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

by Randy McNutt

  Americus, meanwhile, remained equally busy. He farmed and lived in Hamilton until the 1830s, when he moved to Covington, Kentucky. He spent the rest of his life trying to vindicate his father’s theory, an impossible mission. For his trouble he received his share of condemnation and laughter. He did manage to revive some interest in the theory, until polar expeditions in the 1850s helped end hollow-earth discussions for several decades. But ridicule did not take a holiday. The term “Symmes’s Hole,” fashionable in Ohio and other areas in the 1820s, had slipped into the public lexicon. It meant anything worthless. Unperturbed by the public’s view of his family, Americus moved to a farm near Louisville (he named it Symzonia) and wrote hundreds of letters to editors to promote his father’s theory, until it became an even worse joke. After gathering additional information, in 1878 he wrote a new booklet on the subject. He thought he had proved the idea conclusively. But by then, the world was too distracted, too modern, to care about concentric spheres.

  When Americus sued a Louisville turnpike company for allowing potholes to form in a road, the defense attorney added insult to argument: “Mr. Symmes could see a hole where nobody else could, like his father before him.”

  Perhaps out of sympathy, the jury awarded Americus Vespucius Symmes fifteen hundred dollars for his trouble. He did find a hole, after all.

  7

  Separate Spirits

  A couple of hours before dusk, I pulled into Zoar in northeast Ohio. Dense fog covered the trees and cupolas like bed sheets. At first, I thought I was driving into heavy smoke, but then I realized that the light rain and high humidity had created a wall of haze that stood along the Ohio and Erie Canal. On the town’s narrow streets, yellow lights glowed dimly, invitingly, from back porches and gardens buried deep within the fog.

  I came to stay the night in one of Ohio’s historic communities: a German Separatist village that flourished in the early 1800s. I wanted to experience Zoar for what it was—a communal enclave in Buckeye farm country. I wasn’t disappointed in the surroundings, for they reminded me of a set for one of those horror films about an old village coping with its demons. The place looked downright eerie in the thick fog. As I drove past log houses and the big, unused hotel, I felt a little uneasy, and then I remembered that this town also sponsors such benign events as a Christmas walk and a Civil War camp reenactment.

  The old canal still has water in it—as well as too many big mosquitoes that attacked me through my open car window. As I carried my suitcase into the Cowger House Bed and Breakfast (known in Zoar as the Number Nine House), I paused to read a large, framed rectangular poster from the 1890s that was affixed to a wall in the dark rear hall:

  PUBLIC SALE.

  The trustees of Separatists of Zoar will sell at public sale … 100 houses! 100 milk cows! 200 young cattle! 300 sheep! 100 hogs!

  At that moment I understood: the commune of Zoar didn’t survive the new century of capitalism. At random I chose a room on the second floor. When the light shower stopped about thirty minutes later, from my window I watched the wooden town unfold like a flower. Everything brightened up. I walked down to the Zoar Store, built in 1833 and now operated by the Ohio Historical Society. It also operates eleven other buildings in town, including the Number One House, sewing shop, magazine complex, garden and greenhouse, dairy, and hotel.

  Nowadays, residents live in the Zoarites’ original houses. They call Zoar a living village. Because the old architecture is still intact, Zoar is one of the few towns that can live in both the past and present. In one way, its past version is a ghost town. The Zoarites are gone; in their place live modern families who are not members of the founding sect. The Zoar Community Association, a group of residents and business people formed in 1967 to preserve the history and heritage of Zoar, operates a museum in the town hall. Anyone can rent the Zoar Schoolhouse for meetings, weddings, and special events. It is as if the modern residents are simply caretakers for a dead race.

  The community is no longer self-sufficient; modern Zoar is a commuter and tourist town. Larger events include the Harvest Festival, Apfelfest, Christmas in Zoar, and the Spring Garden and Backyard Tour.

  The village is still undeniably German, settled by Separatists who fled Wurttemberg with their mystic leader in search of religious freedom in America. They called themselves Separatists because they often opposed the state’s Lutheran Church for its formal doctrine. Originally, they were pietists, who believed in leading a purer life through individual rebirth and attaining a purer moral life through prayer meetings, Bible study, and attending Sunday school. When rationalism influenced church leaders in the 1700s, pietists separated from the Lutheran Church. Many of the Separatists were known as chiliasts, the believers in a doctrine of premillenialism (they thought Christ would return in 1836). Later, the sect drifted toward mysticism, and by 1791 it had grown larger, with dissenting pietists who opposed the new church hymnal as being too worldly. For breaking away, the Separatists were often harassed, imprisoned, and murdered by the state. Separatists did not accept sacraments such as confirmation, marriage, and baptism. They also opposed military service (a dangerous stance in the German states of the period), and the more radical members refused to pay taxes. A few of them practiced vegetarianism and celibacy.

  Many of Zoar’s old buildings still stand, including the Number One House, built in 1835.

  Zoar’s founders arrived in Ohio in a century when communes, some of them religious, were operating in rural areas across the United States. They included the Perfectionists of Oneida, New York; the Shakers at various sites in Ohio, Kentucky, and the East; the Harmonists at Economy, Pennsylvania; the communal societies of Aurora and Bethel in Missouri and Oregon; and the Amana Society in Iowa. German immigrants with spiritual leaders also founded the Aurora, Amana, and Harmony groups. But each one espoused different principles.

  The Separatists needed a new home and found one in America. Each member sold his possessions to help pay for the voyage. In August 1817, they arrived in Philadelphia. Assisted there by Quakers, the group arranged to borrow money to buy land. The Quakers suggested they settle in Ohio. In October, the members arrived in the Tuscarawas River Valley to build a village, which they named Zoar in honor of the place where Lot went after fleeing Sodom in biblical times. Over the next fifteen years, the Zoarites bought fifty-five hundred acres to farm. Their emblem became the seven-pointed star of Bethlehem; their symbol, the acorn.

  The Zoarites lived as a commune after their early attempts at farming failed. Unlike other communal groups, which operated this way for political or religious reasons, the Zoarites did it for practical purposes; they knew no other way to survive. All property and earnings became common stock. On April 19, 1819, 53 men and 104 women established the Society of Separatists of Zoar, under the leadership of Joseph Baumeler (later spelled Bimeler), their agent and spiritual leader. He disliked ministers, saying they knew books but not God. He discouraged marriage (but in fact he was married with children). He and his followers did not use prayer books; they thought they were harmful and preachers deceitful. And members were ahead of their time in one way: Men and women held equal rights in making community decisions, and women worked in the fields alongside the men.

  Despite having some success raising crops, the Zoarites needed more money to stay in business. In 1827, the group decided to contract with the state to dig the Ohio and Erie Canal, which would pass through their land. Most communities allowed the state to dig the canals, but the hardworking Zoarites recognized the coming of the canal as a means of getting out of debt. When members finished the difficult work in 1828, they earned $21,000—more than enough to pay the $16,500 mortgage that they owed the Quakers. Because the canal ran next to the town, the Zoarites knew they could make money from commerce. They operated four canal boats, provided services to canal travelers, and sold their surplus goods. In 1835, the society became practically self-sufficient and increasingly wealthy. Seventeen years later, its property was valued at m
ore than one million dollars—a substantial sum in those days.

  Unfortunately, the society had little time to enjoy its good fortune. Bimeler died in 1853, leaving the group without its leader. On top of that, canal traffic started to decline. But it took decades for Zoar to die as a communal society.

  At its peak, Zoar was green and prosperous. Apple trees grew everywhere. Members loved flowers and planted them in large gardens in the center of town, where they grew vegetables, flowers, and small fruits. On an entire block, they built the Zoar Garden and Greenhouse in 1835. It symbolized the new Jerusalem described in the Revelation of John. In the center—called the Centrum—stood a Norway spruce, representing everlasting life; a surrounding arbor signified heaven. Around the spruce stood twelve juniper trees, representing the twelve apostles. A circular walk enclosed the Centrum, from which twelve other walks led farther into the four corners of the garden, denoting the various paths to heaven. From each of these paths led smaller ones, like the worldly paths that people take as they seek the Lord’s salvation. Yet another, wider path went around the whole garden, to show the path of unredeemed souls.

  The Zoarites grew flowers for their own enjoyment in the early years, but later they grew them commercially for markets in Cleveland and other places across the Midwest. Gradually, the society at Zoar branched into many different moneymaking operations. In the 1840s, at its peak of five hundred members, the community baked; made soap; grew grapes for wine; worked on the canal boats; brewed beer; raised and sold chickens and hogs (this was before they decided against eating pork); forged iron products; made pottery; milled flour; raised sheep for the wool; produced milk and butter; sewed clothing; and built stoves, tools, plows, and wagons. They also operated a general store and hotel that catered to outsiders.

  Filled with their success, the Zoarites expanded. Dallas Bogan of the Warren County Historical Society in southwest Ohio told me he believes the Zoarites founded another town called Zoar in his county in the 1840s, although firm evidence linking the two towns is lacking.

  Warren County’s Zoar prospered immediately, keeping busy two blacksmith shops and two wagon makers’ shops that employed eight to ten laborers. According to History of Warren County, Ohio, “Prosperity was destined only to be transitory. The streets of Zoar became long ago deserted and the sound of the hammer is no longer heard within her borders.” Until now, that is. When I drove through the ghost town on U.S. Route 22 / State Route 3, I noticed development all around me. Now, suburban people are fleeing to Zoar because it is only about five miles from Interstate 71. The rest of Zoar consists mostly of a few small brick and wooden houses built from the 1930s to the 1960s, the Zoar United Methodist Church, St. Philip’s Catholic Church, a storage building, and a body shop. Nothing remains of the old town.

  Tuscarawas County was much better suited to a long-lasting town because it offered prime farmland, the canal, and the church elders. Yet visitors of the period must have considered the Zoarites an odd sect. After all, what Christian people disregarded baptism and the Lord’s Supper? What kind of gentleman wanted no titles—not even mister? Kept his hat on in a public room? Called a sermon anything but a sermon? Because the Zoarites believed all men were equal, members nei ther tipped their hats nor bowed. They did not mark their graves. They worked on Christmas, Easter, Sundays, and holidays, which they barely considered. The Zoar women, who outnumbered the men three to one at one point, were largely responsible for digging out much of the canal. Residents’ homes were numbered, but not in sequence; when people moved to another house, they took their number with them. (The Zoarites wanted to simplify everything, so they identified their buildings by numbers, not names.) Members were also obsessed with cleanliness. They scoured and scrubbed the village daily—even the trees. They removed and washed windows every day. They used two soaps—toilet soap for the face and a homemade soap for the body. Members caught using the more expensive toilet soap on their bodies received a reprimand. They drank beer—no, savored it. Never too happy with marriage, by the 1820s they embraced celibacy to give women more time to work on the canal. The Zoarites believed that God only tolerated marriage, and that it caused trouble in the community, but they did not forbid members from marrying. Celibate members divided themselves into houses of twenty each—for men, women, or both. They lived by the twelve Principles of the Separatists, including this one (number nine): “All intercourse of the sexes, except what is necessary to the perpetuation of the species, we hold to be sinful and contrary to the order and command of God. Complete virginity or entire cessation of sexual commerce is more commendable than marriage.”

  When children reached age three, they were placed in community nurseries until they turned fourteen. (In 1840, one of the town trustees refused to send his children to the nursery, so the town dropped the requirement. By 1860, the practice died out.) The idea was to free the women to work outside their homes. Mothers and fathers did not see their children too often in those days. Rearing the children was left to the nursery supervisors; some were harsh and cruel. They insisted that the children earn their room and board by performing household tasks. Children lived in quarters that were hot and humid in the summer and cold in the winter. The early Zoarites believed a kiss was sinful and didn’t even believe in kissing their children.

  While visiting the community in 1875 to write The Communistic Societies of the United States, reporter and author Charles Nordhoff couldn’t reconcile many of the Zoarites’ odd practices. He decided that he would not want to live in such a place. He wrote:

  Yet, when I had left Zoar, and was compelled to wait for an hour at the railroad station, listening to men cursing in the presence of women and children; when I saw how much roughness there is in the life of the country people, I concluded that, rude and uninviting as the life in Zoar seemed to me, it was perhaps still a step higher, more decent, more free from disagreeables, and upon a higher moral scale, than the average life in the surrounding country. And if this is true, the community life has even here achieved moral results, as it certainly has material, worthy of the effort.

  After visiting a dozen communal towns across America, Nordoff considered Zoar a town filled with dull and lethargic people:

  Though founded fifty-six years ago, [it] remains without regularity of design; the houses are for the most part in need of paint; and there is about the place a general air of neglect and lack of order, a shabbiness, which I noticed also in the Aurora community in Oregon, and which shocks one who has but lately visited the Shakers and Rappists.

  The Zoarites have achieved comfort—according to the German peasant’s notion—and wealth. They are relieved from severe toil, and have driven the wolf permanently from their doors. Much more they have accomplished; but they have not been taught the need of more. They are sober, quiet, and orderly, very industrious, economical, and the amount of ingenuity and business skill which they have developed is quite remarkable.

  In 1884, the town incorporated as a village, with an elected mayor, council, and secretary-treasurer. The religious society continued to function, without the commune. By 1898, when it was obvious that the boom times of the canal were never coming back, the members disbanded the society. Each received land, a house, and possessions.

  Zoar became just another declining canal town with an unusual name.

  I walked over to the Zoar Store and asked to go along on a group tour. A historical society guide named Steve Shonk, of Navarre, escorted us on a tour that he gives four days a week. He dressed in the style of Zoarite clothing that was typical in the 1850s, complete with broad-brimmed straw hat and white linen shirt and dark trousers.

  While walking around town with him, for a moment I forgot that he was not a Zoarite. He was precise in his terms and explanations, and appreciative but not adoring of what the sect accomplished.

  We walked along the damp blacktopped streets while Shonk talked. When he’s not leading tours, he is writing the Zoar Star, a newsletter published quarterly by the Z
oar Community Association.

  The Zoar Store was built in 1833 at Main and Second Streets. The building served as the group’s business headquarters, post office, and store. The early residents had so little money that they had to sell homemade utensils and other useful things to the farmers and hired men of the area.

  “I don’t know if there was any friction between the people of Zoar and the people of the county, but there was a healthy curiosity,” Shonk said as we walked between the buildings. “They all did business together. They didn’t have time for animosity. German immigrants were often sent straight to Zoar because they could find work there and speak the language. Newcomers would find out about the communal arrangement soon enough. Some didn’t mind it. They’d stay on. Others would leave for Dover and Canton and other area towns.

  “Zoar hired a lot of outside laborers. The town welcomed some of them, but some others were not received so well. This had more to do with practical matters than religious. In 1834, thirty-five to fifty villagers were claimed in a cholera epidemic. The town was left shorthanded. The Zoarites decided to hire outside laborers. Some of the elders were against the idea, fearing the effects of outside influences, but the group had no choice. They needed help. They decided to accept only Germans—poor ones who had less to leave behind in the world. The Germans were sought because of the cultural similarities. A man could join at age twenty-one, a woman at age eighteen. Of course, they could live in Zoar and not become a member of the religious sect. They simply received a wage and were not included in the ownership of the community. In 1847, a big wave of immigrants came over from Germany. They settled here. Some were not Separatists, but they ended up staying anyway. One of those families was Catholic. It didn’t matter. Anyone could attend services in Zoar.”