the other hand, we’ve had some sheriffs who were champion still-busters.”

  Taking gravelly Peach Mountain Lane, we found the clearing where Mineral Springs once existed. Instead of towns, we saw an Ohio historical marker:

  ADAMS COUNTY MINERAL SPRINGS

  Medicinal value of springs promoted by Charles Matheny 1840. First Hotel built 1864 and resort named Sodaville. Under ownership of General Benjamin Coates 1888–91, Smith Grimes 1891– 1908, and J. W. Rogers 1908–20. Mineral Springs Health Resort nationally known for its large hotel complex and recreational facilities. This hotel destroyed by fire 1924. Smaller hotel, built in 1904 a quarter mile north, continued operation through 1940.

  Looking around, we saw the decaying red roof of a Mineral Springs hotel protruding from the woods. Although the sun burned my arms, the air was cool and pleasant on the “mountain.”

  “The second hotel stood over there in that forest,” Kelley said. “It’s frustrating because our old family homes and even this hotel are left to rot. But around here, people don’t care. Down the road, a guy is selling a house that was built in 1805. What will happen to it? It will probably be torn down. It’s always the same story. In the early 1940s, when the Mineral Springs resort was nearly out of business, my mother worked in the hotel. The war was on then, and nobody wanted to come out here. Hotel owners used to tell people that they could spend some time in Mineral Springs and not worry about getting dressed up and dealing with pretense. ‘Social rivalry is unknown here,’ they always said.”

  At the four remaining houses in Mineral Springs, two women worked in their gardens and hardly noticed us. With the exception of the school, which has been restored, no public buildings remain. Pieces of the church lay scattered in a pile. Through the window of one house we saw a dozen looms. Kelley said a Cincinnati woman, Jeanette Macmillan Pruiss, comes out to conduct classes in weaving. Her late husband, the respected surgeon Bruce Macmillan, spent parts of summers in Mineral Springs. “He bought hundreds of acres,” Kelley said. “Fortunately for us, he bought and restored the old school and the cottage next door. He preserved our past. He was a world-class traveler. Doc always said, ‘I just returned from Hong Kong. Recently, I went to Berlin.’ I’d stand there and think I must be the world’s greatest hick. I hadn’t left Adams County.”

  When census takers arrived in Mineral Springs in 1890, they counted 108 permanent residents. The town had three ingredients for success: a post office, a train depot, and an express office. The resort included a bowling alley, a post office, a billiards parlor, hotels, and fancy gazebos. A brochure promised an idyllic summer retreat: “Hot and cold baths provided. Acetylene gas is in every room. The water is known to cure various diseases, including dyspepsia, indigestion, disordered liver, chronic irritation of the bowels, costiveness, hemorrhoids, chronic diarrhea, catarrh, diseases of the urinary organs, gravel and kidney diseases, female diseases, dropsy, ulcers, and all nervous and skin disorders.”

  Kelley laughed at the description and said, “When the owners ran out of diseases, I think they made up some more.”

  While Mineral Springs was attracting Cincinnati residents in the early 1900s, conservationist E. Lucy Braun discovered the woods around the town. Braun, who lived on the east side of Cincinnati in her own woods, loved the wilderness; to her, there was no better place to work than Mineral Springs. A pioneer of the modern environmental movement, Braun helped introduce the public to the word ecology and in the process became a nationally known botanist.

  Emma Lucy Braun was born in Cincinnati in 1889. Her fascination with the woods of Mineral Springs would come naturally, for she and her older sister, Annette (a well-known entomologist who worked with her sister), grew up with schoolteacher parents who encouraged their children to respect and appreciate the woods. In 1914, Braun earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati, where she went on to teach until 1948. In 1917, she helped establish the Cincinnati Wild Flower Preservation Society. In 1931, her Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas was the first book to inventory Ohio’s natural areas. Even after she retired from the university, Braun continued to roam the woods of Adams County as well as the great forests in eastern Ohio and in Kentucky. She became the first female president of the Ecological Society of America.

  “The Brauns are credited with discovering all the rare plant life here and publicizing it by writing about it,” Kelley said. “It all started in the ’20s and ’30s, when E. Lucy and her sister came out here. They brought in other botanists to see their discovery. It has had a lasting impact.”

  She called the area the Edge of Appalachia, and she loved it. In 1928, she wrote The Vegetation of the Mineral Springs Region of Adams County, which is still in print. In 1967, the National Park Service opened the E. Lucy Braun–Lynx Prairie Preserve in Adams County.

  The Mineral Springs resort peaked in the early 1900s when Alfred and Eugenia Bader bought the Mills Hotel, one of several hotels at the springs. The couple renamed the place Hotel Baderton and expanded the business. It operated from spring till late fall. The hotel featured a wide front porch with many rocking chairs, rooms furnished with brass beds, and a reading room. Log cabins—named Old Kentucky, Uncle Pat, Aunt Hannah, Blue Ridge, and Luke McLuke—surrounded the hotel on fifty-one acres, which included a long frame bowling alley, tennis courts, and riding trails. Visitors could stay there for twelve dollars a week, or twenty-one dollars for two people. (Special rates were offered for children and servants.)

  Alfred Bader called the resort the Switzerland of America. In a 1915 booklet, he wrote: “Here in this joyous Pleasure Ground the old grow young and the young grow younger … leave all your cares behind. Plunge headlong into Magnificent Virgin Nature and be riotously, gloriously happy. Here in this joyous VACATION LAND, this HEAVENLY HAVEN, you may soothe jaded nerves, restore appetite, cure indigestion, add pounds to your weight, elasticity to your step, sparkle to your eye, color to your cheek, and set the rich, red blood of perfect health racing electrically through every vein of your body.”

  “Modesty was not one of Bader’s most endearing traits,” Kelley said. “He was a promoter who made a lot of money in the five years that he owned the place.”

  He pulled some old black-and-white photographs from a folder: Sprawling wooden hotels painted white in 1900; E. E. Richards presiding over his open-air fruit cannery on Peach Mountain in 1908, while guests look over his produce; two young women smile as they sit on a stone wall at a hotel in 1910; two boys sit on a massive wall overlooking the Big Spring in 1910; and ten carpenters, who built the Upper Hotel in 1904 for R. B. Mills, sit on a stone edifice at the Lower Spring.

  When the Great Depression worsened in the 1930s, Mineral Springs nearly went out of business, a victim of hard times and changing lifestyles. The public had fallen in love with the automobile. The fortunate few with spending money wanted to travel and sightsee rather than spend a vacation at a rural health spa. The resort continued to decline and finally closed in the late 1940s. It could not survive postwar America’s fascination with cars, music, and kids.

  Nowadays, Mineral Springs lies near an eighty-eight-acre nature preserve, among an ocean of trees that cover the mountain. I walked with Kelley under the arms of ancient oaks that folded across the road like outstretched arms. At the old school, we stood on the porch and list
ened to the afternoon silence for a minute. I felt a rare serenity as I stared at a sky of deep blue. Slowly then, my ears tracked the screams of a distant blue jay. His melancholy lullaby plummeted, and we stood there looking at the houses and listening to the birds. Kelley shook his head as though perplexed by some minor mystery.

  We walked around and found a wall that surrounded the original Big Spring. Visitors carved their names and initials all over the stone. Some were professionally inscribed. Among the dozens of names were “Wm. Schaefer, RIP. O. 1880. Lizzie M. Seiwert, 1901. Rosalia G. Smith, 1900. Wm. G. Popp Wil. Del. 1901. C.A. Liberman, Geo’town O. ’04. O. J. Fetter, 1922. Harlan Walker, Dayton, O. 1904.”

  Behind the main spring basin, a larger, fancier inscription read: “TAKE A DRINK ON Wm. BRUCKMANN.”

  I said, “He must have been a politician or somebody important, because his name is prominently displayed. It’s as if he owned the place. Apparently the owners wanted people to see his name.”

  Kelley said, “He was a Cincinnati brewery owner in the early 1900s. For a long time I wondered about him. I wondered about all these people. Did they enjoy themselves out here? Were any of them cured by the medicinal waters? What did they do for entertainment on hot summer nights? Mr. Bruckmann was one of the resort’s wealthier patrons. Look at this inscription. It’s so beautifully carved in the rock. He must have been a big tipper. One day I realized that I had missed his humor—the double meaning behind the words, ‘Take a drink on … ’ It’s safe to say he came out here to drink more than beer.”

  Bruckmann came from a long line of German American brewers in Cincinnati. His family’s name was synonymous with beer in the Queen City. They distributed Dixie Beer, featuring a logo of a horse’s head and a horseshoe. The Bruckmann brewery operated from 1856 to 1950 at Ludlow and Spring Grove avenues. William was a jolly man and one of three brothers who took over the brewery from their father in 1887. All the Bruckmanns had good senses of humor, particularly William. He belonged to a recreation club that on Sundays operated a little steamer—not much larger than a big canoe—on the Miami and Erie Canal. He’d take people to and from his brewery.

  Probably Bruckmann inscribed his humorous line at Mineral Springs before December 1, 1918, when Congress prohibited the use of grain to brew beer, and thereby changed his and his company’s fate. Bruckmann must have found the news unthinkable. No beer? Has Congress gone mad? That feeling was shared by tens of thousands of Cincinnatians who consumed large quantities of locally made alcoholic beverages. To call Cincinnati a “wet” city was an understatement. It produced almost one-third of the beer made in Ohio. In those days, drinking was more than a passion in Cincinnati; it was an all-consuming hobby. With its hundreds of German beer gardens, breweries, and neighborhood saloons, Cincinnati was a community nearly drowning in booze—until January 18, 1920, that is, when the Wheel Café received its last shipment of beer, two days before the Eighteenth Amendment, or Prohibition, took effect. In one day, Cincinnati breweries closed and familiar Bruckmann bottles disappeared—Bruck’s Jubilee Beer and Big Ben Ale (“Always Right, Day or Night”). Other major names in Cincinnati’s brewing industry, including Christian Moerlein, disappeared. But Bruckmann did not. The firm jumped on the no-beer wagon and produced nonalcoholic cereal beverages—called “near beer”—and malt tonic, which Cincinnati residents considered poor substitutes for the real thing. Yet that’s all they had, unless they bought illegal brew from some three thousand speakeasies in the city limits.

  When Congress finally repealed its Prohibition laws, Cincinnati’s Bruckmann brothers, William and John C., were ready. On April 7, 1933, delivery trucks pulled out of Ludlow Avenue to deliver downtown Cincinnati’s first legal beer in thirteen years.

  Once again, the world was ready to take a drink on William Bruckmann.

  II

  Lost Legends

  If there be a matter-of-fact people on the earth, look at Ohio and you shall see them.

  No visions here—no poetry here—all tabernacles of the flesh—all stern realities.

  —Isaac Appleton Jewett,

  a Harvard graduate of 1831

  6

  Journey to the Center of Obscurity

  My hometown, Hamilton, Ohio, is perched on the banks of the Great Miami and the river of time. It is at once old and new, bold and understated, gothic and neosuburban. I’m never surprised to learn something new about something old. In fact, I expect it to happen in Hamilton.

  It is only fitting then that the tale of Captain John Cleves Symmes unfolds in Hamilton. Growing up, I heard the name Symmes mentioned nearly every day—Symmes Road, Symmes Township, the Symmes Tavern, and other area landmarks that bore the family name. Yet today few people realize that Symmes was once a controversial surname in the Ohio Country and the Northwest Territory. New Jersey native John Cleves Symmes, a former judge and a pioneer speculator, bought from Congress thousands of acres between the Little Miami and Great Miami Rivers, in what is now southern Ohio. In a transaction fiasco, however, the judge sold land he didn’t own, causing financial turmoil among the pioneers and political battles with Governor Arthur St. Clair. Because the Symmes Purchase was the biggest real estate deal of all time in our area, the name Symmes echoes across the centuries.

  Captain John Cleves Symmes was—and still is—mistaken for his irritating uncle. But the captain did not speculate on property. He speculated on ideas. He was more of a Don Quixote, tilting toward the polar caps and loving it. His theory of a hollow earth spawned a popular fantasy novel of the early 1800s, influenced the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and nearly convinced the United States to search for a strange race that supposedly lived inside the earth. (In 1863, French fantasy writer Jules Verne further promoted a hollow planet in Journey to the Center of the Earth.) Although the majority of Symmes’s contemporaries ridiculed him, his idea has continued to attract a small number of followers over the last two centuries.

  Captain John Cleves Symmes as he looked during his tours to the East. Drawing by Dan Chudzinski.

  Despite my familiarity with Hamilton’s history, I didn’t know that Symmes is buried beneath a hollow metal globe in old Ludlow Park, on North Third Street near downtown. In our Lane Public Library, the only resources available on him are a biographical paper in the local history room and a listing in a reference book called Roadside Attractions. Symmes’s monument is listed neither in the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce’s walking tour nor in any tourist brochures. No signs direct visitors its way. According to the chamber, only about a dozen people a year inquire about the monument.

  For a century and a half, Captain Symmes remained an obscure figure in Hamilton’s past—practically forgotten. Then in 1991, Historic Hamilton, Inc. hired sculptor Edgar Tafur to restore his monument, which had become scarred, covered by graffiti, and worn smooth by the weather. Tafur patched the damaged sandstone base, waterproofed it, and placed it on a new four-foot pedestal, increasing its stature to nine and a half feet. He also added bronze plaques with the original inscriptions that had been obliterated by time: “Captain John Cleves Symmes was a philosopher, and the originator of Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres and Polar Voids.”

  Tafur’s work restored a measure of interest in the good captain. Reporters wrote news stories about his rejuvenated globe, and the city finally recognized the piece for what it is—sculpture. Then, within months, the captain quietly fell back into oblivion. The only Symmes who mattered was the judge. In early 2004, however, I was surprised to learn through the Internet that a group of Symmes’s followers, the International Society for a Complete Earth, planned—ever so tentatively—its first Hollow Earth Convention. If and when the bash ever begins, it will be held in the only place on earth worthy of such a gathering—in Hamilton, Ohio. Founded in 1977, the society is operated by an anonymous German naval captain who claims to have visited the inner world. His followers say it is ruled by a “tall, blond, blue-eyed super race” called the Arianni, whose flying saucers patrol the worl
d’s skies to stay informed about what we surface creatures are doing. In a 1978 interview with Chicago newspaper columnist Bob Greene, Captain Ritter Von X said, “People will call us crackpots, will try to ridicule us and even stop us. But we are not crackpots. We are a small group [more than a thousand members] made up of physicians, engineers, and pilots.”

  Out of curiosity, I visited Symmes’s grave in the park one gray winter day and pondered Ritter Von X’s words. Other surface creatures walked past the monument without comment. Probably I was the only passerby who realized that a man and his dream lay beneath the globe. Other walkers never even glanced at it, as though it did not exist. I stood there wondering if the ghost of the captain ever returns to this forlorn spot to ponder his hollow ideas, or if he ever shoots off to the polar caps to see if they have ever opened. As I thought about it, I realized that his monument is such a solitary and final icon—burial without a headstone. Nearby, young men shot basketball and paid no attention to the black iron fence that surrounds the monument. A dark gray sky set a somber tone in the city park that’s bordered on three sides by old houses. At least the place has a theme: On the north side of the park stands another nineteenth-century black iron fence; on the south, about eighty small pillars topped by round stone balls that resemble globes.

  As I started to walk away, reporter’s notebook in hand, a boy no older than twelve approached me.

  “What are you doing with that notebook, mister? You the police?”

  “No. I’m writing about this historic site.”