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

by Randy McNutt

  After warming myself for a few minutes in the car, I drew the courage to look into Fred Barrett’s wide store window. I saw assorted merchandise and junk—oddities he collected by habit—stacked to the ceiling in disarray. Like the day, the store was dark and depressing—local history, missing in action.

  The scene was ghostly. I sensed Fred Barrett all around the store. He knew a little of everything, people said. The farmers of Rainsboro knew that, so they towed their ailing machinery, automobiles, and tentative hopes into his garage. They always said he could repair any motor made in America, and if for some reason he could not, they were welcome to conversation made by the men who hung around the garage. With the village monopoly on lube jobs and good talk, Fred won a measure of prosperity for his work. Yet he was unhappy.

  He had fretted and complained ever since Henry Ford abandoned the Model T in 1927. Nobody else in town grieved much over its passing, but Fred was inconsolable. He had built the garage to accommodate the Model T to the inch, not the Model A. To him, the old T was more than an automobile—it was a faith, a passion, a metaphorical machine on which the common man rode off to success. And now, it was gone. That hopeless conclusion struck him suddenly and finally one afternoon in the autumn of 1932. The next morning, he dragged rusty toolboxes into a back room, bought some staples to sell in front, and proudly reopened the shop as Barrett’s General Store. “Don’t remember havin’ any feelin’ about it,” he said. “Just did it.”

  It was the only occupational transition he would ever make, or even consider. Fred believed a general store was a fitting place for a man who knew a little of everything. He could have gone broke those first six months and he would not have cared. He refused to quit, despite the Depression and competition from four other general stores. At times he ran so short of cash that he could not make change. So he sold hogs for three cents a pound and carved wooden toys to sell. Fred also taught himself to cut meat and cure bologna and to order bolts of cloth, fishing rods, cigarette holders—every ridiculous and conceivable thing. He never did learn to sell, though. Customers strolled in, heard his opinions, and left with something or another.

  Friends and years passed. Faces changed. Farming changed. Everything turned askew, except for Fred Barrett and the cornfields that rolled gently over the seamless green hills of Highland County. Rainsboro itself remained a low place in the road, a momentary and disappointing premise among the fields—a school, a church, a few houses, and several stores. Rainsboro was just a crevice of a community to which the obsolete general store could cling.

  Fred built his place of brick. It stands on Route 50, showing faded white letters on the sides that still read “Barrett’s Garage.” No matter. Nobody notices the subliminal message. For more than fifty years, people fixed their eyes only on Pap Barrett, the imperturbable and cantankerous man who seemingly toiled forever in a store as deep and dark as a cave.

  Our meeting was by chance on that gray April day in 1984. Driving through town on my way to eastern Ohio, I suddenly felt hungry, so I stopped in Rainsboro. Fred’s store caught my eye. I went inside and looked around, momentarily suspended between the present and the years when a teenage doppelganger was trapped in the back seat of his father’s 1961 Plymouth Valiant. Fred sold me a candy bar and grunted. He didn’t talk much. I asked if I could sit for a while and look at what he had in the store. “Yep” was all he replied.

  Fred always moved slowly behind the counter. He was hard of hearing, hardheaded, hardpan. He was as stout as a grain bin. A century ago he would have been just another fellow trying to earn his way, but now his kind is revered. He would be considered an entrepreneur, a man of uncommon independence in an interdependent world. He could not understand the mystique. “An independent,” he snorted, “is a fellow who ain’t changed much and don’t intend to.” Such talk bewitched strangers. They stopped in the store for a candy bar or soft drink and believed they had discovered a shrine of American versatility. They spoke quietly of the past; Fred listened.

  Bootjacks. Breast chains. Something called a horse fiddle. They were all stuffed inside the store like relics in a disarranged museum. Then Fred, the reluctant curator, would point to his trophy—a wooden plaque with a photograph of him holding two fourteen-pound catfish up on Brush Creek in the summer of ’61. On holiday. The regulars thought Fred liked the picture because it was a documentation of his own real trip, in the manner that tourists bring back pictures of themselves standing next to the Parthenon while on once-in-a-lifetime vacations. The catfish, of course, were optional.

  He did not leave the counter often. He and his wife, Elizabeth, worked behind it from eight in the morning until late at night, but after she died in the 1970s he could barely stay open until five. Business narrowed. Rainsboro was shrinking. A few old friends drifted in and out as always, while a few new customers came mainly for bread and soft drinks. Finally, the bread man said he couldn’t stop any more; the route no longer paid for itself. Most people shrugged and drove off to a convenience store in Hillsboro, the county seat. Fred’s older customers rebelled. They told the bread man that they depended on his loaves and on Fred’s store. They threatened to write letters to the big-city newspapers, to the governor. In two days, bread reappeared on the dusty shelves. Customers claimed victory. Fred sighed and said it was a temporary one at best. He was just happy to still be able to swing open the old screen door in the summer and to sit around the black fuel-oil stove on cold days.

  Looking into the back room, I saw Fred’s garage as he intended it—dark and dirty. He flipped a switch and a single bulb illuminated the room in shadowy light. An old Ford sat there waiting for attention, tools scattered on the floor around it. A calendar still read 1932. Fred said nothing.

  Behind us, in the store, Clarence Wogner was stacking cans on a shelf for Fred. A farmer and a feed man watched him from their familiar positions near the stove. “We come here because of Fred’s sense of humor,” Wogner said. “You’ve got to dig real hard to find it.”

  Ignoring them, Fred stood rigidly behind the scarred oak counter, staring at walls strung with fly swatters, fishing rods, nets, work gloves, ax handles, brooms, hammers. And a hand-lettered sign: “New fishing license on sale. By now, avoid the rush.”

  From their positions, the men watched carefully as a boy no older than thirteen walked into the store lugging on his shoulder a massive black radio—a boom box—with speakers as large as dinner plates. The boy slammed a carton of empty soft drink bottles upon the counter to receive his return deposit fee.

  “Hiya, Fred!”

  “Yep.”

  “Gimme Skoal. Put it on our bill.”

  Slowly, Fred pulled out an old, fat pencil and a tattered yellow account book, originally a child’s tablet. He read the figures by flashlight on the dreary afternoon, holding the book four inches from his eyes. The boy watched. As the music played, he skillfully completed a spin, and faced Fred. The boy said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot somethin’. Gimme a Pepsi, too. And open it.” He pointed to the returned bottles and added, “Now, mister, you owe me a dime!”

  Wogner laughed and moved from the back of the store like a shadow. “Hey, Fred, we were trying to remember when Lou Hamilton got wired up outside. About ’34, was it?”

  “Huh?”

  Wogner shook his head and yelled: “WHEN DID LOU HAMILTON GET WIRED UP?”

  Fred cupped his ear and frowned. “Yep,” he said.

  Wogner turned to the farmer and the feed man and said, “Well, anyway, Lou had the irritating habit of coming over to the store after school to crank up Fred’s car for a drive. Now, nobody touched Fred’s car. It was a beauty. Always shined. So one day Lou came over for another spin. Fred was ready. He had hot-wired the car, and was looking out the window to watch. Lou grabbed ahold of the crank. WHAM! Got a shock on him he’ll never forget. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, FRED?”

  “Last time he ever drove my car, ain’t it?”

  A foghorn of a voice filled the store with laughter, an
d the farmer finally said, “Hot-wired! Kids always jumped up on the hood of my ’38 Mercury when I’d go to the picture show up in Greenfield, so one day I wired it up and turned on the switch. Whoooo, those kids flew off the hood so fast that they lost their shoes.”

  “Nineteen hundred and thirty-eight,” Fred said for no particular reason.

  “I moved here in ’30,” Wogner said. “There ain’t but a half dozen folks left in this town who came into the store then.”

  “Darn chain stores,” Fred grumbled. “They’re makin’ it too hard for me to operate. I was ready to sell last year, you know, but the people who wanted to buy me out didn’t even have the money for a down payment. I guess I ought to quit.”

  The men looked at the floor. Finally, the farmer said, “Where would we go?”

  “What would we do?” echoed the feed man.

  “Fellows,” Wogner said, “there are no good answers to the eternal questions.”

  Fred did not respond. He had motioned for me to come to the counter, and he shoved a wooden puzzle into my hands. He said he carved it in 1924. After five minutes of trying to fit the parts together, I gave up. Fred laughed.

  “That puzzle was invented long before that fellow Rubik came out with his cube a few years ago,” Wogner said. “But Fred’s is different because one piece is made not to fit. When strangers like you come into the store, he shoves the puzzle at them and watches them go crazy as they try to put it together. Then somebody distracts them while Fred slips a special piece—the right piece—into place. Then he always says, ‘Well, what’s so tough?’”

  “When did the McCalls die and their daughter take over their store?” asked the feed man. “About ’57?”

  “No, no, no,” Wogner said. “Time gets away from me. I can’t remember …”

  Fred stuck out a foot. “Bought these shoes from the McCalls fifty-five years ago. Good as they day I bought them.” He adjusted his glasses, pushed back his black railroad cap, and looked out the big window toward the automobiles on Route 50. “I’ve seen history roll by here in my time. And change. But people don’t change much. No, sir. They stay the same.”

  “Fred, they still need your kerosene lamps and chimneys. Remember that,” the farmer said as he walked toward the door.

  The men ambled along to their wives, hot suppers, and another Saturday night of television programs. Fred stayed behind, looking at old stereo slides in his viewer. An hour was left until closing time, but Fred said he might close early anyway. He had felt more tired and lonely lately. Not the aching kind of loneliness he once felt as a young man, but the nagging kind that crept into his room about ten at night, when he looked up and realized that Elizabeth wasn’t there anymore. Yet the morning always returned, and Fred slipped on his old overalls and denim work shirt and hobbled over to the store to stand behind the counter once again. Surely that was the best place for a man who knew a little of everything.

  . . .

  Route 50—on which Rainsboro lies—is a horizontal line separating the county’s two types of farm land: In the north, you can throw a handful of seed corn on the ground and it will grow in the rich soil. In the south, you need divine intervention to grow anything in the heavy, wet soil. The farms around Rainsboro have been growing smaller for fifty years. The root system withers, the organism dies.

  Rainsboro could be any town; its problems are those of agricultural America. When small farmers retire or lose their land, they displace the communities around them. For every farmer who goes out of business, economists estimate the nearest town loses a worker and a store.

  In 1830, George Rains founded Rainsboro with a healthy bank account and a prayer. The North Carolina abolitionist farmer had moved to Ohio, a Quaker stronghold, with his wife and eight children, when he was nearly sixty years old. He was a man who loved permanence. He had his children but he yearned for what he thought would be an even more durable legacy—a town. Such an endeavor would surely last. Before he died fifteen years later, he saw his town grow steadily, until it became a local trading center for farmers. Rainsboro’s population reached 220 people, despite epidemics of small pox and spinal meningitis in 1876. It had a post office, a hotel, a woolen mill, a telephone company, and, over at the Woodmen’s lodge, a brass band.

  But a million cornet players couldn’t change reality: Rainsboro was a country town and was therefore doomed to limitations. Take culture, for instance. Hillsboro, another town on Route 50 and the seat of Highland County government, always received the factories, the mansions, and what passed for culture in the rural county of the 1800s. About the time Rainsboro was getting excited about its brass band, Hillsboro had already formed its own women’s group, the Friday Club, to discuss the important matters of the day—classical music, Shakespeare, flower gardens, and public speaking.

  In Rainsboro, meanwhile, no one had the time for such frivolity. The town had become a mini depot for huckster wagons, which embarked at sunrise like little supply legions on missions into the hinterlands, carrying fresh eggs, dairy products, and vegetables. The wagons served farms and such small towns as Dallas, Turkey, Gall, Harriet, Winkle, and Fairfax. Today, these are mostly ghost towns with forgotten stories and similar histories.

  Although George Rains’s town has survived the better part of two centuries, it has lived without acclaim. In the daily realm of news, in fact, only one major local news event ever occurred—at least one that people can talk about—on Rainsboro’s narrow streets: the apprehension of outlaw Robert “Little Reddy” McKimie, whom the locals once described as Horatio Alger in reverse. Born in Rainsboro in 1855, red-haired Bob must have been a charismatic character, for his story has been retold in town and in the county for more than a century.

  McKimie grew up with an aunt in Rainsboro. A likeable boy, he claimed that he left to enlist in the army at fourteen. When he was twenty-two, in 1877, he returned to town a wealthy man. He told neighbors he had served in the army in the West and later earned a fortune in the cattle business. Now, he said, he wanted to settle in Rainsboro and start a family. At least he was serious about that part of his story. A few weeks later he married quiet Clara Ferguson, and they opened a dry-goods store. They hardly had time to enjoy their honeymoon when a U.S. marshal named Seth Bullock, a dapper man with a thick black mustache, arrived on their doorstep, asking the strangest questions about murders and robberies in Utah, Texas, and Wyoming. Clara was aghast.

  Bullock had searched unsuccessfully for McKimie in four states, and then, acting on a tip, traveled to Rainsboro to see if this McKimie fellow was actually the killer called “Little Reddy from Texas.” Indeed, they were the same, Bullock said, although McKimie denied the charge. He was wanted in Utah for killing a man and stealing his horse and in Wyoming as the most cold-blooded member of a gang of stagecoach-robbing outlaws. In their most profitable robbery in Wyoming, they stole $14,000 in gold—a lot of money in those days. Then, they disappeared into the dust.

  After being charged, McKimie was taken to the Highland County Jail in Hillsboro to await extradition. But he soon escaped with the help of another prisoner (and, it is believed, with the cooperation of other townspeople who seemed to be under McKimie’s spell). He easily tricked people into thinking he was the real victim. He was well liked in the countryside, where the farmers must have considered him some kind of Opie Taylor character who just happened to be in trouble.

  For days, McKimie hid in the Seven Caves and in farmers’ homes and barns, until he left to join his wife on the East Coast. They sailed all the way to Nassau but soon spent all his money. He could have stopped in a thousand places, but instead the bold young man returned to Rainsboro to form a gang, which robbed local stores, banks, and homes. In one year, the people of Rainsboro concocted the most fantastic tales of his exploits. He became Rainsboro’s personal terror. Disguising himself with false mustaches and dyed hair, McKimie came and went as he pleased. After several reported McKimie sightings, the people were afraid to walk the streets after dark.
Then one night, about one hundred local men surrounded him in a country cabin and brought him into town. This time, he didn’t escape.

  In 1879, he was sent to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. After his release in 1890, he somehow avoided the charges pending against him in the West. Nobody knows exactly how he did it, and that adds to the mystery. Even today, Rainsboro still talks about Bob “Little Reddy” McKimie. Some people say he went back to the West after his prison term, changed his name to Ferguson, and went into business. Others say he joined the Rough Riders, was appointed territorial governor of Oklahoma, and died a millionaire.

  There are many unsubstantiated stories, but nobody can say for certain exactly what became of Rainsboro’s prodigal son. As far as the townspeople know, he is still hiding in the shadows, ready to fool another generation.

  The cold wind roared at my back and the snow fell heavily on Route 50. I trudged to the car and sat warming my half-frozen fingers. Down the blurry street, I thought I saw history move before my eyes. It ran in a straight line from George Rains to Bob McKimie to Fred Barrett. I was in there, too, ignoring all of history for the moment, which was encapsulated perfectly in one of Pap Barrett’s icy sodas.

  The esteemed Mr. Rains could rest in peace for at least another day. His town—his long-sought permanence—was still alive, although gasping for breath in the cold January air.

  3

  Venice Times Two

  On a chilly afternoon in early October, I crossed Pickerel Creek in the Blue Heron Wildlife Preserve on U.S. Route 6 near Lake Erie. On my right stood a light-green water tower marked EHCRWA in big black letters. I wondered: Is it a town or an eye test? (Later, I learned that it stands for Erie-Huron Counties Rural Water Authority.)

  Mountainous gray clouds rolled across the sky like a scene in a fast-motion film. Autumn marched through the woods; its damp air felt more like late November. I fumbled with the radio and caught the latest weather forecast: rain, wind, and possibly an early—and colder than usual—winter. The wind whipped the canvas top of the Jeep so fiercely that I could hardly hear the announcer. With each big gust, the canvas popped loudly, like a gun firing. Beside me, brown fields of corn and soybeans lined the two-lane road. Its faded gray pavement matched the textured sky, and everything blended above and below. Signs with summer names such as Willow Point and White’s Landing greeted me as I passed from Sandusky County into Erie County.