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

by Randy McNutt

  Out of curiosity, I searched for an Erie ghost town named Venice. It holds a slim connection to the old Venice that’s near my hometown in Butler County, and a slim excuse was a good enough reason to head north. On the way, I thought about the two Venices and what they must have been like during the Civil War. Both played minor roles in Ohio’s war days: looking the other way when escaped slaves came through town, sending their men into battle, and waiting out the fighting. All I knew about the northern Venice was that it was built on Cold Creek. The town is listed on only one new road atlas and on my deteriorating 1913 state map. Following their routes, I arrived at a crossroads on the edge of the city of Sandusky. I saw a few old houses, a bar, a restaurant called Margaritaville, a new retirement complex, a post of the Ohio Highway Patrol, and an abandoned winery.

  When I drove through what I thought was left of old Venice (and this was only an assumption), I could almost see the present converging with the future. Time has roared through this little town like a tornado, blowing away families and shops and changing everything in its path. Suddenly, I was driving through a community and not noticing.

  At Venice Road and State Route 6, across from the gray Cold Creek Trout Camp, I stopped to read a historical marker:

  FORT SANDUSKY

  Erected by the British near this junction in 1761; destroyed during Pontiac’s Conspiracy of 1763. The fort was strategically located near Indian towns and trading posts on the Great Indian Trail between Detroit and Pittsburgh.

  The place that would become Venice was a popular stopping point on the trail. A few miles to the north, on the Sandusky River, the French built the first fort in the Ohio country, Fort Sandoski, in 1751, and abandoned it three years later because of the British threat. French and British traders competed for furs in the area. The British built a blockhouse and palisade on the site of Venice during the French and Indian War. The area’s Indians resented the new fort and British arrogance. In 1763, after the French defeat in North America, Ottawa chief Pontiac conspired to attack Sandusky and nine other British forts west of Fort Pitt (the site of modern Pittsburgh). On May 16, 1763, gatekeepers at Fort Sandusky allowed a group of Indians to enter. The garrison commander, Ensign H. C. Pauli, did not know that an Indian coalition of eighteen tribes was attacking Fort Detroit. After smoking a peace pipe, the Indians grabbed Pauli and quickly killed the fort’s fifteen soldiers and a dozen traders. Warriors burned the fort and dragged Pauli to their village, where they threatened to kill him and forced him to run the gauntlet. When he had all but given up hope, an older widow intervened and asked to adopt Pauli. According to Indian custom, this was a proper way to replenish lost tribe members. He lived with the tribe until early July, when he escaped and met a group of British regulars who had just discovered the mutilated bodies of Pauli’s soldiers at the burned fort. Soon, Pontiac’s forces took nine British frontier forts, excluding Detroit.

  After taking a picture of the Fort Sandusky marker, I stopped at the highway patrol office and asked a dispatcher for directions to Venice.

  “It’s the first road at the next light,” she said.

  “Not Venice Road. I mean Venice, the town.”

  She looked confused. “What town?”

  “Venice.”

  “Never heard of it, sir.”

  “I think we might be standing in it. It should be here, according to my maps.”

  She turned to a fellow officer and said, “Hank, you ever hear of a town around here named Venice?”

  “No,” he said blankly.

  Feeling defeated, I walked down the road and stopped at an old house where an American flag was hanging in front and a man was polishing a metallic blue pickup truck. He identified himself as Harold Schonhart, a truck driver, the former postmaster of Venice, and the retired postmaster of Sandusky. He had an impressive head of thick white hair, combed back in a distinguished wave, giving him a regal but rugged appearance. He wore jeans and a blue plaid flannel shirt over a red T-shirt. He was friendly.

  “Where can I find downtown Venice?” I asked.

  He looked at me as though he had met a fellow countryman in a foreign land, and said, “You’re standing in the middle of what used to be Venice! I’m the oldest remaining resident, and I’m only sixty-five. Not many people, even around here, know that a town used to be right here where we’re standing. It’s too bad that the achievements of communities can’t be remembered. I’ve heard that the town was named for its close location to the water—as in old Venice, Italy. Well, our Venice never quite lived up to that lofty reputation. When I was young, we had a regular town sign and all and a few businesses here. Even had a village hall. I can’t remember if the sign said incorporated or unincorporated. I can’t remember anything much about my town. I wasn’t paying attention, and I let a little piece of history slip through the cracks. Now, nobody but me is left to wonder.

  “But I can tell you this much: we had our own identity in the 1800s. Venice was supposed to be the next big town on the lake. We had the best port between Detroit and Cleveland in the days of the smaller wooden boats. Then in 1963, a few months after I became the Venice postmaster [Venice had seventy-two post office boxes], Sandusky annexed Venice. That was the end of things for this town. The post office closed later that year, and I went to Sandusky to work. Venice went into hibernation.”

  Meanwhile, Sandusky has flourished. Its population has nearly doubled since the late 1800s, to about twenty-nine thousand people. Its landlocked port is still considered one of the better ones on Lake Erie, being only sixty miles east of Detroit and sixty miles west of Cleveland. Officially founded in 1846 (although settled earlier), the Erie County seat was on the doorstep of Venice. That was too close for two competitors in the shipping business, and the towns battled until Sandusky won.

  Schonhart shook his head. He knows that Venice, on Sandusky Bay, once held so much promise that people considered it a potential metropolis. The town dates to 1817, but as early as 1811 Charles Butler had opened a leather tanning business near the Venice mills. The tannery provided settlers with much-needed leather goods. In 1823, Dr. L. B. Carpenter started a small distillery at the head of Cold Creek, but it was closed about 1830, perhaps because of competition from William P. Mason’s distillery. Mason believed that he could more easily transport whiskey than corn to eastern markets, and he could use any surplus produce to make alcoholic beverages. The market for a stiff drink was big in those days, too. The new distilleries lead to the opening of barrel factories in Venice and neighboring Castalia.

  With its five crude houses and noisy mills, Venice was a “major” community, only several miles west of Sandusky. Flour mills also flourished. By 1833, they established the first permanent cash market for wheat in the region. They could produce seventy-five thousand barrels of flour during the navigation season. Farmers brought in wheat by wagon until the Lake Erie Railroad opened to Tiffin in the second half of the nineteenth century. Soon, however, shipping became the major business in Venice. Community leaders extended the town pier out into the bay for a mile and a quarter. The first steamboat to dock was the Major Jack Downing. The townspeople predicted prosperity.

  Behind the facade of trade, Venice had another life—a secret one. It was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, a loose coalition of white and black abolitionists, Native Americans, escaped slaves, Quakers, and other religious groups that helped slaves escape to Canada. In Underground Railroad code, Sandusky was called Hope. Venice was important, too, because its Cold Creek did not freeze.

  Historians believe Venice is the place where the Reverend Josiah Henson escaped on his family’s journey to Canada in 1830. Henson, a slave on a plantation in Maryland for thirty years, took his family through Ohio on the way north. He is considered the inspiration for a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Henson never did reveal exactly where he crossed into Canada. Years after his arrival he wrote:

  One night more was passed in the woods, and, in the c
ourse of the next forenoon we came out upon the wide plain, without trees, which lies south and west of Sandusky city. The houses of the village were in plain sight. About a mile from the lake I hid my wife and children in the bushes, and pushed forward. I was attracted by a house on the left, between which [it] and a small coasting vessel a number of men were passing and repassing with great activity. Promptly deciding to approach them, I drew near, and scarcely had I come within hailing distance, when the captain of the schooner cried out, “Hollo there, man! You want to work?” “Yes, sir!” shouted I. “Come along, come along; I’ll give you a shilling for an hour. Must get off with this wind.” As I came near, he said, “O, you can’t work; you’re crippled.” “Can’t I?” said I; and in a minute I had hold of a bag of corn, and followed the gang in everything in emptying it into the hold.

  The captain sailed with Henson and his family. When they landed in Canada on October 28, 1830, Henson said he threw himself on the ground with joy at being free.

  In 1849, just as commerce began to flourish in Venice, a devastating cholera epidemic struck the Lake Erie coast, damaging the prospects of the new town and of others in the area. Gertrude M. Chapman, a young girl who grew up on her father’s eighteen-hundred-acre marsh in Venice, was sent to Sandusky to live. She remembered those plague days even after she turned eighty-four years old. “A young woman came to my mother’s house with cholera from Detroit, and she and five others died of cholera,” Chapman told a local historian. “I knew many of the people buried in the old Sandusky Cemetery. They were many of them of the aristocracy of the town. They were buried in coffins made of rough boards. The people died like sheep. The coffins were piled up in the cemetery like cordwood. I have seen thirty or forty unburied at one time.” The cemetery, named the Cholera Cemetery, still has a large gothic iron arch and gate with its name across its top.

  A century after the epidemic, Venice still existed. Schonhart grew up in the Venice of the 1950s, the son of a grocery-store man who sold everything from salt to clotheslines. In the 1890s, the elder Schonhart and his brother delivered produce in a twenty-mile radius—even in winter. He worked in a 20 x 22–foot room with worn wooden floors, wide glass windows, decorative metal ceilings, and a potbellied stove. The men sold by bulk, right from the barrel. One of their more popular items was thread, which they kept in a big wooden cabinet made to hold the spools. The building also contained a large meat locker that was originally used to harvest lake ice. The Schonhart brothers wired it for electricity and used the room as their place to cut and store meat.

  “The bar across the street was a grain mill,” Schonhart said. “We had two bars, two groceries, two grain mills, and another mill down on Venice Road, besides a post office and a fishery. At one time, we had a big pier so the boats could stop and load grain. These things existed in the early 1900s. Then, slowly, they died out. I remember hearing people predict how Venice would grow someday and be bigger than Sandusky. They said it was an excellent port with a future. We were the biggest port between Cleveland and Detroit. Ships could load year-round here. Venice never lived up to its reputation, however, because the creek wasn’t deep enough to accommodate larger boats. It was good for commercial shipping because the creek rushed so fast that it never froze, not even in the coldest of our winters. But it wasn’t deep enough, and the bigger that the boats evolved, the more they went off to Sandusky and some other ports. They left Venice behind. The industry that stayed here for the longest was the fishery. Finally, it went out. Now, there is nothing left. People don’t even know that Venice used to be a town, with its own history. I wish I had saved my father’s old store signs and written down some of the stories about this place. Too late now.”

  We walked across the street to the former town hall, a two-story frame building with peeling white paint and boarded-up windows. Nobody uses it now. For a time, some people discussed the possibility of rehabilitating it, but it was too dilapidated. So it remains empty. “Even when I was a kid, the town hall was not functioning,” Schonhart said. “But when this town was going good, my father told me, the hall had a jail with two or three cells. The building was used for our town’s special meetings and functions, when Venice was a part of Margaretta Township.”

  In the mid-1800s, Venice also had its own school and a church. On June 3, 1867, the Right Reverend Bishop McIlvaine consecrated the new Church of Our Redeemer, which was built for twelve thousand dollars by Russell H. Heywood as a memorial to his deceased loved ones. Through 1879, Redeemer ministers confirmed fifty-six members and baptized sixty-four.

  Today, the church is gone. The town’s once second-busiest place, the old hotel, is a house. Schonhart said nobody remembers the name of the hotel, or who stayed there, but he has heard that some famous people did.

  “It had a railing in front of the building for horses to be hitched,” he said. “Later, the building was cut in half, and one half was moved across the street. The hotel had a huge bar—it must have been thirty feet long—in the lounge. The place had four fireplaces, two upstairs and two downstairs. When I was a kid, the mills stopped running, but railroad crews still came into town to stay a night or two. They were rowdy. We used to call them gandy dancers. The sad thing is, I can’t tell you why. That’s the story of Venice. There’s nothing left anymore that you can relate to. It’s a place with no name, and not much of a place.”

  I drove over to the Venice Cemetery and wandered around in the stiff wind. It was an attractive place with a bench and a slim-barreled cannon that appeared to be a World War II antiaircraft gun. Walking around the cemetery, I observed some names: Hooper, Matt, Sambow, Sessler, Hills, Scherz, Altvater, Addy, Leidorf, Becker. A large number of Germans rested there, under headstones obliterated by the weather.

  Next door, the abandoned Steuk’s Winery beckoned me with silence. I walked around the yard and tried to imagine the good times that people had in its three red buildings. In front, the main building was low and faded, adorned with big apples made of painted red plywood, all shabby and peeling. On the large glass window by the road, somebody had outlined in soap a picture of the cartoon character Goofy and with his finger had written, “No goofing, we’ve got chocolate by the lb., candy, and other goodies.” Another sign offered honey, cheddar cheese, cider, wine, and baked goods. In back of the lot, a large red barn with a cupola included a date at the top, 1895. The once welcoming white front porch and wooden benches were overgrown with weeds and vines.

  The lonely winery is a symbol of a town long dead.

  . . .

  The abandoned Steuk’s winery in Venice, Ohio, on Lake Erie. Author’s photo.

  Every time I returned to the road, I noticed that things had changed in the countryside. Mostly I missed the rural characters and their unusual towns, places like Venice in Butler County. The unincorporated town—now a place where development creeps around—was known by two names, Venice and Ross, in the early 1900s. Ross prevailed in later years, though the split personality remains as subdivisions grow around the old town.

  My memories of it are vivid. My older cousin used to take me swimming at Meadowbrook, a private park and pool on the edge of town. It was a grand place with green space surrounding it and a pool unlike the others I’d seen at the time. This one was oval shaped and concave, like a real lake. When I pass Meadowbrook these days, the old park is filled with cars for sale or in storage. It is no longer in the country.

  Ross—older people still call it Venice—now lies between rural and suburban. It is losing its identity but not its purpose; several highways, including U.S. Route 128, intersect in the center of town. Not long ago, a local newspaper inexplicably described the town as “the Ross community of Ross.” This identity crisis has been continuing for years. In the late 1980s, I noticed that members of the Venice Fire Department wore uniforms with Ross Township on their jackets. On a recent trip, I saw a sign that read: “Venice, 12 miles.” If this is not confusing enough, many of the churches still use Venice in their names while
many local businesses use Ross. Once, a harried Cincinnati television reporter asked me how to get to Ross. He glanced at his fancy new maps, checked the highway numbers that I’d given to him, and said I must be wrong. “Ross doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s on none of my maps. Are you sure?” He looked at the map again. “Hey, wait—it’s listed here as Venice,” he said, totally confused.

  One of my colleagues said, “Hey, is your map from 1898?”

  Venice founder Jeremiah Butterfield arrived in the early 1800s, bought eight hundred acres at $1.25 per acre, and built a cabin. He found a pioneer’s paradise filled with thousands of wild geese, turkey, deer, pheasants, quail, squirrels, and other game. The land was also filled with every kind of wood a man needed (and then some) to build a sturdy house: poplar, oak, buckeye, ash, walnut, sycamore, hickory, cherry, gum dogwood, and sugar-tree sassafras. The river was so thick with fish that hundreds could be caught in a large net. Butterfield was one of those larger-than-life frontiersmen whose exploits and hard work sound unbelievable today. At age twenty-one, he left his home in New York and traveled west. He found the Great Miami River and farmland that suited him and his young bride, Polly Campbell Butterfield. Once established, Butterfield worked relentlessly. Nothing could stop him. In the winter of 1819, he drove hogs from Venice to Detroit, more than 280 miles. There were few good roads then, and snowstorms hindered his travel. A nineteenth-century historian explained: