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

by Randy McNutt

  While on the road, I talked to small-town people and tried to imagine what their Main Streets looked like a century ago. Some towns were totally changed; few businesses remained. Sometimes on my trips I’d meet young people and wonder: Why do they stay? So little is left for them to do. Schools are closing. People are moving away. Businesses are shutting down. Between 1990 and 2000, 59 percent of Ohio’s 264 incorporated villages (with populations of lower than 500) lost population. In northwest Ohio, 75 percent of the towns lost population.

  By 1975, people had started calling Ashville a dying community. A study by University of Cincinnati researchers concluded that Ashville had one of the state’s lowest community identity scores; people didn’t know much about their town’s history, and did not care to preserve it. By 1982, however, Ashville had one of the highest ratings in the state. “What happened?” Hines asked. “Our museum happened. The train station restoration happened.”

  On a budget of less than $10,000 a year, Ashville volunteers operate a museum that has received national attention. In addition, they have helped the town build a modern library, a home for the elderly, new schools, and a fire station, and they have granted university scholarships.

  Improvements began in 1975, when Hines and Morrison collected local historical artifacts, organized the Ashville Area Historical Society, and considered using the old Norfolk and Western Railroad station as a meeting place. When the owner suggested tearing the building down, historians discovered and rescued artifacts from the attic. “We had no idea they were in there,” Hines said. “We also didn’t know it was one of the original Scioto Valley Railroad system stations. We found old handbills, flags, dated spikes, receipts, lanterns, and even old shoes from the Scioto Valley Railroad that made the building eligible for a National Register of Historic Places designation.”

  About this time, two local families donated the old refrigerated Zero Locker building (formerly the Dreamland Theater) to the village. The volunteers took it over, set up their exhibits, and invited a television reporter from Columbus. The reporter referred to it as Ohio’s small-town museum, and a few years later the society officially adopted that name.

  When it opened in 1978, nobody paid much attention. Even today, it remains obscure to Ohioans. Visitors can find an eclectic blend of the routine and the weird. What I like about it is its local nature: You’ll see a baseball glove used by a member of the high school’s 1950s championship baseball team, and a display of related newspaper clippings.

  Thanks to the museum, Ohio now has a rare seventeen-star United States flag. After its discovery in an attic in town in 2001, the flag was donated to the society. Group officers sent it to Textile Preservation Associates of Keedysville, Maryland, to be analyzed. The company reported that the flag is authentic—made with materials consistent with its age. The seventeen-star flag was never an official American flag; it is thought to be a transitional flag made to celebrate Ohio’s acceptance into the Union. A record of the flag does exist, however, in an 1837 political cartoon. Sixteen white stars form a circle around one star in the center. The Historical Society has ordered a custom display case made of buckeye “to further signify the flag’s symbolic tribute to Ohio.” For the 2003 bicentennial, the flag was displayed at the Adena Education Center in Chillicothe.

  The flag and other unusual items have given the museum cult status among the people who appreciate such things. They particularly enjoy the old traffic signal, which hangs in the museum now and features a hand that slowly rotates across each bulb, to show how much time is left before the light changes. The signal is the museum’s main attraction. Editors of the New Roadside America list the museum among their top twenty-five American museums and call it “a cocktail of Americana that’s just plain fun to drink in.”

  This delights Lemmon. He knows all the artifacts and stories and saves them as a part of the town’s fading folklore. He said the town used to be the home of characters—people who dared to be different without being rude. Call them eccentrics, but they were respected years ago. In today’s homogenized society, we either ignore such people or make them television stars. Lemmon’s mission is to preserve their memories, and in the process the history of Ohio. But Ashville has had its share of nonhuman characters, too, and they are honored equally.

  “Chic-Chic the rooster was a tough old bird,” Lemmon said. “He was one aggressive little guy. If he’d meet you walking down the street in Ashville, you’d better move out of the way. He’d peck you. He’d walk straight up to you and stick you good. Well, Chic-Chic was a smart bird, too. His owner, Mrs. A. B. Cooper, would send him down to the store. She’d say in a high-pitched voice, [Lemmon imitates an older woman], ‘Now, Chic-Chic, honey, are you hungry? Do you want a snack?’ Oh, man, that got old Chic-Chic riled. He’d cock his head to the side and crow real loud. Sure, he was hungry! He was always hungry. He had it made with Mrs. Cooper. So she’d pull out a dime and lay it on the kitchen floor. Old Chic-Chic, he’d reach down there with his beak and pick up that dime every time.”

  Hines snickered. “Yeah, Chic-Chic didn’t have a degree, but he was the world’s smartest rooster.”

  “Old Mrs. Cooper,” Lemmon said, “why, she’d open the screen door and out he’d prance, walking as big as you please right down to Brinkers’ Confectionary store on Long Street. The owner, Clyde Brinkers, knew Chic-Chic, see, so when he saw that rooster coming, he’d open the door for him and put out his special bowl of favorite corn feed. Chic-Chic would drop the dime and start eating. When he’d finish, he’d strut over to the bus stop and cockadoodle-doo up a storm to all the travelers. Oh, they loved him. Everybody did. This went on for years. Pretty soon, Chic-Chic became a local celebrity. People came to town just to see that rooster. It’s a wonder Mrs. Cooper didn’t charge them for the show. People called him the King of Ashville. When old Chic-Chic died back in 1955, his story didn’t die. No, sir. His legend grew even bigger. Now, every visitor to our museum hears about Chic-Chic. We even have the famous Chic-Chic display.”

  He pointed to a little shrine with a taxidermied rooster and a newspaper story about Chic-Chic. (The fowl on display is not Chic-Chic, but some other unfortunate bird.)

  “Now, one of my other favorite stories is Buster the dog,” Lemmon continued. “Buster was one of them terrier dogs—hey, Jim, what kind of terrier was Buster? A fox terrier?”

  “Naw. A Boston terrier.”

  “No, no. Wasn’t he a fox terrier? Or a what-do-you-call-it … ?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, okay. Anyway, he was a Boston terrier who had never been to Boston, an athletic little dog. Clyde Brinkers owned him. Clyde and Mrs. Cooper, they owned the two strangest animals this town has never known. Buster’d jump through hoops and up into his master’s arms and jump on his back and run through his legs. Words can’t do him justice. He was well liked, too.”

  According to local legend, Buster would bark approvingly every time somebody spoke the name Herbert Hoover. Whenever somebody said Al Smith, the New York Democrat who opposed Hoover in 1928, Buster would growl.

  That year, Brinkers thought he might as well take the politically astute dog into the voting booth, and put his paws up on the voting lever. Soon everyone in town was talking about it. When the Depression hit in 1929, however, some people blamed the dog because he voted for Hoover.

  “It’s all true,” Lemmon said. “One day Clyde took Buster with him to vote, as a joke. Clyde somehow put that dog’s footprint on the ballot when they was in the voting booth. What he did was, he allowed that darn dog to vote Republican! The next day, the whole town had heard about it. Now, some people weren’t upset at all about a dog votin’. It wasn’t considered sacrilegious or anything. The problem they had was that the dog had voted Republican.”

  “Tell him about the movie,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, yeah! Buster is in our town movie, made in 1937. A. B. Cooper, the man whose wife owned Chic-Chic, owned a Pure Oil Station. He hired a guy to come to town to
take movies on 35mm film. Even though times were hard at the end of the Depression, A. B. wanted a permanent record of life in Ashville. So he hired the movie man to shoot all kinds of things that people did. Of course, Buster was one of the stars, doing his tricks and all. Say, fellows, when did old Buster die?”

  No response.

  “We sell the movie on videocassette for fifteen dollars,” he said. “We have to be careful with that original negative of film, though, because if that nitrate becomes unstable, it’ll blow up.”

  “It’s quite an explosive movie,” somebody said.

  Another popular attraction at the museum, Lemmon said, is its moon-dust sifter, invented by a man who grew up near Ashville and later worked for NASA.

  Lemmon explained: “We had a guy named Teddy Boor who invented a lot of things, including a corn shocker. It would do the job, too. The only trouble was, the local corn pickers didn’t like being replaced by a machine. So they destroyed it—at least they went through the motions. They stacked corn all around the machine and set the whole thing on fire. They burned the corn-shocking machine, but Teddy rescued it, rebuilt it, and kept it going on the sly. Now, Teddy was something else. He also invented our local traffic light. It’s one of a kind, the oldest working traffic light in America, and you see it hanging right in the middle of our museum. People say it looks like it come from a flying saucer.”

  I stood under the cone-shaped aluminum object, watched it carefully as it blinked, and thought that it looked like a prop from a 1930s Flash Gordon film. When I stared at it at just the right angle, I thought I was looking into the angular face of an alien space traveler with bulbous eyes and thick eyelashes (the covers on top of the lights).

  “It’s worth the trip to town just to see it,” Charlie Morrison said. “I’d drive a hundred thousand miles to see it because it’s the only one of its kind in the world. It’s even been mentioned on Oprah.”

  “Brother, that’s big,” Lemmon said.

  “Oh, yeah,” another guy said in a monotone that hinted toward the sarcastic.

  Apparently her show is the modern index of fame, even in Ashville.

  “The Ohio Department of Transportation people liked that darn signal so much,” Lemmon said, “that they asked us to bring it up to Columbus so they could examine it. They hanged it up in their building, and called it an ingenious contraption. For fifty years, up until 1982, it hung right here in Ashville, at Long and Main streets. People got used to it. We never had an accident there either. People knew its rhythm, and how it worked. Come to think of it, that’s sort of how this whole town works—a rhythm to it.”

  And the beat goes on.

  III

  Vanishing Ohio

  Now most people live only on the horizontal, and our time is space: miles and numbers, quantities and travel. The enduring present lives at the point where these lines cross.

  —Donald Hall

  14

  A Little Good News

  By noon on any Wednesday, Dale Schlabach, the Amish blacksmith of Sugarcreek, puts down his hammer and walks up Main Street to buy a copy of the Budget. Then he returns to his little red shop to find out who died, who married, who was born, who traveled, and who planted the most corn. This qualifies as breaking news around Sugarcreek.

  Schlabach and his neighbors all enjoy the Budget, Sugarcreek’s local paper combined with an international Amish journal. Newspaper owners in Sugarcreek distribute the separate Amish edition throughout the world; at home, they wrap it inside the local news section. As most of the world sees it, the Amish paper is a weekly anachronism defying convention in favor of a deeper tradition. No news of wars, movies, business, or fashion stocks the pages; no comics or horoscopes appear. In fact, the Budget should have died a long time ago, according to most publishing odds. Yet it continues, a newspaper hopelessly and contentedly out of touch with the times and a ghost of newspapering’s past. In that way it’s like the Amish. Rejecting the electric cord, they use battery-powered alarm clocks but they also milk cows by hand and use buggies and shun the world’s modern ways.

  The Budget is strong in northeast Ohio, the home of the world’s largest Amish population. Their ancestors began in Europe as a part of the Anabaptist movement that started in Switzerland in 1525. One of the Anabaptist leaders, Jacob Amman, left the main group because he believed it was too liberal; he preferred plain dress and old customs. His followers became known as the Amish. A similar group, led by Menno Simons, became known as the Mennonites. The Amish came to America in the late 1700s and early 1800s and settled in Pennsylvania. By the 1970s, they had arrived in large numbers in northeast Ohio farm country, especially in western Tuscarawas and eastern Holmes counties. The area now claims fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand Amish people.

  At the news office, I met Don Sprankle, editor, general manager, Lutheran. He laughed at my observation. From a small brown frame building with yellow trim and alpine photographs inside, he directs a newspaper with a circulation of twenty thousand. “Not bad for a town of about two thousand people,” he said.

  Reading the Amish paper is an unusual experience for a reporter who has worked at modern daily newspapers. There is plenty of essential “news,” yet no stories about politicians’ broken promises, war, terrorism, bank robberies, and murders. In this way, perhaps, the Budget serves as the ultimate modern paper by fulfilling the fantasy of every suburban soccer mom who pleads with newspaper publishers, “No more bad news, please.”

  On publication day, Sprankle sat back in his office and looked over the crowded, dense pages of the freshly printed eighteen-page national, or Amish, edition. It could be mistaken for a museum piece, or for any small-town paper of 1910, at least until the reader finds the unusual Amish and Mennonite news stories. Six hundred correspondents, called scribes, write about their communities from all over the world. They jointly or individually write about 450 dispatches a week. In exchange, they receive pens, paper, postage, and envelopes—but no money. “It’s an amazing workforce,” explained Keith Rathbun, the assistant publisher. “We have a bigger staff than the New York Times.” Whether in Paraguay or Canada or the United States, a scribe usually starts his or her report with the date it was written and a description of the weather conditions. Scribes avoid controversy. Their stories are like short letters from home. Reports fall under bold, unusual datelines: Carbon Hill, Ohio; Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania; Gonzales, Texas. Paragraphs are lean: “It feels like autumn now. Silos are mostly filled. Some fourth crop hay has been put away.” And: “May 20—rain again today. Somebody said this was the fourteenth Sunday we had rain. Farmers are starting to make hay, but not much hay weather so far.”

  Reports from scribes are glimpses into Ohio’s and America’s past and a little of the present. “I haven’t heard the coyotes howl once this month,” wrote David Mast of Mondovi, Wisconsin. “I always loved to hear that lonesome, eerie howl during the night.”

  Another scribe from Aylmer, Ontario, Canada, discussed an important social problem: “At the same meeting at Elmos, another topic was presented for us to think about, and that is the long-range effects of the computer age on our [Amish] churches, and what we ought to be doing to steer clear of the dangers. The question was raised as to how an earlier generation was able to sense the profound effect the automobile would have on society and on the churches, so that it was decided not to allow the ownership of cars. Are we in the same point today in the computer revolution, having already accepted their forerunner, the calculators?”

  Wrapped around scribes’ reports are advertisements for flycatchers, hand-cranked bread kneaders, kerosene-powered refrigerators, steel wagon wheels, cook stoves, and treadle sewing machines—in short, things that the rest of us see in antiques shops and museums. With its reports from Amish settlements all over the world, the Budget is a communications link between a separated people, who are as scattered as the November leaves. They read columns called “Our Suffering Brethren,” about people who are still persecuted f
or their religious beliefs. Another column, “Es Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch Eck,” discusses everything from Amish recipes to quilting. And where else but the Budget could a reader ask where to buy Cornell Horse Liniment, or what to use for poison ivy? One reader advised another: “For the ivy use homemade lye soap. Make wet and rub on affected area. This is also good for chiggers and other itching. We have found it very effective.”

  Contrast this old-time approach with the Budget’s desire to stay in the public eye. (Some things change slowly, while others, like the Budget, evolve in ultra-slow motion.) Although the newspaper is still firmly connected to the turn of the twentieth century, its owners understand that they must serve all of their readers. So they have started a company Web site—www.thebudgetnewspaper.com. It will serve local readers as well as any Mennonites (and any renegade Amish) who don’t mind using the World Wide Web to get information. When I looked up the paper’s new site in 2004, it told me that I was visitor number 663.

  Progress and technology notwithstanding, the newspaper cannot be fully explained or appreciated without first knowing Sugarcreek, a town fiercely proud of its past. The town has proclaimed itself the Little Switzerland of Ohio (one third of its people are of Swiss descent, said historian George R. Smith, associate editor of the newspaper). “Of course,” he said, “our Amish brothers came from Switzerland too, but they wandered around all over Europe first. So we really don’t really count them as Swiss.”

  Sugarcreek is a prosperous country town that is preoccupied with all things Swiss. Every September, more than a hundred thousand tourists converge on the town for its Swiss Festival. People expect to see black Amish buggies, an old Amish newspaper, and yellow Swiss cheese. They are not disappointed. These trappings of rural Ohio enable the Budget to exist as an independent enigma. The newspaper and its readers fill their own small nooks in this world, a place in love with technology. But in Sugarcreek, the story is a little different. Everyone knows that horsepower still means horse power and a newspaper still means long columns of small black type. No color pages, no fancy graphics. No gimmicks clutter the paper.