by Randy McNutt
Paul Huebner, an eighty-seven-year-old farmer whose homestead is marked by the Stars and Stripes, said he has watched Worstville and other old towns lose their reasons to exist. “You can always go by this rule: when a town’s elevator goes out, the town goes,” he said. “When my dad brought us to Worstville from Germany in 1916, the town was the place you took your grain to and bought your staples at. It was a regular little community, with local families who knew their neighbors. The farmers used to drink whiskey to get them going for the day; one guy always got drunk and threw oranges at the clerk in the general store.”
Nowadays, towns can grow if they’re closer to larger cities or within commuting range. The more remote ones in the old swamp are declining. In southern Wood County, where an oil boom created new towns practically overnight in the early 1890s, West Millgrove has lost its gas stations, hotel, restaurants, schools, and churches. The population decreased from 171 in 1990 to 78 in 2000; it had peaked in 1900 with 236 people. West Millgrove’s downtown died years ago. In 1998, the community sunk into $27,000 of red ink. It sold its park and village hall to get out of debt. As interest in the community declined, local elected officials felt helpless. When a Toledo newspaper reporter asked Mayor James Carr to explain why council meetings attracted so few spectators, he replied, “We used to [attract somebody], but he died.”
In Henry County’s Napoleon Township, Dogtown once attracted travelers to the intersection of U.S. Route 6 and County Road 17. Church services were held in the local tavern. After the members finished praying, they draped a sheet over the altar and opened the bar. The community was also known as Halfway House and Bostelman’s Corners, but was more often called Dogtown. This was possibly because a tavern there once used the symbol of a dog. Or, according to researcher Walter Shockey, a local tavern was a “doggery,” the old-fashioned name referring to alcoholic drinks as “the hair of the dog that bit you.” When the automobile became common on area roads, fewer people had to stop at Dogtown. It faded.
The swamp consisted of many such tiny towns—a general store and a few houses—because the roads were so poor and useful only in warm weather. Farmers and neighbors had to travel only as far as the nearest crossroads community to buy staples. One such town, Cloverleaf, had a large general store that sold everything from shoestrings to patent medicines to parts for Model T Fords. Across the street, a cheese factory operated until the early 1900s. (The town’s nickname, Ratsville, came perhaps from a prank in which some boys nailed rats to a board by their tails.) Now that people can travel long distances by car on good highways in the former swamp, Cloverleaf is farmland and the store is gone.
When the swamp was stripped in the mid- to late-1800s, many towns popped up temporarily to service commerce and industry. The appropriately named Woodville became a timber town. (Its post office was called LeSeuer, in honor of a lumber company owner named Fred LeSeuer.) At its peak, Woodville consisted of thirty houses, a company store (Smiley Higgins managed it), a rooming house, and other company properties. As LeSeuer’s stock of timber decreased, the town grew smaller. In July 1894, a fire destroyed the company’s operation. The flames spread to fifteen acres around Woodville, where eight inches of bark and up to fourteen inches of sawdust were scattered. Ashes smoldered for more than ten years. Woodville fell into a swift decline.
In Wood County, Galatea was one of about twenty oil towns that boomed in the county from the late 1880s to the early 1900s. The oil business started in Galatea, site of the world’s largest strike at the time. The town had a glass factory, a railroad station, a post office, two saloons, a dance hall, a hotel livery stable, a refinery that employed six hundred men, and other businesses. When the oil boom ended suddenly, sending the workers to Texas, Galatea nearly closed. Today, it is a ghost town, haunted by the rumors of ghosts and cults. Some people say the spirits of oil workers float out of the ground at night.
On another trip into the former swamp I found a ghost town called Shunk, on State Route 109 in Defiance County. Shunk started as an Indian town in the 1780s. The Indians took or found American army gold and buried it in the village. According to legend, when soldiers approached a few years later, the Indians left behind a ghost warrior and horse to guard the gold. In the early 1900s, a Shunk boy was lost in the woods. Rescuers found him dazed and talking about a ghostly Indian who tried to ride over him with a horse. A few years later, a frightened treasure hunter told a similar story. Sometimes people still report seeing an Indian on horseback in the woods at night.
My favorite tale is from Munger, a lost town in the heart of the swamp. Writer Charles M. Skinner told the story of an evil man named John Cleves (no relation to John Cleves Symmes), who owned Wood-bury House, a mansion two miles south of town. In 1842, he received a visitor who was never seen again. Ten years later, when the house sat abandoned and decaying, two travelers decided to stay the night. As they talked late, a skeleton appeared to them. One of the men, a Major Ward, shot it with a pistol, but the skeleton moved forward, pointed his bony finger, and said: “I, that am dead, live in a sense that mortals do not know. In my earthly life I was James Syms, who was robbed and killed here in my sleep by John Cleves. Cleves cut off my head and buried it under the hearth. My body he cast into his well.” Next, Ward heard the voice coming from beneath the floor. It said, “Take up my skull.”
Many Black Swamp ghost towns were victims of the dying canal and timber industries. New Rochester, built on the Maumee in 1835, became the county seat. It was the only town in Paulding County with three hotels and two blacksmiths and was a stop on the Fort Wayne-to-Toledo stagecoach route. The town’s fortunes changed, however, when in 1840 Benjamin Hollister of Charloe boldly offered a two-story brick courthouse if the county commissioners would make his town the county seat. They agreed. “Both towns depended on the canal traffic,” County commissioner Elaine Harp told me. “Now, New Rochester is gone, and Charloe is nearly gone, and Paulding is the county seat. Many of our people have left the county to find work elsewhere.” These days, all that remains of New Rochester is a roadside park, a stone marker, and a pioneer cemetery.
Other ghost towns of the Great Black Swamp included farm towns, several of which died during the tornado of March 1920. People still talk about it. On Palm Sunday, strong winds moved across the flat Indiana border and over to Payne, Ohio, where every home was destroyed. Then it struck the small town of Emmett, at State Routes 228 and 115 in Paulding County. The place consisted only of a telegraph office, express office, two general stores, and a hotel. With one mighty blow, the twister blew Emmett off the earth (but not the Ohio map) before moving a few miles northeast to tiny Renollet. Gone—the grain elevator, general store, railroad siding, a few houses, and five people. Next stop, Brunersburg. The big wind knocked down every building as well as the big bridge. A fleeing family drove their car into a building, which showered them with bricks but left them unhurt. Brunersburg lived but has never regained its momentum. When the tornado entered Lucas County, it struck Raab first, blowing the town into oblivion. In all, the tornado killed twenty people in less than an hour.
In Wood County, an area high point, home to Bowling Green State University (from which my wife graduated), there is a road called Sand Ridge. It is not sandy, and it is only a small ridge, but the settlers built houses on it and rejoiced at finding a dry bedrock hill. Cheryl said she spent four years in Bowling Green and never knew she had lived near a ridge.
At the university library’s archive building, we took the elevator to the fifth floor and punched the swamp’s name into the computer. Twenty-seven entries came up, many of them unrelated to the swamp, including songs by the singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. In the early 1970s, he recorded songs such as “Black Panther Swamp” and “A Night in the Life of a Swamp Fox.” He was a Louisiana native, but his song titles reminded me of the Black Swamp; it was as if he knew the place. In the archives we also looked at books, audio and videotapes, master’s theses, newspaper clippings, and a box containing
swamp ephemera that was collected by a man named Orin Bernard Workman, who was born October 29, 1908, in Paulding County. The construction company owner founded the Black Swamp Historical Museum, his passion. In a university file I read a list of his museum inventory, which he had handwritten on five pages of company letterhead. His artifacts included old vinegar and wine barrels, newspapers, gaslights, a tapestry, German books, plows, and other farm implements. After he died on December 9, 1971, his museum was closed and a piece of the swamp’s past died too.
Also in the archives, we discovered a 1983 note about an elderly woman named Mrs. Gribble of Deshler. She recalled that her grandfather farmed on Jackson Prairie in Wood County in the late 1800s, when the prairie was a little piece of heaven inside swamp hell. By his time, only small pockets of swamp survived in Wood County. She said the prairie’s deeply rooted grass burned for weeks after farmers conducted their annual stubble fires to clear out the area. In the archives I also found a yellowed history of the Friendly Neighbor Home Demonstration Club, organized October 23, 1947, and disbanded May 14, 1969, after its two-hundredth meeting. The history explained that the club, in Emerald Township in rural Paulding County, was formed so farm wives could give one another lessons in homemaking. Declining membership caused the group to disband.
Leaving Wood County and heading south, I noticed that from all directions in the former swamp, the horizon is flat. A writer for a 1960s Ohio Almanac claimed that “a headlight on a grade in Defiance can be seen in Antwerp, more than twenty miles away.”
When mist covers the fields and sunlight reflects on the dew, the landscape unfolds toward the horizon like a green carpet. Ohio’s last frontier is now cornfield after cornfield, a place where 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America are still hip, county fairs are the biggest events of the year, and programs like Farm Focus beckon farmers to sit on the latest tractors and try on red polyester baseball caps with yellow seed emblems.
Roaming farther into northwestern Ohio, I saw narrow country roads crisscross the horizon like grids, intersecting U.S. Route 127 and disappearing into walls of corn. The fields swelled with corn, soybeans, and wheat. Big green and red combines looked like oversized beetles rummaging through rows of cornstalks. When cars turned off the highway, all I could see was their tops moving, as if they were rolling directly through the fields. Out there in the country, I imagined silver-topped silos as missiles poking through the morning fog. I pulled over and parked and watched the sunset. Everything around me was flat and alive. The sun was splashing streaks of orange across a charcoal sky. Sitting there in the Jeep, I imagined the ghosts of ancient trees standing in the swamp world below.
Vanquished now. Forever gone.
12
The Marrying Kind
Aberdeen, Ohio, and Maysville, Kentucky, are linked by a steel bridge and a shaky family tree. The smaller Aberdeen, on U.S. Route 52 in Brown County, never culminated in a typical nineteenth-century business district, as did Maysville and neighboring Ripley, home of Ohio’s burley tobacco market. Maysville and Ripley are red brick and Southern in appearance and attitude, but Aberdeen is more informal, all white and sprawling, as if its founders had to keep their options open.
The village of about two thousand people is known for one thing: the Simon Kenton Bridge, built over the Ohio in 1931. It seems a one-way route: Ohioans cross the river to shop, work, and entertain themselves. A century ago, however, generations of Maysville people came to little Aberdeen just to say “I do” because they didn’t need a marriage license. All they needed was desire. Ever since, genealogists on both sides of the river have been trying to untangle their conjugal roots.
Aberdeen, meanwhile, has spent the last century trying to live down—or live up to, depending on your family’s perspective—its past of lax marriage rules. Some women flowed across the river in yellow velvet gowns; others sneaked across at night in homespun dresses. They all sought temporary relief on Aberdeen’s muddy shore, where anybody could be hitched fast and for the right price.
By the time I came along, the marriage paper trail had blown into eternity. It was all a memory, or a retelling of someone else’s tale. Yet the Marriage Capital of Ohio lives on in the minds and record books of local people and institutions. The town still celebrates its marital history with a summer festival, which some couples make a nuptial event and where others renew their vows.
Because marriage itself is a gamble, Aberdeen became a rural Las Vegas, and the region’s number one marriage market in the 1800s. So many couples married there that neighboring states lost count. The town became a wedding turnstile. As a modern chamber of commerce advertisement points out, the earliest Aberdeen marriage certificate dates to June 11, 1772, “making Las Vegas and Niagara Falls look like modern interlopers to the small river town.” Aberdeenians exploited their town’s strategic location on the Ohio (fifty miles west of Portsmouth; forty-five miles east of Cincinnati) by bringing in boatloads of couples and offering low-cost witness service. Weddings were Aberdeen’s cash crop. Some local men made a living by witnessing.
Today, Route 52 zigzags along the Ohio like a strip of gingerbread, touching rusty trailers and lonely campsites that slowly come to life in spring. In Aberdeen, small businesses—car wash, fast-food restaurant, motel, antique shop—give the village a measure of activity. I felt I was in the country when I saw a sign for Sissy’s Restaurant. Directly across the river, a busier Maysville was hunched on the banks, like a collection of Victorian dollhouses. Spires and steeples rose from the hills, which appeared to fall into the misty river below.
On a fine spring day I went to Aberdeen looking for a wedding. I couldn’t find one, not even in the mayor’s office. These days, few transient couples rush here to be married by public officials, and shotgun-toting fathers rarely charge into town (well, at least not too often) from the hills.
In Margaret’s Kitchen, a little white restaurant on the highway, the old counter and knotty-pine seats looked comfortable enough to hold a dozen eloping couples, but the place was quiet by early afternoon. I asked where a guy could marry quickly in this town, and people stared as though I were an undercover cop. Two waitresses looked me over from head to foot, possibly considering me marriage material or a molester, then informed me that Aberdeen—and its scenic river vantage point—is the most romantic place in Ohio for a wedding. I had to tell them the bad news: I’m already married.
No matter. As if I should know it, one woman said, “Aberdeen was the home of the marryin’ squires.”
Another waitress said, “People stop in here all the time to ask about the old boys, who must have hitched everybody’s ancestors. We hear about that stuff all the time from genealogists. Yeah, Squire Beasley— oh, gracious, he married a lot of couples.”
An old man seated at the counter looked up from his serving of apple pie and said, “Uh, yeah—thousands.”
His buddy turned to me and added, “Naw, man. Tens of thousands.”
He was not exaggerating. In the 1800s, Aberdeen was called “America’s Gretna Green,” referring to a village in Dumfries, Scotland, once known as a runaway lovers’ haven. (Aberdeen is also the name of a city in Scotland.)
Aberdeen has no anvils left, but its Greta Green nickname came honestly enough in the form of Thomas Shelton, a Huntington Township justice of the peace who elevated the holy bonds of matrimony to cottage-industry status. His successor, Massie Beasley, took the tradition to new heights. At one point in the late 1800s, it seemed the town would forever serve the impetuous lover. If a couple wanted to elope, all they had to do was go to Aberdeen, where nobody worried about marriage’s minute details—license included. Steamboat companies and, later, the railroads, made Aberdeen a regular stop on the Cincinnati-to-Pittsburgh route. Shelton’s pockets bulged. Keeping his effort at a minimum, he stood before each couple and said loudly: “Marriage is a solemn ordinance, instituted by an all-wise Jehovah. Jine yer right hands. Do you take this woman to nourish and cherish, to keep her in sickness
and health? I hope you live long and do well together. Take your seats.”
Beasley’s ceremony lasted a bit longer, and he married, by his estimates, twenty thousand paying couples over twenty-two years. Some women complained that the ceremonies joined the man only to the woman, and not the woman to the man, but the squires didn’t care.
I drove around Aberdeen’s few streets for a while and on Market Street saw Massie Beasley’s two-story brick house, which was being renovated. I was told to ask about the squires at the village hall. The white concrete-block building on Route 52 is equipped with a clock that shows only military time. (“All I know,” a secretary said, “is when it’s time to go home.”)
Village manager Graham Ruggles, a ninth-generation Aberdeenian, said he’s used to people inquiring about the squires—letters, personal visits, telephone calls. “Beasley,” Ruggles said, “married two or three of my relatives. His deputy, Jesse Ellis, was my great-great-grandfather, the mayor, and the best man or witness in many marriages. My wife’s side of the family was all married by the squires, who made a mint because the State of Ohio was pretty lax about marriage licenses in the early days. So the village issued its own marriage license. Finally, the state set new regulations governing such things, but personally I don’t see the big deal. Is there really a difference between what the squires did and what the mayor does now? A while back, he married a couple on Friday. On Monday they were back in here, wanting him to take it back.”
Ruggles said Aberdeen was poised to become a major community in the early 1800s, but industry never arrived and Aberdeen remained small. A tannery, hotel, tavern, and lumberyard were all it had to offer, and then the marriage game started. Out-of-town couples provided local merchants and residents with money. When marriage became big business, well, who could turn it down?