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

by Randy McNutt

  Ague—a malarial fever with chills—was so widespread in the swamp that families kept salt, pepper, and quinine on their kitchen tables. Cholera and typhoid struck, too. Pioneers disagreed about the fever’s transmission; some said the fever came from eating swamp fish; others said it came from air poisoned by decaying vegetation. Apparently they did not consider the blood-lusting mosquitoes that attacked in squadrons.

  In 1910, Wood County historian C. W. Evers explained the agony of ague:

  All had it. It was no respecter of persons. It was a singular complication or combination of attacks on the human system. The victim begun the ordeal with a feeling of extreme chilliness; lips and fingernails turned blue as if the blood were stagnant. Then greater chilliness followed by shivering and chattering of teeth. By this time the victim, feeling as if every bone in his body would break, had crawled into bed if he was fortunate enough to have one, and called for more cover, shaking meanwhile as if just out of an icy river in a bleak day. This chilly period lasted from three-quarters of an hour to one hour or more, and was followed by a raging fever in which the patient constantly called for more water, which he gulped down by the quart, and still the thirst was unquenched and unquenchable. The fever in turn would be followed by a relaxation of the system and the most profuse and exhausting perspiration until the sheets and clothing would be wringing wet, leaving in the clothes a disagreeable odor hard to describe, but always the same. There was no mistaking an “ague sweat” by its odor. The only antidote, quinine, could not be obtained regularly.

  To discourage mosquitoes, the pioneers burned smudge pots that produced clouds of black smoke to drive insects away. They worked, to a degree, during the day. People burned them constantly. Surprisingly, new people arrived to settle the land. Soon they suffered from violent malarial fevers that struck as often as every four hours, followed by chills that were called the shakes. They didn’t understand that malaria was caused by a parasite, but they knew that mosquitoes were involved in transmission of the disease.

  Fever struck James Riley Sr., one of the swamp’s main scouts and pioneers, in the late 1820s. He helped lay out towns such as Lima; Celina; Coldwater; Delphos; Van Wert (his son, James Watson Riley, would become a cofounder of Van Wert in 1835); and New Rochester, the first seat of Paulding County. Riley became so ill with fever that he had to move to New York. In camp, travelers kept horseflies, gnats, mosquitoes, and other annoying insects away after dark by burning big fires. Because of the fever threat, many pioneers turned back to Michigan and Indiana. Those who moved into the swamp wore heavy clothes and buckskin mittens—even in warm weather—to protect their health. To discourage threatening insects, pioneers covered their horses in blankets and wrapped cloth around their own heads. In humid summer, life was unbearable.

  Other diseases arrived with travelers. By the late 1840s, a cholera epidemic spread across the swamp and frightened travelers coming across Ohio from the east. The feared disease raged for years. It hit hard and fast. A person could wake up feeling sick to his stomach and having diarrhea, and by night he could be dead; some people fell dead in the streets. When a family member took sick, some people simply ran away from home instead of staying to care for him, because they knew the disease was extremely contagious. Even some local newspapers closed. In Perrysburg in Lucas County in 1854, cholera killed two hundred people in a town of fifteen hundred. Panicked people fled town. Businesses closed. Two girls orphaned by the disease survived outdoors by eating scraps of food that a kindly neighbor threw to them from her back door. In Eagle Township in Hancock County, one whole cemetery was devoted to cholera victims. Delphos, a Miami and Erie Canal town that straddles the Allen and Van Wert County line, was nearly wiped out by cholera in 1854.

  Neither disease nor discomfort could stop people from entering the swamp. As early as 1827, when more travelers started arriving on their way west, Congress built the Western Reserve Road on the spongy ground. The problem was, the land was so flat and clay-filled that it would not drain. Previously, the only “major” swamp routes were a skimpy trail cut from Fort Adams to Fort Defiance by General Wayne’s troops in 1794 and then a road that the state expanded from Greenville to Defiance in 1824. Wayne’s soldiers simply followed an old Indian trail, the Black Swamp Trail, which they would later build from Upper Sandusky to Findlay. In 1812, General William Henry Harrison used it on his trek to Fort Meigs.

  Because of the poor weather, stagecoaches could travel in and around the swamp from only July to September. Travelers said the state road wasn’t much better than Wayne’s. An early editor called it “a strip 120 feet wide cleared through the woods with a ridge of loose dirt about forty feet wide between the ditches along the side.” The more the road was traveled, the worse it became; it was known as one of North America’s worst. More roads, all of them bad, opened in the 1830s.

  (Frustrated by their lack of success with roads, engineers tried to build an elevated railroad across the soggy land in 1840. The track was to be mounted on wooden poles, installed by two big steam-powered machines. One started at Toledo, the other at Lower Sandusky. Woodcutters worked ahead. Every time the machines stuck the poles in the wet ground, however, they fell over in the mud. The two machines never did meet as planned in the middle of the swamp. The rail line never started running.)

  Settlers walked and rode only a few miles at a time because the roads contained deep ruts that cracked wagon wheels and broke spirits. Between Fremont and Perrysburg, thirty-one taverns—one per difficult mile—opened to serve weary travelers, who sometimes rode all morning, only to return, beaten down, to the tavern where they had stayed the previous night. Tree stumps blocked wagons. Drivers tried to steer around them, creating ruts deep enough to bury a horse. Mud holes sucked down victims like quicksand. Entrepreneurial frontiersmen claimed certain big mud holes as their own; for a fee, they would pull stranded travelers from the mud and help them on their way. Even so, riders sank into mud up to their saddlebags. One man drove a wagon home at night and the next morning discovered he had lost his rear wheels in the mud somewhere down the bumpy road.

  In the spring of 1838, John S. Butler, a fourteen-year-old Pony Express rider, and another young man traveled from Sylvania, Ohio, to Indiana, going through the Black Swamp. They carried no guns. When attacked by wolves, the two cut tree limbs for clubs and pushed their tired horses faster, but the howling surrounded them. At a big tree they fought the attacking wolves for thirty minutes. Butler said, “Finally, they retreated, and we knew that one of them had fallen a victim to our clubs, and that it was now our chance to push on. It was only a short time before we could hear those wolves coming on again, and I knew that this fight would be harder than the other, for the taste of blood had added to the fury of those wild beasts. When we were almost exhausted and overpowered, I heard a gun, and knew that the tavern keeper had heard our shouts and was coming to our relief.”

  On the road one night, wolves approached lone traveler Daniel Sauder, who scared them away by striking six-inch wooden matches all the way home. Stranded travelers overturned their wagons and tried to hide at night, but wolves chewed through the wooden sides. Those lucky enough to evade the packs faced poisonous snakes, bears that could outrun men, lynx, and panthers. One settler heard a noise on top of his isolated cabin, so he tapped the ceiling with a quilt frame. A panther jumped off the roof, growled, and frightened the family. A more serious threat to woodsmen was wild hogs with sharp tusks. They were usually thin and hungry, and when they found a man, they mutilated him. Long bristles stood up on their backs when the hogs were angry. They were so fast and ferocious that they often ripped rattlesnakes and copperheads apart before the snakes could strike. The only way to escape a hog in the swamp was to climb a tree.

  The whole place was malevolent. Wood County farmer Amos Dewese lost 8 horses, 21 cows, and 260 hogs to disease during the winter of 1842. His neighbors, wearing rags and starving, fled to the city, leaving empty cabins. The stress of living in such a hosti
le countryside provoked people to extreme actions. One woman killed her husband because he would not agree to leave the swamp. A man killed his wife and buried her in a tree stump. When neighbors discovered her skeleton several years later, they remembered that her husband had said his wife “went away to Michigan.”

  Engineering reports said the swamp was uninhabitable, but Middle European laborers couldn’t read English and probably wouldn’t have believed such reports anyway. They had come in the 1820s to build a canal system in northern Indiana and western Ohio. When they finished their work in the 1830s, they decided to stay. After all, the land was cheap. Nobody wanted it. Europeans accepted the swampy conditions better than most Americans, perhaps because they were used to wet land at home. Where most people saw death and misery, the immigrants saw opportunity. One young man, a native of Dresden, Germany, told writer John Peyton that northwestern Ohio was El Dorado. “You will not find precious metals here,” he said while shaking with malarial fever, “but innumerable dangers, discomforts, and toil; but these are inseparable from a new country, and if surmounted by industry, a man can accumulate a fortune.” An American pioneer, anonymous and maybe apocryphal, offered a different view: “The white man came and took possession of the Black Swamp before the Creator had it ready.”

  Despite the hardships, more settlements grew slowly. Immigrants were intrigued because the Indians had left by federal orders, the most dangerous animals were being driven away, and the forests were slowly shrinking. Although area newspapers were filled with horrible stories about swamp life, people rarely complained to their neighbors and families in the East. They were too proud. They had heard that the swamp was a great opportunity. Unfortunately, many speculators lied about the region’s potential. J. W. Scott, who later started the Toledo Blade, published guides to attract pioneers. He claimed the area would contain the world’s largest cities by the year 2000. Thousands of people believed him—until they saw the water rats.

  In the 1840s, Methodists came to build churches in and near the swamp. After experiencing Toledo, preacher Joseph Cross told church members in the Christian Advocate:

  Of all the towns I ever saw, I think it is the most miserable … the place is so sickly that few will consent to stay here, except blacklegs and desperadoes, such as can subsist wherever Arabs or alligators can, and seem to feel most at home in such society. A few human shadows, yellow as the autumn forests around them, creep shivering through muddy streets. Our hotel seemed to be the general rendezvous of bedbugs for all the western country, and for breakfast they gave us hash of which I should not dare even to guess the ingredients. Here the philosopher might well light his lamp at noon to find an honest man.

  Yet swamp people endured hardship with humor. The Maumee City Express published this poem on June 24, 1837:

  On Maumee, On Maumee

  Potatoes they grow small;

  They roast them in the fire

  And eats them—tops and all.

  On Maumee, On Maumee

  It’s ague in the fall;

  The fits will shake them so

  It rocks the house and all.

  There’s a funeral every day

  Without hearse or pall;

  They tuck them in the ground

  With breeches, coat and all.

  In 1859, conditions started to improve when the Ohio legislature passed the first public ditch law, forcing land condemnation and assessment to help drain the swamp. Immigrant farmers renewed their attack against the swamp as though it were the intruder. They installed homemade wooden under-drains and, later, clay ones. At first, farmers laughed at the few who installed drainage systems under their farms. To convince farmers of the advantages of under-the-ground drainage systems, the state hired John H. Klippart, a drainage expert, to write land-drainage guides for farmers.

  From 1870 to 1920, farmers dug fifteen thousand miles of drainage ditches. The 1870s and 1880s were northwestern Ohio’s busiest years, with more than seven thousand miles of ditches dug in more than two million acres. If the region were to become farmland, ditches would be necessary to drain fields. At first, ditches were cut by hand from the heavy clay. Ditchers received $1.50 a day. Later, steam- and gas-powered machines did the heavy work. The soil that piled up was used to build roads.

  Machinist James B. Hill of Wood County patented and built a steam-powered ditching machine in 1893. The big metal wheel on a wooden frame could do the work of fifty men. Hill called his invention the Buckeye Ditcher. In 1902, he sold his company to the Van Buren, Heck, and Marvin Company of Findlay, which became the Buckeye Traction Ditcher Company. Because of Hill’s invention, drains were installed all over the Black Swamp and digging ditches became easier. The new company was the largest ditching and trenching company in the world for half a century, and its ditchers helped drain the Everglades.

  As farmers dug more ditches in the Black Swamp, whole economies flourished and died. Stave and barrel-hoop factories depleted elm and hickory forests. Black Swamp woodchoppers could clear an acre of big trees in three to four weeks. They lived in shacks in the same woods they were cutting. They called themselves “specialists” and rejected other forest jobs; they said the title gave them the luxury of working when they wanted. To hurry the cutting, they devised a method called tree slashing: they cut deep notches in trees, sometimes halfway through the trunks, with the deeper notches in trees at the front of the woods. Wind knocked over the forests like a table of dominoes.

  By 1870, more than four hundred sawmills were operating in the Black Swamp. Wood County alone had nearly one hundred. Sawmill equipment was made in nearby Allen County and sent in by railroad. The sawmill manufacturer evolved into the Lima Locomotive Works. As late as 1880, thirty-four stave factories were operating in Paulding County, making staves for wooden barrels. Even smaller towns had sawmills, to make 12 x 12–foot frames for barns. At the time, timberland sold for five dollars an acre. Settlers arrived, methodically cut the trees, and thus destroyed their financial base. When the logging industry faded in the 1880s, many sawmill operators started making drainage tiles. The companies also became mini-banks, loaning money to farmers and small-business people at rates lower than what the banks could offer. By 1880 the Black Swamp had eighty-one brick and tile mills, most of them powered by horses and, later, steam and gasoline engines. When demand for tile declined in the early 1900s, most northwest Ohio tile makers went out of business. Beneath the ancient swamp were buried millions of clay tiles, enough to surround the Earth eleven times. Today, only a couple of major tile makers still operate there.

  Paulding County’s last pocket of virgin timber—forty acres in Brown Township—wasn’t cut down until 1953, and, because of the immensity of the trees, the job took three years to complete. One elm measured 30 feet around and 150 feet high. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimated its age at 450 years, making it one of Ohio’s older trees. Woodcutters were so effective that by 1940, Ohio’s wooded land represented only 14 percent of the state. Woodcutters chopped themselves right out of their specialty work as the land turned to farms. (In 2003, Ohio was nearly 28 percent forested, the highest percentage since 1880.) In the swamp, most trees were cleared from 1860 to 1885, when the sawmills peaked.

  Dwight R. Canfield, a Perrysburg physician who grew up in the swamp at the turn of the century, looked over the treeless horizon in 1949 and wondered if his people had made a mistake: “Were the giant forests that were here when we came destroyed unduly? Is man like an insect that passes over and attacks our fruit trees and destroys them? What is man but another animal? Will he some day and some time be destroyed off the face of the Earth that it may return to its former state as it was before the creation? Deep in the silences of the forests I am constrained to wonder!” His view is modern environmentalism. Another opinion, probably the prevailing one, came from the writers of the Ohio travel guide (the Federal Writers Project) during the Depression: “Today the only reminders of the blight that once infested the region are the
parallel rows of drainage ditches running across the fields like strings on a harp.” One man’s blight is another man’s beauty.

  By the Depression, the logging towns—places named Timberville, Sophia, Arena, and Toronto—were gone or declining. They had depended on the canal and the timber industry to stay alive. During the timber boom years, 1840–1900, Paulding County’s population increased from 1,035 to 27,528, still an all-time high. Supported by sawmills, towns like Worstville started in weeks but dried up when the trees were cut. The Black Swamp was tamed, like a wild animal is domesticated. Instead of killing people, the swamp now served them.

  Worstville appeared to me like a mirage on the horizon. All that remained when I visited were rows of used tires, two old mobile homes, and five small houses separated by railroad tracks. A retired factory worker named Henry Wheeler invited me to sit with him in his front yard. He said Worstville was named in honor of the Worst family, prominent merchants.

  “The school bus don’t stop here. Nobody does,” he said. “Not long ago, the oldest man in Worstville—a good friend of mine in his nineties—died at home. He couldn’t bear to think of dying no place else. One day he got to feeling bad. I went over to visit him and he said, ‘I’ll have to go into a rest home. How can I? I ain’t never left Worstville.’ I told him he could hire somebody to take care of him. The next day, he went to Paulding to draw up his will. He came home, stuck a shotgun in his mouth, and blew his head off. They tore his house down the other day. I said, ‘This town is dead too, only it’s waiting for some kind of pronouncement.’”