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

by Randy McNutt

  Out there on black asphalt ribbons, deep in the heart of nowhere, I watch the images of towns and people grow smaller in my rearview mirror and finally fade to nothing. I feel at one with the speeding tires and the motion of the Jeep. In the cool rush of air on my sides, sometimes the movement seems strange yet vaguely familiar, as though it possesses a soul I once met but can’t quite remember.

  Back home in the solitude of my mother’s house, I sit and watch the snow drift as high as the back fence and begin to understand. Those slowly disappearing images I saw in my car mirror and the blurry objects on the side of the highway were not solely optical events, after all. They were fragments of time rushing past me, quickly and almost imperceptibly.

  I do not know where they went.

  Drawing by Dan Chudzinski.

  I

  Big Dreams

  Time is the longest distance between two places.

  —Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

  1

  The Life and Times of Fizzleville

  Those who travel on State Route 763 should have good brakes and new tires. The narrow road wiggles its way down steep hills between State Routes 41 and 125, passing a few farmhouses and privies and even fewer automobiles in rural Brown County. On the way, it’s easy to overlook a little community named Hiett and mistakenly drive as far south as Slickaway, Stringtown, and Fishing Gut roads, or as far north as Suck Run or Stony Lonesome roads. From Route 125, visitors should go south on Route 763 to the Eagle Creek Covered Bridge and over some of the greenest water in southern Ohio. The road twists past Eagle Chapel, a wood-frame church built in 1876. The decaying building sits in a forest of weeds, where only the rushing water of the creek pierces the silence.

  A few miles south, the road curves abruptly and a general store with two gasoline pumps appears on a rare piece of flat ground. The first thing I saw was nine pickup trucks parked in front of the rustic wooden building. A simple sign proclaimed:

  HIETT GENERAL STORE

  FIZZLEVILLE, OHIO.

  For a moment, this visitor believed he had stepped into a Wellsian time machine and arrived in rural Ohio, 1920. Hiett, nicknamed Fizzleville, is that kind of town and a chunk of fading Americana. I only wish it could have been named something more colorful, more literal, as were such other faded burgs as Goosetown, Grange, and Sulphur Lick. But then, the visitor can’t have everything his way.

  Residents admit Hiett isn’t much of a town anymore. Cartographers share that opinion. They usually omit Hiett from maps or misspell the name these days. This might bother some community-minded people in small towns, but it doesn’t matter to the two hundred people living within ten miles of Hiett. In fact, they don’t even call it Hiett much themselves. To them, it is just Fizzleville.

  When Walter D. Grierson came to Hiett in 1866, after serving in the Civil War, he built a general store, where he sold dry goods, groceries, coffee, dry beans, and candy—anything the country town needed. By the 1880s, Hiett had a second general store, stock scales, a Grange lodge, six houses, a blacksmith’s shop, a Presbyterian church, and a physician’s office. After Grierson’s death in 1926, the store remained in his family for generations—a total of 111 years, to be exact. Alma and John Lorenz, the last owners, operated it for forty years, until 1977. People called Alma the Queen of Fizzleville because she treated them royally. These days, however, only one house remains, Hiett is a ghost town, Mrs. Lorenz is dead, and her store has burned. Another store, built to look old, serves the people of surrounding Huntington Township.

  A few years ago, a rumor started in Brown County that explained just how Hiett got its nickname. Some local farmers were sitting around the Hiett General Store one winter day, wondering why their community never grew. One farmer said it just fizzled, and soon the people living around the store were calling themselves Fizzlevillians. But that explanation is only a rumor, started, perhaps, by someone like Estil Earhart, the self-proclaimed mayor of neighboring Neals Corner, population four. Earhart claims Neals Corner is a suburb of Fizzleville. Others contend Earhart likes to tell the story to avenge himself against the Fizzlevillians, who have the larger of the two towns. To them, size matters most of all.

  Days earlier, I had called the store to ask for directions.

  “The stooooore,” clerk Gerlinde “George” Shelton answered in a smooth Appalachian drawl.

  “What town is your store in?”

  “Fizzleville,” she replied, slowly and confidently.

  “Oh. Well then, where’s Hiett?”

  “Fizzleville.”

  “Thank you for clearing up that mystery.”

  When I finally walked in, five men dressed in coveralls and bib overalls rested on two old church pews that had been worn smooth by use. The pews creaked every time another man shifted position. They stared at me silently, expectantly.

  I spoke first, in jest: “So tell me, what is the population of Hiett?”

  “With or without the horses?” Mitch Littleton answered.

  “Without.”

  “Well, horses would bring it up pretty much if you count ’em. But then, if you’re outside the city limits, you’d have to say ten or twelve families—not countin’ the dogs.”

  “Of course,” somebody grunted.

  “Oh, sure,” another said.

  Just then, a customer entered the store.

  “There’s a councilman right now,” Littleton said. “Let’s ask him.”

  The man grabbed a loaf of bread and walked out without saying a word.

  My questions about the naming of Fizzleville brought some snickers and guffaws, but all laughter stopped when Wilson Walton began to speak: “Well, there was five of us sittin’ around the store one day and we decided to start a bowlin’ team over at the alley in Aberdeen. When we got there, somebody said, ‘Where you boys from?’ Well, I don’t know who said it, but somebody replied, ‘We’re from Fizzleville.’ And the name stuck. That was more than forty years ago. I remember it because that’s how long the bowling alley has been around.”

  Theo Jones shook his head knowingly and said, “No, no, no. That’s not what happened. Here’s how I remember it: a farmer and his wife were in a strippin’ room—a tobacco-strippin’ room. We were all strippin’ tobacco back then. That was thirty-five, forty-five years ago. They saw that a town had once been here, but fizzled out, so as a joke they decided to name it Fizzleville. I was there when it happened. I can vouch for it. The bowling team came later.”

  “Huh?” Shelton said. “I always thought the name came from the bowlin’ team.”

  “Oh, other versions of the story are still floatin’ around,” Jones said. “But mine is the correct one.”

  “Oh, boy,” another man said. “Who cares?”

  “This man does,” Jones said, pointing to me. “He’s taking down this town’s history.”

  “What’s left of it,” somebody said.

  They all grinned slyly, as if the whole thing were a joke.

  “Has the date been set yet for the annual tractor pull?” asked John Hardyman, a regular. “A lot of people come out to see it. They come from as far away as Cincinnati.”

  “Well, a few of them do,” Jim Fite said.

  “Now, let’s don’t start debating the size of the crowd,” Phil Figgins said.

  “Yeah, all those ‘thousands’ of people,” Hardyman said.

  “All right, boys,” Shelton said. “Third week in June, I believe.”

  Although the general store resembles the one built in 1866, it has an electric cash register, a big freezer, and a kerosene heater. And, in typical small-town tradition, the store is still the favorite and only gathering place for people from a wide area. “The ladies used to get mad because their husbands would come up here to loaf,” Jones said. “Those old boys would sit down next to the pot-bellied stove and stay for the whole afternoon.”

  Every inch of the building is used. The inside of the front door is filled with notices; owner Al Rhonemus calls it the
community bulletin board. He said of Fizzlevillians, “How well do we know our neighbors? Well, we know one another’s dogs by name.”

  The patch on his green baseball cap identifies him as a Fizzleville Booster. Four different styles of caps may be bought at the store, as well as reprints of a drawing showing how the store appeared years ago. Residents can also get the latest edition of a bimonthly newsletter, the Fizzleville Times, a one-sheet publication that informs people of the community about what the neighbors are doing. Rhonemus and his wife, Patty, editor of the Times, are retired teachers who bought the store in February 1981. “I taught thirty years, and after I quit I learned the store was up for sale,” he said. “Alma Lorenz ran it for forty years, and when she died we were afraid it would be closed, or bought by somebody who wasn’t interested in the community. So we bought it.”

  (Once, a big-city woman came into town with a friend, on their annual antiques excursion into the country. A local farmer met them by chance. During a conversation on some forgettable local subject, he happened to say, “Well, I do believe I read about it in the Times.” At that moment her jaw dropped and she said enthusiastically, “Oh, my, yes! Why, I also read the Times!”)

  Under the newsletter’s hand-lettered masthead, these words appear in small type: “HIETT GENERAL STORE (In Downtown Fizzleville).” The publication speaks directly to the few people who live in the area. One April, Patty wrote:

  And so, encouraged by the premise of a new and better growing season, we bring the Times once again to life. Sorry about the hibernation during the winter months, but sometimes when there is little good to say, it’s better to say nothing at all. You know, it’s human nature to complain about the weather. But lots of us praise God with thankful hearts that our homes have not been blown in upon us or washed out from under us. May God also help us learn from our past mistakes and also help us forgive and forget the mistakes of others.

  Al and Patty believe the Fizzleville Times has brought a sense of identity to the rural Hiett area. The paper includes a sprinkling of Bible quotations, updates about families and who is visiting, birthday and anniversary congratulations, 4-H news, and consignment sales. Families send special notices to be published, and one anonymous resident, known only by his byline as the “old-timer,” writes about farm life of a bygone era. “The farmers are waiting for signs of spring, the sun to shine, the temperature to rise,” the editor wrote as spring approached. “It’s a trying yet an expectant time. The spring and summer’s work is being planned. All hope for a better and earlier start on the crop years.”

  Yet Patty also told readers that the time has come to start thinking about closing the store.

  “We have to pay as much for gasoline as some stations in town sell it for,” she wrote. “The utility bills keep rising. I can’t imagine our community without the store. Yet it needs more going for it than it has now. New owner-managers might help. I’m too moody and Alfred is too busy to keep it going as it should. Be thinking and praying about it, will you? We’re no longer able to pay the bills because many of our customers are having trouble paying theirs and we can’t afford to keep going deeper and deeper in debt much longer. Something needs to be added to make the business profitable enough to keep the store in the community. Any ideas?”

  The store generates a few additional dollars by selling bumper stickers that read: “Fizzleville U.S.A.; Where Is It? Follow Me!” and “I Followed And I Found … Fizzleville U.S.A.” Red and blue ball caps come with “Fizzleville Booster” emblazoned across the front.

  From his comfortable seat Wilson Walton looked over the cache of promotional items and said, “Bumper stickers, caps, pictures—seems everything’s in Fizzleville. And did you know we usually get between forty-five thousand and fifty-thousand people in here for the famous Fizzleville Fair?” He paused and said, “Ain’t that right, Gerlinde?”

  “Oh, mercy, Wilson,” she exclaimed. “Every year the cars line up for a mile down the road.”

  The summer fair (and other activities) are sponsored by Huntington Township’s 4-H club, the Huntington Hot Shots. Rhonemus, who has also served as president of the Brown County fair board, organized the Fizzleville Fair with the Hot Shots. Walton and Figgins donated land across from the store for the Fizzleville Fairgrounds, and residents built a wooden fence and horse track. Other fair activities included horseshoe pitching, log sawing, square dancing, tractor pulling, and, of course, some impressive eating.

  Hiett’s main cultural event started small in 1966, and by the 1980s it was attracting people from all parts of Brown and Adams counties. “It’s a time to get together with your neighbors and friends, a time to appreciate the little things,” Al said. “School kids play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at our fair, and we even have our own young gospel singers from the church. We have to set the date way in advance to be able to plan it all out. It’s just good community fun.”

  “Please don’t confuse this event with the tractor pull,” Hardyman added. “It’s the third weekend in August—usually. Folks are quite thrilled to stop here in Fizzleville.”

  “We started it as a joke,” Littleton said. “We held a little 4-H fair here in Huntington Township—that’s what Fizzleville really is—and some people came out to see it. That was in 1966. We usually have between, oh, forty-five and fifty thousand people show up.”

  “You mean between forty-five thousand and fifty thousand?” I said.

  “No. What I mean is between forty-five people and fifty thousand people, usually on the lower end.”

  Everyone laughed at me.

  “Oh, well,” Walton finally confessed, “maybe it’s more like one thousand people on a sunny weekend.”

  On those summer fair days, the town’s population swells considerably. With or without the expanded population, no one really knows the town’s exact number. After all, the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t even count Hiett. Nobody does.

  Al Rhonemus savored the jokes, the population, the town, and the put-ons, and then he stepped out onto the porch of the general store. He gave a raking glance south on State Route 763, and pointed toward the meager skyline.

  “Well, now,” he said, “let’s see. That house, the one down the road, and the house after that one, they could all be considered a part of downtown Fizzleville.”

  As I drove out of town, leaving the little general store far behind, I thought of its precarious state and wondered how long it would survive in a world that is too expensive and too small these days. I felt the potential loss of something gentle and good. To me, the store is a symbol of an Ohio that is becoming increasingly forgotten, even lost, and we don’t even have the time to notice its passing.

  2

  Death of the Patriarch

  By eleven on that January morning in the late 1990s, an angry sky was spitting sleet and snow onto my windshield as I drove east on U.S. Route 50 in rural Highland County. The radio announcer was predicting a winter storm and by nightfall subzero temperatures. Even the cows were hiding.

  When a green metal sign announced Rainsboro, I remembered the town as an oasis in a great swelter of August countryside: old grocery stores and general stores, places that sold soda bottles so cold they were covered in a sweaty frost, rescuing countless numbers of travelers who were only minutes from curling into charred parchment and blowing off the face of the overheated planet. Through the snow I recognized the general store operated by a man named Fred Barrett. He had been an octogenarian standing behind a wooden counter holding a stereoscope, one of those double-slide model viewers that offers the illusion of three dimensions, as though Mr. Barrett were conjuring up the Rainsboro he had once inhabited.

  On my last visit in the 1980s, Mr. Barrett was already an icon in his own store. Even then, Rainsboro had become every small town on the cusp of decline; its history that of every town that once aspired to greatness and failed. Except for a small brick elementary school serving Paint Township, no public buildings remained open. Businesses had been abandoned.
Although still open, Barrett’s General Store had slipped into that gray divide of the past.

  Once, a spot on Route 50 almost guaranteed any town immortality. The two-lane highway ran from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., passing through cities such as Cincinnati and Parkersburg, West Virginia. Buses ran through regularly—until the federal government deregulated the industry in 1982 and bus companies dropped their less lucrative rural routes. For a few years after the buses stopped coming, a tiny residual customer base—wanderers sniffing their way to an uncertain waterhole—still found their way to Barrett’s General Store.

  Fred Barrett stands in front of his general store in Rainsboro. Author’s photo.

  By noon on this bleak winter day, however, cars and trucks sped through town, oblivious to the empty storefronts. Some of them stopped at the convenience store about a mile east of Rainsboro. I stopped to buy a Columbus newspaper and seek information.

  “What happened to Fred Barrett?” I asked the clerk.

  “Oh, he died a few years back,” she said. “A woman who works near here took care of him at the end.”

  Considering his age, I wasn’t surprised by the news, but her words still carried a hollow ring.

  “So what’s happened to Rainsboro?”

  “People are burning it down,” she said. “Five fires in the last month. They set fire to an old house again last night. I don’t know what gets into people. When there’s no work, I suppose they go berserk.”

  Returning to town, I parked and watched more cars shoot past, as though the town didn’t exist. Then I walked around its two side streets, looking at two dozen older houses—a few well-maintained and newly painted, but too many abandoned or neglected. Several rusty mobile homes appeared so fragile that they might blow away in the coming winter storm and sail off into the void, along with Rainsboro’s outhouses and unmet goals.