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

by Randy McNutt

  He saw things unimaginable. A menagerie of animals, hoaxes, freaks. “Once,” he remembered, “a fellow put up a colorful banner at the Montgomery County Fair in Dayton: ‘See the Hairless Dog in a Barrel! Only Ten Cents.’ Well, I overheard an old farmer say, ‘Mother, you wanna go in and see it?’ She said, ‘No, Daddy dear, you go in and look.’ A few minutes later, the old fella walked out, all red-faced and cussin’ up a blue streak. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nothin’ in that barrel but a damn hot dog on four toothpicks!’ By ’43, we had to clean it all up. The do-gooders wouldn’t have any of it. A guy used to sell nickel hamburgers. He’d put so much meal in them that the burgers would turn white as Styrofoam. He’d have to color them red. Some people complained that they was gettin’ a gyppin’, but the owner didn’t care.

  “Then there was the guy who had a tent with a big sign: ‘Little People … Alive and in Action!’ People stood in long lines to get in there. They even brought cookies to feed the ‘little people.’ When they got inside, though, they got a surprise: the little ones was all mechanical, see—shoe cobblers and farmers, all doin’ something, going around a track. Oh, there was all kinds of gimmicks then to turn a dollar.”

  Harry’s laughter boomed across the midway.

  “In those days, people wanted something more,” he said. “So they came to the midway at the county fair. Like to try your luck? They could buy the same old thing downtown for fifty cents, but they wanted to beat ya. Now, all we got is a lot of nonsense.”

  Except, of course, for the cane rack game. It is the only game Harry will work. He said, “My game is the only one on the midway that will give the kids a fair shuffle. I can’t take money from the kids and not give them something to take home. Maybe it’s nothing but a memory, but it is something they won’t forget about growing up in Ohio and in this time. They seem to have no childhood; they grow up so fast anymore. The game, though, it is the one thing that keeps them like the kids of my day. It’s a simple game, and it is rewarding. I sum up my working philosophy this way: When a millionaire over in Troy died years ago, a reporter went to the mansion to write a story about all the man’s possessions. The guy had nearly everything. The reporter came back to his news office, wrote up the man’s story, and told the editor, ‘Here’s a hot piece.’ The editor frowned and said, ‘Hell, son, this ain’t news. What did the man take with him?”

  Harry always reminded his young workers that honesty mattered. They looked around the midway and chuckled. It wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth. Next door, a man named Pitcher John sold lemonade and reclaimed the ice. “He’d put a little chain on each pitcher so you couldn’t walk away with it,” Harry said. “After you drank your lemonade and left, he’d gather up the ice and hose it off and use it again. He had a sign: ‘All you can drink for a nickel.’ But he saved money on the ice. One hot September day, a boy drank five pitchers. Pitcher John said, ‘You got any more boys like you at home?’ The boy said, ‘Give me another one!’” Pitcher John, all the wiser, just smirked.

  A man named Foxy claimed he had an animal that looked like a groundhog and shrieked horribly. Then, a big wind blew open a tent flap to reveal an old man pulling furiously on a long rosined string to produce the shrieking sound. Never mind, Harry told his boys. They won’t stay in business for long. And most of them didn’t.

  Yet, they were all Harry’s friends, every last showman and con artist. When the sheriff closed Red’s striptease show in Marion one night, Harry thought of a plan to save his friend from certain bankruptcy. “I told Red to go into town and get himself two dummies, a man and a woman, and bring them back to the fair and put up a big sign. He should call his show ‘The Ruination of Temptation: Why Young Girls Leave Home.’ Yeah, that would do it up right, I told old Red. Well, he took my advice and folks lined up for two hundred feet. Men tried to ditch their wives and sneak into the show. Oh, it was wonderful until the sheriff came. He thought he’d close up Red again. The sheriff paid his quarter, but all the old buzzard found was two mannequins holding cigarettes and glasses of Co’-Cola.”

  As Harry sipped his drink, a plump boy of twelve walked up and said, “Need any help, Mister?” Harry stared at him and said nothing. Then the boy said, “What do you pay, anyway?”

  “Now, I’m going to tell you somethin’, young man,” Harry said. “When I was a kid your age, I never asked how much money was involved. I worked for a man and then collected my pay and was satisfied with it. How much do you think you’re worth an hour to pick up them rings and put ’em on a stick?”

  The boy’s eyes darted. “Uh …”

  “Well?”

  “Uh, I’m just askin’ for a friend.”

  “Well, come on!”

  “Uh—six dollars?”

  “Six dollars! An hour?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Harry wiped his forehead and said: “Son, for six bucks an hour, I’ll pick up my own rings. In fact, I’ll go to work for you for six an hour.”

  He has picked up his own rings, too, and considered it all in a good day’s work. The traveling was the hardest part. It had been lonely, too, despite the characters who surrounded him. Then Harry met Pauline in 1945. One day she pitched the rings and smiled. They started talking and soon began dating. They went everywhere together around their hometown, Findlay, until the warm weather came again and, one day, a new stock of canes arrived. Harry felt the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to head out on the road. It was an itch that he could not stop. “Well, kid,” he told her straight, “I got to leave you. Fair time, you know. Time for me to go.” Pauline smiled sadly and said she’d try to understand. She felt crushed, and her feelings showed. As Harry started to walk away, he felt the magnetic attraction of Pauline’s affection. He turned to her and stammered, “Well, uh, I … let’s get married. I guess you could go with me. I got a nice mobile home.”

  For thirty-nine years they ran the cane rack as partners, driving to county fairs in Ohio and returning to their house on Kibby Street in Findlay for the autumn and winter. When Pauline died, Harry cried. It was as though his life had ended; he did not know how to react. Two weeks later, he set up the cane rack as usual at the Butler County Fair in Hamilton. What else could he do? He said he felt as if somebody had just cut him in half, but he had to go on with the game. He knew no other way. The work gave him purpose.

  “This is the place for me to be, at the cane rack,” he said. “There will always be another fair for me, somewhere.”

  He picked out a red cane and handed it to me. “A souvenir,” he said, breaking into a familiar grin. “But this time, kid, you don’t have to toss no rings. It’s yours.”

  As I walked away, I turned to look back at Harry Dearwester one last time. He had stepped into his little wooden rectangle again and started hustling canes. For a moment, time failed to move. Harry seemed perfectly timeless.

  His voice grew softer as I walked farther: “Hey, folks! We got dog heads, eagle claws, rat feet, and some canes from old Japan. Hey! Who else and how many? Who else and how many … ?”

  At that instant I heard the fading echo of a forgotten Ohio.

  18

  By Any Other Name:

  Ghost Towns and Other Fabled Obscurities

  The river of time takes the hard rock of a real life, moves it along through history, scraping off the rough edges as it goes, and deposits it on a distant bank as a smooth stone of myth for all to admire. Free to choose what we believe, Americans choose myth over reality ever time.

  —Dayton Duncan

  Alpha

  Alpha is a mirage of history, overcome by time and Dayton sprawl, a ghost town. Historians disagree on how the community received its Greek name. Some say it came from the town’s proximity to the area’s first settlement. Others say the founders borrowed the name from a local mill, which stamped the name Alpha on its first barrel of flour in 1798. Because the mill was important to the town’s economy, the name stuck. Located near busy U.S. Route 35 in Greene County�
��s city of Beavercreek, Alpha lies near a large shopping mall. Few remnants of the past remain. While preservationists restore some log buildings, visitors wonder whether Alpha still exists. It has been absorbed by the invading city, which is expanding like a fresh ink spot. Once, Beavercreek Township was the seat of local county government. The Xenia, Dayton and Belpre Railroad arrived in town in 1853. Then, small places were important in Greene County: New Germany, Knollwood, Zimmerman, and, of course, Alpha, which started in the earliest days of Ohio statehood, in 1803. The town grew slowly around an early courthouse. A post office opened in 1850 and a school in 1882. The population finally reached one hundred. The community had high expectations for itself; people realized that it was a natural commercial center. Unfortunately, the town had already peaked. It was divided into three parts: Upper Alpha, Middle Alpha, and Lower Alpha. Lower Alpha was the industrial section, which included a woolen mill, a five-story flour mill with five water wheels, a three-story distillery with a hundred-foot-long corn house, a lime house and sawmill, and a toll gate house. In Middle Alpha, the Pennsylvania Railroad shipped the town’s whiskey, grain, and lumber. Upper Alpha had several blacksmiths, wagon manufacturers, and general stores. In 1888, Alpha’s future changed abruptly one night when most of the town’s men were attending a political rally in Cincinnati. A fire started in a hay shed and spread to the mills and distillery. All the buildings burned, anguishing Alpha and dooming its future.

  Ash

  In the late 1800s, Ash existed in Jersey Township in west Licking County. Little is known about the town today. “Licking County has a lot of these kinds of places—ghost towns that were once postal drops,” said Martha Tykodi, president of the West Licking Historical Society. “Ash was just up the road from us. There were a lot of little settlements here and there in those days, when people couldn’t travel too far and they needed a lot of post offices for the convenience factor. Ash had a post office, a general store, and a few other businesses. The town really wasn’t significant—only a crossroads. What happened is what is happening and will continue to happen to a lot of small towns: they lose their post offices, then their schools, and then themselves. Nothing is left. It’s the way things go. It’s not necessarily the better way, but it is reality.”

  Bear’s Mill

  Bear’s Mill, 6540 Arcanum–Bear’s Mill Road, Greenville, is one of only a few gristmills still operating in Ohio. The four-story building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. It features a store that sells handmade pottery and other items. Major George Adams bought the land and built a sawmill on Greenville Creek in 1832. Eventually, the sawmill gave way to the flour mill, which is still covered with its original black walnut siding. The wood is in such excellent condition that I thought it had been replaced in the last twenty-five years. Today, the mill still grinds cornmeal, whole-wheat flour, and rye flour. The property is privately owned by the Friends of Bear Mill. Its mission is to preserve and maintain the mill for public touring and education. The group’s most successful month is December, a time when visitors stop to buy Ohio products. The group sponsors its Candlelight Open House, which includes an illuminated millrace path through the woods and a roaring bonfire. In 1849, founder Gabriel Baer (Bear’s Mill is a corruption of his last name) paid local schoolchildren fifty cents a day—a good wage then—to dig the eight-hundred-foot millrace. He opened the mill the next year. The second owner operated it only a couple of years, then closed it in fear that Confederates would strike Ohio and burn the mill. On a late-fall visit, I bought a jar of raspberry jam and a loaf of cherry bread and wandered around the place. I enjoyed seeing a collection of old Darke County Fair posters from the early 1900s and other ephemera. I asked a volunteer about the story that the mill is haunted. She acknowledged that some people claim to see a ghost who looks like a farmer from the late 1800s. But, she added, “I have never seen him, and personally I believe the story is an old wives’ tale.” Yet other people say they have seen the farmer coming up and down the wooden stairs.

  Bear’s Oil Village

  In the 1790s, the Massasauga tribe inhabited the area near Conneaut in Ashtabula County. Led by a chief named Macqua Medah, also known as Bear’s Oil, the tribe consisted of older people who could not resist the pioneers’ invasion. One day a traveler accused a tribe member of stealing his gun. A fight led to the shooting death of the traveler. When other settlers heard of the incident, they sent a party to the Indian village to arrest the offender. But Bear’s Oil refused to give him up. When the whites returned with a larger group, they found the village deserted. The chief had fled with his people, but before he left, he made sure they understood one thing: if they trespassed on sacred land, where a ten-foot red pole marked the grave of his mother, he would scalp every settler he could find. Unimpressed by his threat, the settlers took over the tribe’s cabins (all fifteen feet high with bark roofs) and the chief’s palace, which they promptly turned into a barn. Bear’s Oil never returned.

  Bear Swamp

  In northwest Tully Township in Van Wert County, bears roamed freely in a wide area aptly named Bear Swamp. Covered by willows, tall prairie grass, and brush, the swamp was a good place for bears to hide. The area, including Union Township, was known as bear country in the middle of the nineteenth century. Around the swamp, farmers lost corn and hogs to hungry bears that were bold enough to raid barns. As late as 1858, farmers killed a dozen bears in one year in or near the swamp. But they couldn’t drain the land easily because it had no natural outlets. The county gave the swamp to the state, and the state condemned it and offered it to anyone who could drain it and remove the bears. A group stepped in and spent a considerable amount of money digging ditches in the swamp. When that didn’t work, they dug a small canal in a wooded area to the north of the swamp. Finally, they were able to drain it and transform it into a rich agricultural area. The bears left when their habitat disappeared. By the late 1800s, once unwanted swampland was selling for a hundred dollars an acre—good money in those days.

  Big Bottom

  In 1790, in the southeast part of the Northwest Territory, thirty-six settlers from the Ohio Company founded a community called Big Bottom. They built a wooden blockhouse and several cabins. The company, based in Marietta in 1788, was one of Ohio’s early settlements. It sponsored Big Bottom and named it for the flood plain. On January 2, 1791, a group of Delaware and Wyandot warriors attacked Big Bottom, killing twelve people (including one woman and two children) and burning its blockhouse and cabins. This incident enraged the Americans and triggered a four-year war that the army referred to as the Miami campaign. It finally ended in 1794, when General Anthony Wayne defeated an Indian coalition at Fallen Timbers in what is now Lucas County. The Big Bottom massacre resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Greenville, which opened the Ohio country to settlement. In 1970, the massacre site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Today, a twelve-foot marble obelisk marks the site, about one mile southeast of Stockport, in Morgan County’s Windsor Township. Families now play at the Big Bottom State Park, where frontier families once died.

  Chattanooga

  Chattanooga is a ghost town on State Route 49 in northeast Mercer County. From 1895 to 1910, it was booming—the center of an oil strike in Liberty Township. Before the strike, about sixty people lived in town. Fast money attracted hundreds of men who fought, drank, and worked, in that order. “Those were wild days and women were afraid to be away from home alone, after dark,” Mrs. Roy Pifer was quoted as saying in a 1961 county history. “My father exercised his own special kind of Christianity. Often a noisy, lost drunk would stagger into our yard. Father would quiet him and fix him a place on the porch to sleep off his drunkenness.” By 1889, the town was growing so fast that it could employ a full-time undertaker, John Allmandinger. His first client was Jacob Baker, a sawmill operator who cut himself in half in a factory accident. A one-room school, appropriately named Wildcat School, met the needs of oil workers’ children. One t
eacher taught ninety students, some of whom were eighteen years old and still in the seventh grade. With the oil workers came crime: A widow named Mrs. Emerick sold the oil rights to her farm and kept the money in her house; somebody broke in and murdered her, but no arrests were ever made. By 1900, Chattanooga’s oil was nearly sucked dry and the wildcatters were moving over to Wood County and other areas with rich deposits. Chattanooga has not reawakened.

  Christian Republic

  In the 1850s, several socialistic or free love societies operated around Berlin Heights. The final one, the Christian Republic (also known as the Berlin Community), was founded in 1865 with a dozen adult members and six children. All but one member came from out of state. Officially, the Republic lasted one year, but a “Christian communist” group of some kind operated on the same grounds for a number of years. Members founded propaganda journals such as Social Revolutionist, Age of Freedom, Good Time Coming, the New Republic, the Optimist, and Kingdom of Heaven. They espoused an unusual blending of religion, politics, and socialism. An earlier version of Age of Freedom caused turmoil in 1858. According to a nineteenth-century historian, the magazine was “so obnoxious that twenty Berlin women seized the mail sack which Frank Barry, the editor, had brought on his shoulders to the post office, loaded with copies, and [the women] made a bonfire with them in the street.”

  Columbia Settlement

  On November 18, 1788, Columbia became the first settlement in Hamilton County, founded on the Ohio River by Major Benjamin Stites and twenty-six men and women from New Jersey. The major had grand plans. He boasted that he would build a great city, for which he had purchased twenty-thousand acres at the mouth of the Little Miami River. The town consisted of a number of log homes, a stockade, and blockhouses. Settlers planted corn on the east side of the town, in an area called Turkey Bottom. One month after the pioneers arrived, another group landed at Yeatman’s Cove. Led by Colonel Robert Patterson, they scrapped their wooden boats and built a settlement called Losantiville, meaning “town opposite the mouth of the Licking River.” Losantiville grew into Cincinnati. Columbia Settlement was later known as East Cincinnati.