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

by Randy McNutt

  As I walked around the town, I thought of Sugarcreek as a fort on the edge of the future. The town is a piece of the old Ohio. Here all the refugees—those who want to hold back tomorrow and keep life as it has been for centuries—have gathered for the final stand because there is no other place to run. I wondered how long the fort would hold, for development will surely arrive in time and money will change Sugarcreek into just another modern and homogenous town.

  A focal point of the old life is still in the downtown, where the Amish and “the English” work together and coexist nicely. The town has turned its heritage—Switzerland—into a communitywide theme. At first glance, the small downtown is disconcerting, with Swiss music being piped through loud speakers. The whole town seems curiously still and colorful, like a timeless town in a snow globe, dressed brightly in gingerbread with blue mountain paintings and long Alp horns adorning the fronts of shops. Even the town library looks like a ski resort, and the entire business district looks imaginary, a shimmering prism of mad colors amid a wide patch of green.

  Life has been this way since 1953, when the town fathers encouraged a growing tourist business in the area’s cheese factories. So that year they started the Ohio Swiss Festival and changed their storefronts to look like a little piece of Switzerland. Businessman Ranson Andreas donated a building to start the Alpine Hills Museum. “He decorated his own building like Swiss and then dared the rest of the town to do it too,” said Claude Zimmerman, a grandson of the town’s founder. “The only problem is, when July comes with its ninety-degree heat and high humidity, visitors can have a little trouble imagining they are in the Alps.”

  Sugarcreek has been a bastion of the Old World since the 1800s. In 1920, Smith’s father, Samuel A. Smith, bought the newspaper. The younger Smith worked there after school and later edited the scribes’ handwritten reports. Even after he became the editor, he continued to tend to about three hundred of their letters each week. He sold the paper in 1969 but continued to edit reports from the people who had become his friends. On a more recent visit, I read that ninety-three-year-old George Smith died in the fall of 2000, after working at the Budget for eighty years. That figure—eighty—staggered me. In today’s flighty workplace, it is unusual to find a forty-year company veteran. After Smith’s death, the paper’s first photograph—at least the first one that anyone can remember—finally appeared on page one of the Amish edition. If any subscribers cringed, they kept their feelings to themselves.

  Smith and the scribes had a close relationship. They trusted him, even though he was not one of their faith. They knew he would not make them look silly. Smith got something out of the relationship, too; he simply enjoyed it.

  “Once,” he told me on an earlier visit, “a scribe wrote that a woman was going to have her third consecutive set of twins—in two years. I know the Amish have large families, but three sets? Another time, we had a person write: ‘A farm family had a chimney fire Tuesday night, but, with the aid of the local volunteer fire department, the blaze was soon out of control.’ And then every so often we get the stories in which somebody is ‘fatally murdered.’ I like that style. I won’t change the writing much because I don’t want to lose the Amish flavor.”

  That flavor has helped sell the Budget since it was founded in 1890, the year Sugarcreek started to grow economically. A local printer, John C. Miller, decided the bustling town needed a newspaper, so he printed one with four 9 x 12–inch pages and mailed copies to six hundred prospective subscribers. From the start, the paper was destined to ignore conventional publishing rules. On October 15, 1891, Miller wrote: “The reason for the delay is that on Tuesday of last week, while returning from Farmerstown on a buggy, behind a kicking horse, we thought it safer to jump out of the buggy, and in so doing we had our right arm broken near the wrist, which will keep us from work for several weeks.” In a month, when he was well enough to resume publishing, Miller had already received dozens of letters from Amish friends who had moved to other states. Without thinking much about editorial policy, he decided to include their letters in the next edition. Readers enjoyed them, so he continued to publish them and the Amish continued to write. By December 1892, Miller was sending the Budget to 18 states and 463 post offices. Circulation increased to five thousand by 1906, and the newspaper earned a name as an important Amish journal.

  Except for a few years during the Depression, the newspaper has been healthy. Sprankle said he does not want to change it or conduct market research or to offer advertising. Lately he has turned his efforts toward expanding the Sugarcreek section of the newspaper, which, in keeping with tradition, is also offbeat. After all, Sprankle dislikes hard news. He looks instead for positive stories when he can find them, and to get them he doesn’t mind posing as he milks cows at the county fair. “Next month, I think I’ll enter a dress-a-calf contest,” he said. He prefers a front page uncluttered with terrible happenings. “I’m probably the only editor of a worldwide paper who devoted only two inches of copy to the shooting of President Reagan. But I did put the story on the front page.”

  Like Smith, Sprankle can’t seem to run from the magnetic pull of the Budget. He worked there in high school and quit to enlist in the Air Force after his graduation. When he returned, he decided to buy a part of the business, but he later sold it. “I had quit again, but the owners asked me to come back to run the paper,” he said. “I thought, what the heck, I’ll buy forty percent of it. Now, I own it with my partner, a Jewish businessman. So you’ve got an Amish paper owned by a Lutheran and a Jew. Kind of odd, huh?”

  Not when you consider the paper’s policy. “We like to run only good news,” Sprankle said. “Of course, out of necessity there are some things we have to get across to our public. For instance, the other week in our local section we ran a picture of a man’s front yard here in town. That might not sound newsworthy, but his grass was too long. It looked horrible. The picture fixed that, though. We put it on page one for everybody to see. By the next day, the grass was mowed. A good thing, too, because we were ready to put a goat on his lawn and take a picture for the next issue.”

  Tired of walking, I stopped at an old building, the blacksmith shop. I looked inside a murky room with two light bulbs dangling from the rafters. A bearded man held an ice cream cone in one hand and a hammer in the other. He looked annoyed.

  “If you’re closing, it’s all right,” I said.

  “No, no—wait! Do come in, please, but you’ve got to excuse me. By five o’clock I smell like a horse myself.”

  He motioned to step closer on a floor littered with the pieces of his life: twisted nails, leather collars, rusty horseshoes, harnesses, and copies of the Budget. “It connects us,” he said. Without blinking, he picked up the hammer and slammed it upon the anvil. The sound resonated off the walls and died in the street.

  Dale Schlabach, Amish, was thirty-four years old at that time, with red hair, a stiff white shirt, and dark work pants. His hands were those of a worker—rough and dirty and thick. The grin was that of a boy. He was loud and warm, a man in whom life’s meaning seemed revealed. The center of his universe was the shop. It was low, faded red, and rickety, like something on the set of Gunsmoke. He said he came to it every day, early.

  The village, which owned the building, kept the rent low so Sugarcreek could show a working blacksmith to the tourists who came to town each year to see how Swiss cheese was made. The arrangement was really subsidized industry. The large Amish population, with a horse-drawn lifestyle, assured the blacksmith of much work.

  For some reason, visitors always ended up in front of Schlabach’s door, their eyes probing every inch of the dusty shop. “Other day,” he said, “a fellow come in and said he heard that blacksmithing was being taught at a college. Can you imagine that? I never went to college, just to the eighth grade. I wonder if they teach you how to milk a cow out at that school?”

  Schlabach opened the shop because he has a reverence for hammer and horseflesh. The job forced him
to rise at 3 A.M. and, after doing the chores on the farm, to drive his buggy (“My van, man”) to the shop in town, about five miles away. Visitors usually gathered around as he opened up the shop each day.

  “People come to see a blacksmith,” he said with a shrug. “Aren’t many of us left these days. Sometimes they stand in long rows in front of my building. About noon I walk over to ’em and say, ‘How many of you folks have ever held the foot of a horse?’ They don’t say anything, so I open up my hand to show ’em something—an old yellow horse’s hoof that I keep here on a shelf. They groan pretty loud at that. At least once a week somebody will come up and touch a red-hot shoe. I’ll say, ‘Was it hot?’ The guy’ll say, ‘Uh, no, I just don’t like to hold a horseshoe too long.’”

  Visitors look at Schlabach and see a breathing anachronism, somebody foreign. Sometimes he invites people like me out to his farm for a meal and a chance to watch him milk his cows. His family roots are planted as firmly as an oak in this rolling countryside. But, like all Amish, he has maintained a detached sense of citizenship. His people belong first to the earth.

  “The old town stays about the same,” he said. “Only the storefronts change. Other day a fellow come in here and said he was a missionary in Africa. I said, ‘But where are you from?’ He thought about that for a minute and said, ‘I’m from nowhere, really.’ Well, being from someplace is kind of like putting on a necktie. You don’t have to do it, but it sure helps.”

  Dale Schlabach lives somewhere: “On a little farm, fourteen acres, where the wife and I are trying to bring up seven kids and fifteen Belgian horses. No electricity, no telephone, no car—just fun. I mean, you ever see seven kids at six in the morning? Ah-ha! Oh, well, I guess the only guy who has no troubles is the guy who has nothing.”

  15

  The Riders of Bentonville

  State Route 41 follows the original direction of Zane’s Trace in Adams County, still passing through flinty hamlets in a land seemingly lost. Much of it is as densely wooded as it was in 1798 when Ebenezer Zane poked his way south to Maysville, Kentucky, to open the first road. The county is so rural, in fact, that only in the late 1980s did McDonald’s golden arches intrude on West Union, the seat of county government.

  In the early 1800s, the trace was a popular route linking the Mid-South and Washington, D.C., so Adams County hosted politicians on their way to and from the capital. Andrew Jackson and venerable Tennessee senator Thomas Hart Benton visited frequently, and today two towns on Route 41 bear their names.

  I hadn’t expected to stop on the road, but then I saw a rectangular monument in the middle of town, dedicated to the Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society of Adams County. My curiosity made me stop. An Ohio historical marker also commemorates Bentonville’s most long-lived and only horse-thief-catching organization. (Coincidentally, on one of my visits to town, I read a story in a local paper about a pair of chestnut Arabian horses being stolen from a pasture in Clermont County, about forty-five miles west of Bentonville. Rustling is alive in rural America.)

  Bentonville is the kind of town that only momentarily distracts travelers’ weary eyes and makes them wonder why anyone would live in such a place. No neatly painted signs hang from businesses to attract customers. No public relations campaigns lure tourists. There is no chamber of commerce, no council, no mayor. And as city dwellers quickly notice, there isn’t even a restaurant. Needs of the area’s two hundred residents are met by a locally owned convenience store, beauty shop, feed store, service station, and two small churches.

  Actually, I drove through Bentonville several times in the 1970s and 1980s, and this time I noticed that the place hadn’t changed much in appearance or pace. It was still slow. Friendly, outgoing people who had greeted me were etched in my memory. Although some of the older ones have died since my earliest trips, the younger people have carried on the town’s traditions—including the Anti-Horse Thief Society—and sought to continue the town in the new century.

  After looking around town, I realized that the only worldly diversion was Joe Devore’s service station, which featured a pool hall and video game parlor in front. The floor still carried traces of motor oil. Fan belts, hoses, and tires hung upon the high concrete walls. The clicking of pool balls mingled with the steady beeping of video games, which had invaded even this small town. Devore served the pool players with a self-made contraption that suspended from the ceiling—tiny chalks on cord. When somebody pulled down a chalk, a system of pulleys brought it smoothly to the cue stick of the player, and then lifted the chalk back up and away. In the rear, Devore himself repaired automobiles, a more serious sport that separated the men from the pool boys.

  On that early spring afternoon, four elderly men sat on park benches inside the station. They watched the younger men shoot pool.

  “Tobacca crop has come near fourth of the way up,” one farmer said slowly as he chewed in a steady rhythm.

  “Well, that’s good,” said another, after an interminable pause.

  Then Grafton Parker, a tan, lean, leathered tobacco farmer, stood up and spit into a metal garbage can lined with a plastic bag. He returned to the bench, and another man repeated the ritual and sat down. As if on cue, the four men stood silently, walked over to the trash can, and spat in unison.

  “In the winter,” said Leo Tumbleson, “there’s a lot of gathering in here. Anybody who’s religious doesn’t call this place the poolroom, though. He just says, ‘I’m going to the garage.’”

  And so it goes on, day after day, until another year passes.

  Later, I found my way to the international headquarters of the Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society. That isn’t difficult. Everything happens in the local post office. In thirty minutes, I was made an honorary member and given a membership card, a membership certificate (suitable for framing, of course), a little wooden plaque hanging with a miniature horseshoe on it, and assorted memorabilia from the group. I was told that I am now one of several thousand people across the world to hold honorary membership, and it requires no dues or any other stipulations, other than enjoyment.

  World crises notwithstanding, the people in the sitting room adjoining the post office in Verna Naylor’s house were mostly concerned with who would speak at the annual dinner of the Anti-Horse Thief Society in a few weeks. The deadline stared them down like a stallion in heat.

  “It’s kind of hard to get somebody to come here to speak,” said Verna, the postmaster at the time. “After all, we pay only fifty dollars, and everybody says that won’t even take care of the gas money.”

  “Did you try that Nick Clooney fellow?” a man asked, referring to the former Cincinnati television anchorman and brother of singer Rosemary Clooney.

  “Aw, I’ve known Nick from way back,” she snorted. “He’s from Augusta, Kentucky, not too far away, but he said he’s too busy to come. Too busy!”

  Verna thought about the problem as she sat in a thick chair, and then smiled. “Say, Little Jimmy Dickens, the country music singer, is from Blue Creek, down the road,” she said, “but I don’t think he’d come all the way back to Adams County just to talk to us.”

  “No, he ain’t Dickens,” somebody said. “It was Cowboy Copas who was from Blue Creek, but he’s been dead for years.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Well, I guess we can’t count on him, either.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Jim Naylor, her son, “but you’d think some public person somewhere would like to get the publicity.…”

  As they collectively hit on the same idea, every head in the room turned toward me. I felt as if they had trained pistols on my head.

  “Do you think you could—”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you, but I live too far away and I know nothing about horses, let alone horse thieves.”

  “But you don’t have to know anything,” Verna protested. “All you have to do is show up.”

  When she realized I was serious, Verna looked over the friends and family in the sitting room and
reminded them: “Well, we don’t have much going on in this town. We can’t even get the reporter interested.”

  Everyone laughed. Things will work out, they said, as the last Saturday in April approaches. That day is traditionally reserved for the annual dinner. The society usually finds area people to speak, such as the newspaper editor from Portsmouth who accepted their invitation last year. This year, however, Verna’s daughter, Harriet Naylor, is more concerned because she is the group’s president, the first woman elected to the post. “I never went to a meeting of the society in my life,” she said. “So one night I went and got elected president.”

  Neither Harriet nor her mother knows which is older—the society or the post office. The society was established in 1853, and the post office has been around a long time, too, possibly since Bentonville’s founding in 1839. In 1949, the post office was opened in the little first-floor room of the Naylor house on Route 41, the town’s main street. Verna greets customers from behind old barred windows, a worn metal counter, and brass post office boxes. They have been in use in town since 1909, and Verna has steadfastly refused suggestions from postal officials to go modern. People are accustomed to the Bentonville Post Office, she said, and it will stay as it is as long as she’s in control.

  Often people step into the adjoining sitting room, the unofficial gathering place for residents who want to discuss anything or nothing in particular. Verna said it’s unusual to find such a tiny post office— no more than ten feet wide—next to a sitting room that’s four times as large, but her customers applaud the logic. They like to come into the sitting room to talk. Sometimes they read the newspaper and, on frosted winter days when the world becomes a snowy drift, they warm themselves by the old gas stove. The room is an odd collection of old but comfortable chairs, six key-wound clocks that chime irregularly, knickknacks, and a sign on the wall that reads: “You can’t hide in a small town. Too many people are watching.”