Welcome to Lost Ohio, a blog dedicated to exploring forgotten places and neglected Ohioana.
The site is named after my book Lost Ohio: More Travels into Haunted Landscapes, Ghost Towns, and Forgotten Lives. The blog will be used to share and receive more tales of missing Ohio communities and vanishing historical sites, provide news about the books (and the places I've written about), post new and old photos of interest to those of us who enjoy traveling the rural routes, view photos taken by Ohio ghost town enthusiasts, and discuss future projects. Most of all, the site will allow me to expand my writings about rural Ohio and its disappearing towns and culture. For the most part, stories on the blog will not appear in my books.
My first book in the "series" was Ghosts: Ohio's Haunted Landscapes, Lost Arts, and Forgotten Places, published in 1996 by Orange Frazer Press of Wilmington. Initially, some people called it the "ghost town book," but then they realized it is also about the changing cultures of rural Ohio and America, the loss of our historic sites, and my own observations and connections to these subjects.
When the book went out of print about 2004, I started revamping it. I found some photographs I had shot on my trips, bought some old postcards and other Ohio paper memorabilia, and began adding more stories to the original manuscript. Three years later, while in Columbus to receive an award from the Ohio Genealogical Society, I met Barbara Gargiulo, owner of Little Miami Publishing in Milford. She agreed to publish a second edition of Ghosts featuring 270 pages and 36 photos and illustrations. With a new cover, this book is closer to what I wanted the book to look like originally. I wanted readers to see some of the people I met on my trips around Ohio. I also added two new chapters, lengthened a number of others to their original sizes, and added a fanciful map.
It took me ten years to get around to writing a second book like Ghosts, but I finally did it in 2006, when the Kent State Universitiy Press published Lost Ohio. That year it won the Ohio Genealogical Society's Henry Howe Award for best Ohio history.
I am happy to report that in September 2012 Kent State will publish the third book in the unofficial series: Finding Utopia: Another Journey into Lost Ohio. It is written in the same style as the first two books--in first person, using narrative chapters organized under several different book sections, and back matter that features colorfully named ghost towns and other sites. Like the first two books, Finding Utopia isn't exclusively about ghost towns. It will be about lost legends, vanishing Ohio, forgotten historical figures, people with big dreams, trips on back roads, and personal stories that connect us to an Ohio that is slipping away a little more each year. As development continues and technology changes the way we communicate, Ohio continues to become a more urban place.
In all three books, I hoped to chronicle the loss of our rural culture. If someone picks up the book fifty years from now, I want him or her to get a snapshot of what life was like in the old Ohio. This was one of my goals when I started writing these books.
In Ghosts, readers met some fading Buckeye characters--people with determination and spirit who chose to live in small towns that were dying or threatened by suburban growth. They included Charlie Potts, the century-old Clermont County man who couldn't stop farming in Branch Hill; Lawrence "Pood" Schaadt, who recalled the big Saturday-night boxing matches at the jewelry store in Glenmore in Van Wert County; and Carl Rudd, the Adams County man who opened what he called the world's largest Christmas display in rural--very rural--Blue Creek. In that book we went to lost places named Sodom (oh, yes!), Dull, San Toy, Mudsock, Knockemstiff, Temperanceville, Rialto, Henpeck, Hog Town, Moonville, Rural, and Surprise. We also met and heard stories about old-time bootleggers, tattooed chickens, canal wars, nitro shooters, mules and muskeetoes, hundred-year fires underground, big floods, and bad tempers. Later, in Lost Ohio, we traveled through what was left of the Great Black Swamp, which once swallowed pioneers' dreams and wagons. In Waynesville, we looked for the ghost of Louisa Stetson Larrick, sister of the creator of the Stetson hat. Moving on, we went searching for the town where thousands of people were married in the 1800s, and the authorities promptly forgot to record their weddings. Then we happened upon Bentonville in Adams County and became official members of the Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society. Finally, we stopped on the forgotten midways of Ohio to meet Harry Dearwester, king of the old cane rack game.
In Finding Utopia, you are invited to join me on the road again, to meet many new characters and, of course, to rediscover a Buckeye dream--Lost Ohio.
A picture of me visiting Amish country in 1994.
Lost Ohio
"Out there on black asphalt ribbons, deep in the heart of nowhere, I watch the images of towns and people grow smaller in my rearview mirror and finally fade to nothing. I feel at one with the speeding tires and the motion of the Jeep. In the cool rush of air on my sides, sometimes the movement seems strange yet vaguely familiar, as though it possesses a soul I once met but can't quite remember."
--From Lost Ohio, the Introduction
"Sometime in the dimness of the afternoon the snow stopped falling, and I drove home, alone, to confront my personal ghosts. Suddenly, everything I had seen and imagined on my trips--every town, every person --came sharply into focus. My own life and brief time fit perfectly into a tiny corner of history. Passing the old fort grounds where Anthony Wayne and Michael Cahalane once walked, I realized my town is every man's town, and, for now, as good a place as any in which to make my stand."
--From Ghosts, Coda: Hometown
Where to Buy Them
Ghosts (ISBN 978-1-932250-64-0; $22.50) may be ordered at any bookstore or purchased directly from the publisher at www.littlemiamibooks.com. Lost Ohio (978-0-87338-872-6; $16.95) may be ordered from Amazon.com or from www.kentstateuniversitypress.com.
Contents xi
Introduction: Charlie Potts' America 1
I. Leaving Their Mark
1. Getting on the Map 9
2. Boomtown 19
3. The Ghost of the Irish 33
4. The Big Washout 49
5. The Ghost of Mad Anthony 61
II. Forgotten Places
6. A Leisurely Tour of Downtown Dull 77
7. Knockemstiff, U.S.A. 85
8. Mudsock Is Missing 93
9. The Quest for Sodom 101
10. Looking for Rural 105
11. The Town That Had Everything 115
12. The Town Least Likely 123
III. Back Roads
13. Keepers of the Past 133
14. Toots Corner 143
15. Statue of Ohio Liberty 147
16. Top Brass 153
17. The Last of Eugene 161
18. The Bootleg Capital of Ohio 167
IV. First-Person Buckeye
19. Reflections of the Lake 177
20. Country Correspondence 191
21. A Hollow Christmas 201
22. Coda: Hometown 211
V. The Naming of Ohio 227
Bibliography 251
Index 255
Contents
Introduction: Forgotten Ohio
Part One: Big Dreams
1. The Life and Times of Fizzleville 3
2. Death of the Patriarch 10
3. Venice Times Two 20
4. Footville is Where the Worlds Meet 33
5. Sodaville or Bust 40
Part Two: Lost Legends
6. Journey to the Center of Obscurity 53
7. Separate Spirits 66
8. The Song of Mount Nebo 79
9. A View from the Tower 90
10. Louisa's Legacy 102
11. Travels in the Great Black Swamp 111
12. The Marrying Kind 128
13. The King of Ashville 137
Part Three: Vanishing Ohio
14. A Little Good News 147
15. The Riders of Bentonville 155
16. Satisfying an Agrarian Myth 167
17. Harry and the Midway 172
18. By Any Other Name:
Ghost Towns and Fabled Obscurities 179
Bibliography 202
Index 207
