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

by Randy McNutt

  Eagleville was not difficult to find, once I got back on a concrete road: a dozen older homes, well maintained, with a cemetery and the Eagleville Bible Church. I stopped in the parking lot and drank a Coke. I thought that Eagleville is the kind of town you pass on country roads and, mesmerized by the white lines on gray pavement, you ask yourself: Did I pass a town back there? Eagleville is also an obscure piece of history floating in time. Its name came from an eagle that perched on somebody’s mill, according to local legend. The story might be true, for our ancestors generally took no great care in selecting names for their towns. If the community didn’t bear the name of a rich pioneer or important official, like Austinburg, then the name selectors could get creative. The map of northeast Ohio illustrates the point: Novelty, Delight, Mecca, Freedom. Often, though, names like Eagleville simply stuck over the years because the town’s official name—if there was one—didn’t impress the people.

  Nobody knows why Eagleville stopped growing. In the mid-1800s, it was a major business center, with a gristmill, cheese factory, hotel, hattery, tanneries, cabinet factory, shoe shop, millinery shop, saw mill, three blacksmith shops, several general stores, a school and a large Congregational church. Then, the place inexplicably vanished. “Like so many towns that once had some industry,” Marilyn Aho of the county historical society told me, “Eagleville just petered out. It grew in the first place because the railroad came in. People from Jefferson came to town to catch the train to Warren. Of course, the train’s long gone and so is Eagleville. When automobiles came in, people no longer had to stop. They just kept driving through town.”

  Eagleville did produce one shining story, however: Colonel Roswell Austin, who lived on a farm near town with his wife and son, Henry, was known for his understatement. “When Henry was a well-grown boy,” local historian Laura Peck Dorman wrote in 1924, “his father sent him one afternoon to drive up the cows. He left the house and disappeared and was not seen again for years. Exactly seven years, to the hour and day, he was next seen there, driving up the cows from the Mill Creek flats. His father’s only remark, as the boy came up to the house, was: ‘Henry, you’ve been a long time getting those cows.’”

  Footville was my last stop in Ashtabula County. No need to ask why I went there. The name was enough. I was disappointed to learn that it was named for a founding father by the name of Foot. I had hoped for something stranger, maybe a founder with a foot fetish. I continued into town anyway.

  Marilyn Aho warned me: “We have a lot of little places that are no longer towns. I call them Ashtabula County’s ghost towns. Places like Footville. It’s defunct.”

  Defunct is a dirty word if it’s used to describe your town. One older woman in Footville insisted that the community is bigger and better than ever. Of course, she’s lived there only ten years. The remains of Footville do not support her claim. Gone are the lumber mills, a hotel, blacksmith shops, and a cheese factory (1871–1905). In the winter of 1842, the first classes were held in the new Footville School. Five years later, Lauren B. Foot built a new school, which still stands. Students attended it until 1935, when enrollment declined to twenty-five children. The next year, they were sent over to Trumbull Center for their education.

  Since then, the old building has been used at times for meetings of the Ruritan Club, a group formed during Ohio’s agrarian past to promote harmony between rural and urban people. At the turn of the last century, a distinct social gap existed between the two; city people commonly referred to their rural cousins as rubes, hicks, hayseeds, and bumpkins. Then came Sears, Roebuck and the mail-order companies, and suddenly any farmer from Ashtabula County could buy a white shirt and fancy collar band. Differences slowly melted.

  These days, about one hundred people still live in the countryside around the intersection of Graham-Trask Road and State Route 166, near a park with a wooden church and former school that isn’t used much these days. Downtown Footville is so small that it barely exists. (Its population reached all of sixty-nine people and a post office in the 1890 census.) The sign for the Footville Community Church is weather-beaten and you cannot read the times of the services. No matter. There are no services.

  Footville and the Ruritan Club—its few elderly members were still getting together only a few years ago—find themselves out of sync with the times. There isn’t much demand for small cheese factories and blacksmith shops anymore, and no one is seeking harmony between city and country people, who all too often are meeting each other on the road to home. So in this cockeyed modern world, Footville tries to make its place. On occasion, a big-city resident—the television camera operator from Cleveland comes to mind—will join the back-to-the-country movement and buy one of the few houses left in Footville. But he will be disappointed. The noise died a long time ago in this town; the softball diamond went back to grass. When I stopped at the house next door and asked a woman if the church ever conducts special services, she said, “Every so often, an old person will request to be buried out of there.”

  I wouldn’t give Footville much chance of staying alive in the next few years, but then, who knows? If more people like John McMahan move into town, the population erosion could reverse itself. McMahan is not exactly a stranger to this place. The thirty-something pop musician grew up in Footville and for several years worked his ancestral farm. Then he heard the call of the road, which few musicians can ignore. He has traveled all over the world, living in New York, Europe, and, later, Cleveland, which was close enough to home that he and his wife moved back to Footville. He commutes the forty-five miles to Cleveland.

  “There’s something magical about the topography of this land that appeals to me,” he said. “In this corner of the county, it’s rolling and beautiful. The rest of Ashtabula County is flat. In the 1800s, my great-great-grandfather, Hiram Spafford, helped found this community, and now every day I pass the trees he planted along the road 160 years ago. I live in the house he built in 1830. My brothers and sisters live around here, too. So there was a lot for me to come back to.”

  McMahan said he knows, all too painfully, that few people are interested in Footville. When he tells people where he lives, they look at him with bewilderment. “It’s the same old situation: the people left town to go where the money was, the city. The population of Footville was once much greater than it is today, but I believe all that will change in the coming years. People are going to get a taste of the city and find out they don’t dig it. They’ll want to come here. Back home.”

  5

  Sodaville or Bust

  Ohio is filled with tiny towns that blew off the map like specks of dust. Many of their names still remain in print. When I drive through these towns, I wonder: Who lived here? What did their people dream? How many families stayed on until the end? Often, no one is left to explain. Obscurity is the only ghost left.

  On this trip, I sought to escape into the woods and forget the world and the terrorism that I’d been watching on television. But the news always managed to intrude. Finally, I crossed over the Adams County border and felt the world slowly recede.

  The first thing I did was look up a native guide named Stephen Kelley. (When searching for ghost towns, the traveler should seek an expert who knows the history, the local topography, and, certainly, the temperament of the people.) Considering the rugged terrain and rural isolation, and considering that I’ve had shotguns pulled on me in such places before, I figured that a guide would be useful, even if he came unarmed.

  I met the amateur archaeologist and preservationist at his Victorian house in Seaman, a village of several hundred people in northern Adams County, about sixty-five miles east of Cincinnati. You know you’re in Seaman because it is the only town in the area with a hitching post on Main Street—and Amish horsemen using it. When I entered Kelley’s white house, he was excited about having just acquired a grooved stone ax, one of the most recognizable prehistoric artifacts found in Adams County and Ohio. He ran his fingers across its smooth surface. “
Unfortunately, when the pioneers started tilling the soil and discovering these relics, they called them tomahawks,” he told me. “The settlers incorrectly assumed that these stone pieces were meant for warfare, because most of the contact between the pioneers and Indians had been in war up until then. The term tomahawk endures. So I always go around telling people, ‘Please don’t call them tomahawks!’ Oh, I’m the life of the party.”

  The genteel, dry-witted man in his fifties looks like a modern pioneer: long sideburns, black boots, and a western string tie. When he finally has something to say, he talks in a logical, deadpan way, with a hint of sarcasm.

  Adams County, population 27,330 in 2000, is his ancestral home and one of Ohio’s most rural counties. Kelley retains a strong interest in its heritage, but he does not ignore the negative. “In 1900, our county had more than thirty thousand people and a lot of small towns,” he explained. “By 1950, the population had decreased to twenty thousand, and some towns had declined. Why? No work. Our people left to help build the West.” They left towns named Tulip, Lynx, Harmony, Unity, Sunshine, Harshaville, Jacksonville, Whippoorwill, Panhandle, Squirrel-town, Tranquility, Scrub Ridge, Beaver Pond, Smoky Corners, Jaybird, Bacon Flat, and my all-time local favorite, Sodaville. I had to experience Sodaville, which I imagined as a place that once had Coca-Cola machines on every corner.

  On the way, we drove through places of meager means that had almost faded until a few Amish farmers and tradesmen moved in from northeast Ohio in the 1970s. They bought farms and opened bakeries— even a pallet factory. Although the towns didn’t grow much at their cores, the surrounding countryside grew and allowed the Unity General Store to remain open. It is a small, white frame building with a wooden floor and tight little aisles packed with loaves of bread and cans of groceries. We stopped to buy candy bars. A teenage Amish boy was standing at the worn wooden counter, contentedly eating a summer-sausage sandwich. The meat carried a distinctive aroma. The look on his face screamed contentment. “He may never go home again,” proprietor Eugene Ryan said. Not far away, an Amish man was selling baked goods and weighing them on a battery-powered scale. He insisted that he will never compromise with high technology (or any worldly ways), but incidentally, credit cards are welcome.

  Driving through the rugged countryside and its flinty hamlets, we experienced hallowed ground: land still untouched by smog and bulldozers. Near Burnt Cabin Road (another name from pioneer times), I saw a black buggy rolling along the south side of the road. The Amish have revived some local hamlets, preserving them like still lifes.

  I remembered once seeing a photograph of an old Harshaville, population sixty-eight in 1890. The town had a post office, blacksmith shop, buggy repair shop, and other businesses; and now I was looking at the same kinds of businesses (minus the post office). As we drove through town we spoke of the miller Paul Harsha, who became wealthy living in this remote place in the 1840s when he opened a water mill on Cherry Fork Creek and built a brick house overlooking his new town. It is still occupied, as is his son’s house by the creek. These two are among the only six homes remaining. The covered bridge still stands over the creek in Harshaville, as it did when General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate horsemen rode into town in 1863. Things have changed a little, however; Amish buggies now clatter along gray paved roads, and electric towers protrude like whiskers from the faces of charcoal hills.

  Making a right turn on some country road I didn’t recognize, we crossed Bundle Run Creek and stopped. Across the great bow of green soared a vulture, wings fully extended like a six-foot black fan. It circled, swooped, and landed in a field. Lacking the sharp claws of most birds of prey, vultures must make do with eating dead animals that they spot with telescopic eyesight. Adams County is filled with vultures, hawks, a few eagles, and other big birds. During one of my visits, sixty black vultures, birds protected by the state, died after eating meat poisoned by insecticides. To put the loss into perspective, consider that black vultures are known to live at least a half century. Perhaps a few of the sixty were around when Adams County’s ghost towns were still active in the 1940s.

  I hadn’t stopped thinking of vultures when Kelley looked around the woods and announced that we were now sitting in the middle of another ghost town—Steam Furnace, home of the first steam-powered smelting furnace west of the Alleghenies in the early 1820s. Today, the only thing steaming in Steam Furnace is the fog burning off the creek. One house stands.

  At one time, furnace towns boomed in southern Ohio. A neighboring Adams County town, Marble Furnace, employed six hundred workers. The town that grew up around the furnace took its name from the big smokestack that, from a distance, appeared to be made of marble. Hundreds of woodcutters chopped trees day and night and piled thousands of cords in mounds, set them on fire, and created much-needed charcoal. Their blazing glory lasted about a decade. By the 1830s, Adams County’s furnace towns were losing business, being undercut and surpassed by the more efficient furnaces of southeast Ohio. Adams County supported four company towns—Steam Furnace, Marble Furnace, Brush Creek Furnace, and Brush Creek Forge Furnace.

  “This place was busy at one time,” Kelley said of Steam Furnace. “It developed into a company affair. The workers had to live out here in the woods. Giant mounds of cut wood and black hills of charcoal lay all around, in a wasteland of ashes. Then, all of a sudden, the fires went out. Steam Furnace and the other furnace towns had no reason to exist.”

  Kelley pulled out a brown paper bag and removed a crude gray metal object with a dish fashioned on the bottom. He said, “This is a slut lamp made in Marble Furnace. It belongs to the county historical society.”

  “A what?”

  “A slut lamp. S-L-U-T. Now please don’t call it a whore lamp, as a woman in the courthouse mistakenly does. In pioneer times, slut meant animal fat. It was often used with a wick for a lamp. This one’s made of cast iron, and it’s worth $350. I wish I could afford one.”

  Moving on down an unidentified country road, we arrived in another ghost town, Mineral Springs, an old health-resort town. The area reminds me of a moon base, isolated and self-contained. The town peaked about 1915, when the advancement of medical science and the automobile made the resort obsolete. Some people in the Mineral Springs area call it Tree Heaven. Conservationists can’t stop talking about it. It is a scenic place to visit. Wandering the woods, I realized that this is one place that the developers won’t touch—at least for a century. The terrain is too wild, too much trouble to tame. It is also an eerie place on the nights when General Electric, a major landowner, tests its jet engines a few miles away. The hills light up in white and roar ferociously, like a scene in a science fiction film. By day, the land is silent again.

  White men first saw the springs about 1787, when the first surveyors entered the wooded county. Natives claimed the water had curative powers. Despite the presence of hostile Shawnee, surveyor Nathaniel Massie bought land in what is now northeast Adams County. He thought people would want to drink water that supposedly cleansed the kidneys and cured various ailments. The trouble was, a Shawnee camp sat only three miles away and the wilderness was filled with bears, cougars, and poisonous snakes. Massie finally gave up and sold the property, which included the mineral springs that fed Grassy Hill (also known as Peach Mountain).

  Word of the spring’s curative powers soon spread throughout the region, and in 1864 Hillis Rees bought the property and built a two-story log hotel just south of one of the springs. He also started a little resort town, Sodaville, to serve the increasing number of visitors who came to drink the water. By 1872, the town had a post office, two gothic hotels, cabins, and bridle and hiking trails. In 1881, the Cincinnati and Eastern Railroad extended its tracks to the area. Visitors got off the train at the Beaver Pond community, and traveled several miles by wagon to Sodaville.

  Resort owners promoted the area’s medicinal waters in an era before the development of the modern pharmaceutical industry. In the nineteenth century, such spas
were popular across America, especially in rural Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana. (Today, people don’t need to visit such places; they can buy spring water in plastic bottles.)

  Around the spring, pioneers observed large numbers of animals drinking the water. Soon they learned that the water contained large amounts of minerals. Speculators came in, built resort hotels, and with advertising lured people from the city and country. Doctors recommended that people drink twenty glasses of water a day. In southern Ohio and Kentucky, the water contained high concentrations of sulfur, which people often described as tasting like burnt gunpowder. Nevertheless, they drank it in volumes. An analysis of the water at Mineral Springs also revealed chloride of magnesia, sulfate of lime, chloride of calcium, chloride of sodium, oxide of iron, and iodine. Visitors often drank water filled with natural diuretics, cathartics, and sudoifics— namely, salt, various sulfurs, chalybeate, vitriol, alum, copperas, iodide, and Epsom salt.

  As I traveled through the site where Sodaville once stood, I imagined visitors taking wagons and horses and, later, railroads up the big hill to a few small hotels and related buildings in the thick woods. Outdoors at night, Japanese lanterns provided warm light, and candles and gas lamps lighted the rooms. By 1900, hotel parlors echoed with music from wind-up spring phonographs and visitors debated the world’s problems, laughed, and ate wild game. They also hunted, went fishing, received treatments on their aching limbs, and drank more water. Some people came here on vacation in summer, trying to escape the heat of Cincinnati and Portsmouth.

  We drove around looking for Sodaville but found nothing left of the town. I wondered how it got its name. Kelley read my mind and said, “There’s always a residue when the water evaporates on leaves and on the ground. It fizzes and dries white—like soda.” A few years after Sodaville’s founding, other entrepreneurs bought land nearby and founded Mineral Springs, a resort and town named after the spring itself. Other than serving their guests, Sodaville and Mineral Springs had no purpose. Resort owners built a school and church with sharply pointed roofs. They named their church the Little Brown Church in the Vale.