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

by Randy McNutt

  Some of his men became disheartened & returned, but he pushed forward, breaking a path in the snow with his horse for his hogs to follow. After many days of hardship he arrived safely, sold out to a good advantage, & returned home with his saddlebags full of silver. Three times he shipped his hogs to Cuba, & in 1828 was shipwrecked. When the vessel neared the shore she struck a rock, & the captain and the crew took to the long boat. Mr. Butterfield would not leave until he had cut open the pens containing the hogs, which were on deck, & let them into the sea. They nearly all swam to the shore, so that he lost but a few … [and] made a profitable voyage.

  On February 17, 1817, Butterfield and his neighbors received company when Benjamin Clark, a popular county physician, plotted a town named Venus, in honor of Venus de Milo, the ancient Roman goddess of beauty. Apparently the name was a little too sophisticated for the locals, who corrupted it as Venice. Yet the town grew steadily, boasting the first bridge across the Great Miami River in 1830, a new school, and businesses. For a time, people believed that Venice would grow into a large city.

  Meanwhile, the other Venice continued to grow near Lake Erie. In the mid-1800s, Ohio’s two Venices created a problem for the U.S. post office, which finally told the people of Ross Township to either change the name of their town or forget the mail. They borrowed the township’s name, which honors U.S. senator James Ross, a lawyer, founder of Steubenville, supporter of Ohio statehood, and proponent of the free use of rivers as common highways.

  As use of the Venice name gradually declined, so did local folktales and icons, including Elland, once the country home of Giles Richards. He grew up in and is buried in the countryside near Venice. His family’s cemetery featured in its center an unusual monument—a great iron roller that had been drawn by eight yokes of oxen and used in the construction of the Colerain, Oxford & Brookville Turnpike (now U.S. Route 27). Mounted on a foundation of Dayton stone and topped by an iron urn, the roller looked like a rolling pin standing on end. Officials tell me they don’t know what happened to the monument.

  Forgotten, too, are many of the tales and memories of greater Venice, a nebulous area extending into Hamilton County’s Colerain Township, near the old Venice Bridge. For generations local storytellers used to laugh at the exploits of teenage cousins George and Giles Richards (the same man who built the strange monument). They went out searching for raiding Confederates one afternoon in July 1863, and found them in a barnyard. The boys traveled in a buggy pulled by Zollicoffer, a young horse named after Confederate general Felix Zollicoffer, who fought in the Kentucky campaign.

  Because their adventure went on to become a local folktale, a reporter for the Venice Graphic recounted the incident in a story on September 9, 1887:

  The three Rebs fell in behind and the boys drove on. Giles knew they were in a scrape but George didn’t realize the danger. Sure enough, they had not ridden very far before they ran into a body of at least a hundred of the Johnnies.

  “Nice horse,” remarked a big rawboned Kentuckian, as he thumped little Zollicoffer in the ribs. “Get out of here and help unhitch.”

  George got out and the Kentuckian rode away on Zollicoffer’s back. Even then he did not appreciate that they were in a bad scrape, but he hunted up the officer in command and said: “Captain, we’re in a pretty tough fix. We’re pretty far from home to be without any horse. Haven’t you got an old cripple you don’t want that you can let us have?”

  The audacity of the request startled the Reb, and for a moment he stared at his questioner closely. He saw nothing but innocence there, and with a queer sort of smile he said to one of his men: “Get this boy a horse!”

  On another of my visits, big trucks rumbled past the Venice Castle restaurant while owner Lawrence Hyob rubbed his close-cropped head and puffed furiously on the stub of a foul-smelling black cigar. “The newcomers call it Ross, but they don’t know any better,” he said. “They never growed up around here. The old-timers will always call it Venice. I know that can be confusing at times. When the boys came home from Korea about ’52, they told truck drivers to take something or another to Venice, and the stuff got lost for a month. A few years back, you knew just about everybody in Venice. You don’t now. All the older ones used to sit around here and play cards. That’s what they liked, and their wives always knew where they was at. But most of them are dead now. I’ll keep this place like it is, though. If I ever change it, life in Venice won’t be the same.”

  One winter day I walked into the Venice Pavilion, the town’s most important piece of architecture, and saw an empty bar on a quiet afternoon. Paul Fiehrer was the owner then. He recalled the days when sweet big band music drifted from the large dance floor upstairs. “This place was built in 1917 for the Schradin family by George Sefton of Shandon, and it opened in April 1918,” he said. “Then wouldn’t you know it, old Stanley Schradin got himself drafted into World War I, leaving the place to be operated by his wife and family. It was a lot to manage. They ran a fried chicken restaurant with three bowling alleys in the basement. They bought vegetables from the farmers around Venice. On the first floor, they kept oak candy and tobacco cases. The dance hall was upstairs. Its solid hardwood floors are so large that the Ross High School basketball team used to practice there. The family operated the Pavilion for twenty-six years. By the 1940s, this place was the best entertainment spot in Butler County. You could hear Cowboy Copas and other country-western stars on Saturday night. Everybody came here looking for a good time and they usually found it. We had four doctors in town then—a few lawyers, too. Now, time is sliding by and our lives have changed. Subdivisions are taking over.”

  Appreciating that life, women of the Venice Presbyterian Church documented their town’s past on a quilt sewn in 1978 for the church’s sesquicentennial. One quilter, Martha S. Reiner of Fairfield, said the women stitched for about a year and never complained. “It was hard work but it was a pleasure,” she said. “We had lunch and a social affair. If we look thoughtfully at the events and the people and the places symbolized on the quilt, we can see the spiritual influences that served to enrich the lives of the people in our community. The homes must be seen as brave efforts of devoted fathers to provided shelter and comfort for the families. Consider some of their names: Isaac, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, Noah, and David. Can we doubt their devotion to the book from which their names came?” (As I write this in 2003, the church is celebrating its 175th anniversary with a special service, dinner, and a storytelling program about the old community and the church. Members will discuss the exploits of the Venice Cornet Band and dedicate a time capsule.) Church secretary Melanie Hanson said, “It gives me shivers to see the band pictured on the quilt. This is all about our community. But all this does make me wonder: Will we baby boomers leave our mark like the quilters did?”

  The church now displays the quilt in a wood frame covered with glass. It is like a lost Egyptian artifact that was rediscovered and exhibited. Bordered with leaves, the quilt features squares with rustic designs of thirty local sites and people from the nineteenth century, including the Venice Pavilion—today, appropriately, an antiques mall—in the center of town. Other local scenes depicted on the quilt are the Venice ferry in 1884; the Venice Graphic, published and edited by Lewis Demoret from 1887 to 1912; and the Venice Cornet Bandwagon, operated by the Venice Cornet Band until the wagon and musical instruments burned in 1889. (Only a year earlier, proud townspeople had donated money to build a bandstand for the group.) The quilted squares also include the Ross School, 1875–1939; the Log School, 1814–1824; the Venice Covered Bridge, 1853–1893; the Woolen Manufactory, 1822–1875; and the oddly named Cyrus Benton “Ditty” Haldeman, 1849–1937.

  Ditty was a whittler known widely for his ability with arithmetic and one of those rural characters whose kind has faded from the countryside. Today, people like him are murky ghosts of the past, as much folk tale as flesh. Ditty never aspired to any important job; he never even left Venice. Ditty remained a bachelor, helped
local kids with their algebra and geometry homework, kept many cats, hired his sister to keep house for him, read a lot of books, fished often, and left a mountain of books, newspapers, and magazines that grew organically all over his house. For a living, he repaired clocks and farm machinery. Supposedly he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Mathematicians in London and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Mathematical Association of America. Once, a math professor from England came all the way to Venice to see him. As Ditty whittled that day, the man presented him with a complicated math problem. Ditty went over to his desk, grabbed a pencil, scratched his head, and in only a few minutes said, “Here’s the solution to your problem.” The truth is, nobody knows much about Ditty, but stories about his “figuring” prowess have been passed down like family heirlooms.

  “Ditty, as he was familiarly known, was the only known genius to live in Venice,” Martha Reiner said. “His only formal education beyond the three R’s was received in the basement of the Presbyterian church. The minister, I. M. Hughes, conducted a school for higher branches of learning. He told Ditty’s parents that he could teach Ditty nothing because Ditty already knew more than he, the teacher.”

  Sadly, tales of such quirky people are fading as the landscape evolves into suburbs and exurbs and a sport-utility world. Future communities will have to make their own legends, landmarks, and characters.

  But for now, and for as long as the sesquicentennial quilt still hangs in the Presbyterian church, people will remember old Ditty and his town—Venice.

  4

  Footville Is Where the Worlds Meet

  In Ashtabula County, in the northeast corner of Ohio, I pulled over to look at a panorama of wheat. On the radio Reba McEntire sang, “Is There Life Out There?”

  I knew there was—somewhere. I just had to find it.

  The afternoon steamed as I took State Route 46 into Ashtabula, a city of about twenty-five thousand people and the largest community in Ashtabula County. Despite its size, it is not the county seat. Jefferson is. It is a small town—no more than three thousand people—that happens to be centrally located, which is why it’s the county seat. Ashtabula has a Lake Erie harbor reminiscent of a New England fishing village. At this harbor, conductors on the Underground Railroad helped escaped slaves board ships and head to Canada.

  While in town to eat lunch, I glanced at the lead story in the daily newspaper: “Hot … Very Hot.” By 1 P.M. the temperature had reached an uncharacteristic ninety-five degrees with humidity so high that it curled wallpaper. The restaurant, recommended to me by a service-station attendant, stood across the street from a white concrete flying saucer with a red stripe around its middle and a glass bubble on top. I asked a young waitress (these days, I consider thirty a young age) what the saucer used to be and she mumbled, “Gas station.”

  “When?”

  She shrugged and said, “Long time ago.”

  “Oh,” I said. “In the 1960s?”

  She looked at me as though I had just emerged from a spaceship. “No. The ’80s!”

  No matter. To me, the saucer was fascinating—as large as a medium-sized airplane and mounted on top of a square box where the cashier once sat. Her estimate notwithstanding, the place is a perfect piece of 1960s pop-culture architecture.

  After taking a picture of it, I got back on Route 46 and headed into the rural county. No particular reason. I just wanted to say I visited the extreme northeast corner of the state. According to my 1915 Rand McNally map, the county once was the home of now dead or dying towns such as Dick, Wick, Cork, Sweden, Denmark, and Padanararn. In Jefferson, I stopped at the Henderson Library and met director Susan Marirovits. She explained that many of Ashtabula County’s small towns declined during the twentieth century. They lost their momentum. “I’m from Rock Creek, about seven hundred souls,” she said. “It used to be twice that size when the railroad stopped in town. In fact, Rock Creek used to be larger than Jefferson, but Jefferson has started to grow a lot lately, attracting some industry. The mayor rubs his hands together and says, ‘We could triple the population of this town in ten years.’ I say, ‘Well, maybe that’s not so good.’ You see, we’re used to having a peaceful town. Naturally, this has caused some philosophical differences in Jefferson. I don’t think we have to worry about that happening in Rock Creek.”

  Looking over the hot landscape, I tried to imagine it in the winter. I couldn’t. I had heard many horror stories about snow in northeast Ohio. But they can’t come close to the big snow of February 3, 1818, which struck the entire Mahoning Valley and areas to the north. At first the snow came down moderately, and pioneers thought it was going to be like any other snowstorm. Then it came faster, more furiously, until it coated everything but full-grown trees. “The earth was covered four feet deep,” wrote the editor of the Historical Collection of the Mahoning Valley in 1876. “No stumps, no fences, no logs were to be seen on the newly cleared fields. All was smooth as the surface of a calm lake, and presented a most desolate appearance. I will not attempt to describe the labor of the days immediately succeeding the storm, in clearing away the snow, and opening such roads as were necessary for the convenience of the people. Deer were plenty at the time. They found it very difficult traveling through the snow. They could move only by leaps and bounds, and when they alighted were completely buried. The mercury soon went below zero, and continued frozen for many weeks.”

  In the late 1700s and early 1800s, New England settlers arrived in what is now Ashtabula County. The federal government owned much of the region then, and sold it to land companies to generate badly needed funds. Earlier, English monarchs had granted title to Virginia and Connecticut. The new government, fearing a major dispute, agreed to set aside tracts for the two states. Connecticut’s land, most of it called the Western Reserve, was sold to the Connecticut Land Company. New arrivals to the Western Reserve brought their own Yankee concept of how a small town should look—greens, spires, frame houses, and brick streets. Pioneer Turhand Kirtland observed in his diary on June 3, 1798: “Arrived at Grand River, encamped, found … as fine large strawberries as ever I saw.” The Western Reserve turned into a major agricultural area in a few years. By the mid-1800s, the area had so many dairy farms that the Western Reserve was called Cheesedom. Nearly every community had a cheese factory.

  Pioneer towns included Eaglesville, Austinburg, Mechanicsville, Morgan (now Rock Creek), New Lyme, Ship, Gould, and Cherry Valley. Many towns died before the mid-1800s; they lost their main businesses, transportation routes, or other reasons for existing.

  In 1799, Judge Eliphalet Austin was bitten by what was assumed to be a rabid dog near his home in Connecticut. When doctors thought he was developing signs of hydrophobia, they advised him to take a trip. (Obviously, the judge had a strong malpractice case.) Feeling better, he decided to go to land he owned in the Western Reserve. He founded Austinburg, which would become the home of the first church in the Reserve. In 1804, the area’s first revival was held there, bringing forty-one souls to the Lord that night. But the church had neither building nor pastor. Determined to find a preacher at any cost, the judge’s wife rode alone on horseback all the way to Connecticut—six hundred miles, one way. Impressed with her determination, the Reverend Giles H. Cowles agreed to return with her to Austinburg. The congregation’s women, meanwhile, had been busy selling subscriptions, as they called them, to raise money to build the church. In 1812, it had the distinction of being the first building erected in the new land without the aid of whiskey as a refreshment. The men complained but were allowed to drink only beer.

  Austinburg (originally spelled Austinburgh) became a premier pioneer town. It was the home of the Ashtabula School of Science and Industry, described as “a manual-labor school to educate the pious and worthy young man for the gospel ministry.” At its peak in 1850, the town had 1,285 people. It was one of the Western Reserve’s earliest abolitionist centers, before West Andover, Cherry Valley, Hartsgrove, and Rom
e. Austinburg’s pioneer Underground Railroad station keepers included Aaron C. Eliphalet and Joab and L. B. Austin. The road from Austinburg to Ashtabula was well protected by local abolitionists against slave bounty hunters. The abolitionists used to boast: “You might as well attempt to get a saint out of heaven as a slave out of Austinburgh.”

  By 1920, however, the town’s population had declined to three hundred. Today, it is the home of only a few scattered houses.

  Later that afternoon, I pushed reason aside and stepped into the summer sauna. Driving south on Route 46, I accidentally turned left on a gravel road and got lost among the fields. A sign in a field read: “Lenox Township—Zoned for Growth.” A dairy barn was painted with a large mural of cows. Hawks circled above, and buzzards, with necks like B-29s, pecked on some roadkill. In this country, a stranger can get lost easily; tiny township roads intersect one another at seemingly a million points. In Ashtabula County, many local roads are made of gravel and road signs are wooden arrows painted white with black letters. As I headed east on one road, trying to find Eagleville, a cloud of dust rose before me like a funnel. A big 1980 Buick, moving at least fifty miles an hour, suddenly shot past me, leaving me sitting in dust as dense as morning fog.

  I stopped at a farmhouse to ask for directions. An older man sat on the porch and looked at me skeptically.

  “Not much in Eagleville.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “There ain’t even a general store any longer.”

  “No problem.”

  “Bet you’re lookin’ for the cemetery. You one of them gemologists?”

  “A genealogist? No, I’m not.”

  Looking disappointed, he turned toward the door.