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

by Randy McNutt

  Perhaps that’s because by 1860 Louisa had become a Victorian baby machine. A native of Rockingham County, Virginia, Hiram Larrick had come to Ohio years earlier. He sought financial security but ended up needing a fortune to pay for all his children. After marrying on August 26, 1838, the couple produced nine children together—six girls and three boys: Elizabeth, 1838; Sarah, 1842; Lucy, 1846; Mary, 1847; Martha, 1849; Susan, 1851; John, 1853; Hiram, 1856; Ada, 1858; and George, 1859.

  Dalton explained: “In 1861, after rearing her oldest children, Louisa separated from her husband’s bed and board and moved into this cottage in town. Imagine the audacity of that woman! Separation and divorce were not considered minor social offenses in Victorian Ohio. In this case the woman had initiated the separation, which was unthinkable.

  “That summer, her brother visited her after being sent west by his doctor to recuperate from consumption. Few people in those days ever survived consumption, or tuberculosis. He also suffered from asthma and other respiratory problems. His doctor could think of only one strategy—go out into the sunshine and warm air—which is what Stetson finally did. Out in Missouri, he took up with some wildcat gold miners. Another gold rush was going on then. He went the distance with them, more than seven hundred miles. He didn’t get rich. When his strength returned, he started back to Philadelphia.”

  One night on the trail, on his way to the boomtown Central City, Colorado, Stetson told a cowboy that he could make a fur hat without tanning the leather. Using the hides of rabbits, Stetson felted a strange-looking hat that protected its wearer against the rain and the sun—exactly what one of the cowboys had requested that night and bet Stetson that he could not make. When he arrived in Central City, Stetson sold the hat to a Mexican cowboy for a five-dollar gold piece. It was the first Stetson cowboy hat. With it came an idea: manufacture the hats.

  “On the way home, John stopped in Waynesville to see his sister, the only person he could think of who might help him,” Dalton said. “He needed money. He had failed in the gold rush. He told her he wanted to start a one-man hat factory in Philadelphia. Louisa listened to his dreams and schemes, and grubstaked him with sixty dollars to help open the John Stetson hat factory. Sixty dollars was a lot of money to Louisa, probably her whole savings. John returned to Philadelphia and in 1865 opened a small factory with only a hundred dollars. He bought ten dollars worth of fur, went to work, and created the hat of the West, which he later named the Boss of the Plains.”

  With its six-inch crown and seven-inch brim, the hat looked like a sombrero. It could carry a half-gallon of water but received the nickname the ten-gallon hat. At first, Stetson sold his hats to shops in Philadelphia. When customers had little interest, he sent free hats to clothing distributors across the southwest. Soon, a few orders trickled in, then more, and within a year many western residents were wearing the Stetson. It became synonymous with cowboys; they used it to shade their eyes, beat out campfires, carry grain, drink water from, sleep on as a pillow, and whip their horses. In 1885, as sales continued to increase, Stetson opened a large factory in North Philadelphia and hired four thousand workers. In the 1890s, the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police started wearing a Stetson hat, as did Canadian soldiers who served in battle in South Africa. The hat became a North America icon.

  “He built the business into a multi-million-dollar operation,” Dalton said. “He also manufactured dress top hats for gentlemen and, of course, his biggest seller, what we call the cowboy hat. Had he not come to Waynesville, and had his sister not listened to his dream, the American cowboy could have gone hatless—or, at least, not as well prepared to deal with his environment.”

  Dalton walked up onto the veranda of the Larrick cottage and peeked inside. The shop was now closed for the day. He started talking slowly: “We believe it is the ghost of Louisa who haunts this place; she lived out the rest of her life here and had little contact with her brother. She led a rather sad life. In 1887, the Larrick family contacted John Stetson and asked him for $250, the final payoff on a $5,000 loan that was the family farm mortgage, and John refused. By then, $5,000 was a paltry amount to Stetson. He was a multimillionaire. Somehow, the Larrick family managed to scrape the money together, though, without Uncle John’s help. This happened two years before Hiram Larrick died. Not that John excluded his sister completely. Every Christmas, John sent hats back to the men in the Larrick family, but he was a terrible skinflint who sent them ordinary hats and the women common clothing. Yet in 1889 he paid $16 million for a broke Florida college, Deland, and put it back on its feet. Now it’s the Stetson law school in St. Petersburg. I went there and could feel Stetson’s personality all over the place.

  “Well, Louisa, I’m sure, felt slighted. After all, she’s the one who built his fortune with her grubstake. He did leave her one legacy, though. As I tell everyone, it wasn’t stock in the business, a million dollars, or even a special hat named in her honor. It was tuberculosis. It struck her down in 1879, when she died poor. Meanwhile, John B. lived on—until 1906, when his company was selling two million hats a year.”

  John Stetson did repay his sister the sixty dollars. He built his business and fulfilled his destiny—live a long life and prosper. He once said, “There is no advertisement equal to a well-pleased customer.” He had millions of them. He left a fortune of more than $10 million. But after World War II, tastes changed. Men stopped wearing hats all the time, even in the southwest. By 1960, his firm was still making 4.5 million hats annually. In 1971 the John B. Stetson Co. main plant in Philadelphia closed, after making hats for 105 years. That year the Stevens Hat Manufacturing Co. of St. Joseph purchased the firm’s remaining inventory and equipment to continue making the famous Stetson hat.

  “Poor Louisa couldn’t help but feel left out of her brother’s success,” Dalton said. “I imagine she shed some tears in this house. But who’s to say? She died in this very place and was carried across the Little Miami River to the Miami Cemetery, where everybody assumes she has been sleeping peacefully. But other people who have owned this building over the years would disagree. Every so often, some unusual things happen. One owner, an antiques dealer, told me she was reading in the back when she heard a commotion in the shop. She walked out there and saw something she will never forget. On the walls hung graduated iron ladles, used to dip lard during hog butchering. They were heavy. All of a sudden, they started swinging together, right on the wall, as if on cue and in time. No breeze could move those big things. The woman just stood there, totally aghast. Another time, a visitor to the shop asked her who was baking gingerbread in the kitchen. (This happened in the early 1970s, when they still had a kitchen in here. Of course, no one was baking anything at the time.)

  “On another occasion, a young policeman saw a figure in the north window as he made his rounds at two A.M. It was on a moonlit night. He felt a sense of wanting to turn around and look over his shoulder. He saw something, a pale figure. When he got the nerve to take a better look, the figure dissolved before his eyes. We do know that Louisa has been seen in the last fifteen years. A neighbor across the street glanced over and saw a woman in the doorway. He described her as small with dark hair. He thought it was the shop owner, but his wife reminded him that the owner was away for the weekend. When he looked back, the figure dissolved into the wall behind her. He said she wore a print dress with a high collar. A Larrick descendant once told me that the figure fit the description of Louisa—right down to the dark hair and small frame.

  “Only a few summers ago, a young sales clerk was working alone in the antiques shop when she heard a loud pounding on the front door, just before closing time at five P.M. She looked and saw nothing. She heard it again, and looked and saw a gloved hand—an old-fashioned woman’s glove. The woman kept pulling on the doorknob. The clerk yelled, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re closed. Come back tomorrow.’ The sound continued and the clerk rushed to the door and opened it, expecting to find an old woman. But again, she saw nothing. She closed up for
the day and went out front, where her father waited to drive her home. She asked him who the old woman was at the door a few minutes ago. He said, ‘I’ve been sitting out in front for fifteen minutes, and nobody has come up to the door.’”

  Dennis Dalton looked at me and didn’t say a word. He finished his tour and we stepped off the porch and headed briskly down Main Street. If I had been wearing a hat that afternoon, I would have tipped it generously to Louisa Stetson Larrick.

  11

  Travels in the Great Black Swamp

  Nature took twenty-five thousand years to create the Great Black Swamp and man fifty years to strip it. The glacier did the heaviest work, grinding the earth like a bowling ball on an anthill. At Cleveland, the ice was eight thousand feet thick. Retreating fourteen thousand years ago, it dammed a poorly drained area on the eastern end of the Lake Erie basin to form one of nine ancient lakes, which eventually dried and left sand ridges in the clay soil the way ridges form on a beach. Along the newer Lake Erie, the lake plains evolved into a larger pear-shaped region in northwest Ohio, where black organic matter piled on glacial soil to nurture swampy forests for ten thousand years. It was the ultimate compost heap.

  Swamp chestnuts produced millions of nuts that covered the water and ground and choked other young trees. In this dark, wet place, armies of spiny hellrats—flashing their snouts and sharp claws, they resembled weasels—probed the muck for nuts. Another nut-eating dinosaur, the American harrack, ate the nuts and the hellrats.

  Centuries later, before the arrival of the white man, the Great Black Swamp remained untouched and covered by water nine months a year. Vegetation grew wildly, becoming by the 1700s the largest deciduous swamp forest in North America. Its soil was a black, oozing muck. An early observer described the swamp as thoroughly impregnated with lime, forming a tough, waxy mud that stuck to wagon wheels.

  According to some estimates, the swamp measured 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. The worst part was an area as large as Connecticut, between the Maumee and the Auglaize rivers. It had a split personality; just when it appeared to be all wet, dark, and muddy, a prairie would pop up to tantalize visitors. Some scientists believe the swamp stretched from Lake Erie to New Haven, Indiana. Because nature doesn’t provide boundaries like fences, no one knows for certain where the swamp began and ended. Most people agree that it consisted of eight contiguous counties, including Lucas, Wood, Paulding, Hancock, Defiance, and Putnam. Neighboring counties were swampy enough for many people to consider them Black Swamp territory. They included parts of Van Wert, Seneca, Ottawa, Fulton, Sandusky, Erie, and Henry counties. (I call these places the swamp suburbs.)

  Pioneers did not draw much distinction between areas inside and outside the swamp. By more liberal estimates, its mucky fingers extended as far south as Allen and Mercer counties, north to Williams and Lucas, east to Hardin, and west to Indiana. (An old surveyor’s wall map, which hangs in the study of the Sherman House in Lancaster, shows the Great Black Swamp covering Ohio’s entire northwest quarter, all the way to the Indiana border in the west and the Darke County line in the south.) “The perfect uniformity of the soil has given the forest a homogeneous character,” historian Henry Howe wrote of the swamp in the late 1800s. “The trees are all generally the same height, so that when viewed at a distance through the haze, the forest appears like an immense blue wall stretched across the horizon.”

  By the time I traveled in the area, everything had changed. I drove for miles without seeing a single tree. Then I’d see clumps of them. I never did find a swamp, and only one marsh. When I visited my wife’s family in Van Wert County, I was surprised to learn that their farm—started by her German immigrant grandfather in the late 1800s—once stood on the swamp’s edge. Nowadays, few people know that a big swamp once existed there, or that their ancestors stripped primeval forests, set up logging and tile-making industries, and later established the former swamp as one of the nation’s richest farming areas. They transformed the land, created an agrarian culture, and in the process eliminated the songbirds, panthers, bears, and wolves.

  Pioneers saw the forests as a challenge to their collective ax. They chopped, sawed, smashed, bumped, banged, and pulled down as many trees as possible. Or they held “burning bees,” competitions to burn down the forests. The earliest settlers found 95 percent of Ohio filled with trees—twenty-five million acres of virgin forest. (Today, naturalists identify only about seven hundred Ohio forested acres as virgin.) Because of wet conditions, Ohio’s nine northwestern counties developed last, from 1850 to 1900. By 1930, they were the most heavily farmed counties in the state. Probably the largest forest left in northwest Ohio is in Paulding County—three hundred acres of old-growth ash, walnut, basswood, red maple, oak, and hickory.

  Seemingly obsessed, the whole state considered tree-cutting its patriotic duty. And in the swamp, where trees were overly abundant, the cutting took on the fervor of a religious ritual.

  Soldiers called the swamp their personal hell. Its bad reputation spread throughout the West. Simon Girty, the hated white renegade who led the Indian attack on Fort Henry in 1777, hid in the Black Swamp, thus adding to his—and its—sinister image. (Today he would be called a terrorist.) There in the mud, Mother Nature joined forces with the enemy. When General Anthony Wayne signed the Treaty of Greenville with the Indians in 1795, he generously gave them some of the Black Swamp.

  Wayne had found and burned Ottawa cornfields on lowlands of the Maumee and Auglaize. Later, he wrote that he had never “beheld such immense fields of corn, in any part of America, from Canada to Florida.”

  While standing in the swamp’s woods, people couldn’t see the sun. This unnerved them. Dark shadows covered everything. The Indians refused to live there; they entered only the river bottoms to hunt and trap. In the early 1800s, the pioneers settled on its edges. Only the fearless chopped down trees and built cabins in the swamp. It was so dense that a hunter got lost only a short distance from Fort Meigs; for three days he wandered among the trees and wolves, until he accidentally walked into the fort’s walls, at which point he did not recognize his wife or children or even know his name. A blacksmith named Jacob Nofziger wasn’t so lucky: He tried to go from the Tiffin River to the Maumee and was never seen again. Neither were his oxen, wagon, and belongings. Another settler, Christian Lauber, tried to cross a creek, but his exhausted oxen stopped in the middle and refused to move. Returning the next morning, he and a neighbor found the team frozen in the water. They broke the ice, freed the animals, and slid the provisions across the icy creek. When traveler William Woodbridge arrived at Fort Meigs on January 18, 1815, he wrote: “My great terrour, the Black swamp, is passed. No part of this road seems so very bad as has been represented, but the evil in it is in its perfect sameness; in a moderately wet season it will be generally covered by two or three inches of water and mud nearly a foot, with a few exceptions of dry spots.”

  Such conditions—and fear of the unknown—convinced many travelers to bypass the swamp on their way west, although the new route required them to travel hundreds of additional miles by wagon. Most travelers never regretted the inconvenience. Experienced frontiersman William Henry Harrison, who fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, said a couple of trips across the Black Swamp could kill a brigade of packhorses. American army scouts feared the swamp, but troops at Fort Meigs were awed by its dark wonders. They saw fish so plentiful that their jumping frightened horses on Maumee fords. In keeping with the swamp’s larger-than-life reputation, a soldier in Wayne’s cavalry company at Fort Defiance once claimed he caught a fish so large that his entire unit feasted on it.

  In late winter, mud and water often stood three feet deep, making passage impossible. The swamp had little natural drainage. Two-thirds of it was under water. As late as 1870, brave people ice-skated the thirty-five miles from Paulding to Van Wert. In summer, water stood in big pools, breeding black clouds of gnats. The wet, low environment encouraged hundreds of flora species, including basswood
, elm, ironwood, oak, cottonwood, ash, maple, sycamore, poplar, hickory, beech, and black walnut. An early surveyor wrote in his journal: “Water! Water! Water! tall timber! deep water! Not a blade of grass growing or a bird to be seen.” Added Williams County pioneer George W. Perky: “We read that God divided the land from the water, but here is a place He forgot.”

  During the War of 1812, American and British generals knew the swamp cut off the western United States from Michigan. If the Canadians fortified western Lake Erie, they could use the swamp as a buffer and the British navy could control the lake. American scout Robert Lucas, who would become an Ohio governor, realized the swamp’s strategic value, so he traveled from the Maumee to the advancing American army to make reports. His journal contained the first reference to the Black Swamp: “Traveled about twenty-five miles, a very rainy day and then encamped in what is called the Black Swamp, had a disagreeable night of wet and Musketoes.”

  Disagreeable? Travelers saw dark mists heading toward them—mosquitoes! They grabbed their napes, and saw blood all over their hands. Animals were bitten so many times, they almost went mad. Malaria, then called swamp fever, was common; some people contracted it so often that they became immune. Newcomers died from it. It turned the skin yellow, caused violent chills and high fever, and left the lucky ones exhausted. Only quinine helped relieve the symptoms. When immigrants dug the canal in the early 1840s, they lived in shanties and practically lived on whiskey and quinine. They breathed air polluted with malarial effluvia from the swamps, and as a result they caught the fever and ague. On the Maumee River, “the fever spared no one,” the Black Swamp pioneer Louis Simonis wrote in 1835. The area was a “forsaken, desolate, ague-smitten, tangled, and inhospitable wilderness where diseases spread with rapidity and with relentless mortality.” Strangely, the Indians did not seem to come down with malaria and other fevers as often as whites, perhaps because they had developed immunity.