From Blue Ball to Busenbark

By Randy McNutt

Butler County operates on two levels—past and present. Sometimes the two cross paths. The past is littered with dead communities, or ghost towns, that once stood across the county and the region. They are good for exploring on autumn days when the weather is warmer and the leaves are changing colors.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones:

At Alert-New London Road at Howards Creek in Morgan Township is the site of Alert, which today consists of a few barns and houses. The town name originated with the Literary Association of Morgan and Crosby Townships in 1821. The group operated an early library. Area farmers started calling the little community Alert, as in “Those people certainly are alert, aren’t they?” They meant intelligent, or well read. To the uneducated pioneers of the period, the library alerted townspeople to the happenings of the world. Through the years, Alert didn’t grow much. A post office opened there in 1850, and closed in 1904. By then, all but a few businesses had disappeared. Alert became just another ghost town name.

On the old Dixie Highway, I found Blue Ball. It is one of Butler County’s most recognized ghost towns. The former unincorporated community doesn’t exist—in name—any longer because Middletown annexed it and its 752 residents in 1993. It began as an early Ohio stagecoach stop, inviting passengers to spend the night at an inn with a big blue ball mounted on a pole. This was to summon illiterate stagecoach drivers. The town’s claim to fame: a guest on the Tonight Show once mentioned the name to a bemused Johnny Carson. When I roamed around Blue Ball, the area was busy with traffic and shoppers at Lowe's and a Target store. Not far away I noticed a big blue ball that somebody had hung from a pole. That was about the only connection to the stagecoach days. 

Busenbark, in St. Clair Township, began in the 1850s as a stop on the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad. The company bought land from a farmer named Robert Busenbark, for whom the little town was named. Its biggest event occurred on Aug. 31, 1867, when 3,000 spectators watched Mike McCoole, the 190-pound American boxing champion, fight Aaron Jones, the 175-pound English champion in a bare-knuckled duke-out. After knocking out Jones, McCoole was named the world champ. He left the ring and leaped over a fence to show how much strength he had left. The unfortunate Jones suffered two broken ribs, a concussion, and internal bleeding. A few weeks later, he died in a Cincinnati hospital. Later, Busenbark was known as the home of a 550-volt electric generating plant that powered traction cars.

In southern Butler County, my favorite ghost town is named Schnaps Town, named for Schnap’s Tavern on U.S. Route 4 in what is now Fairfield. The community was filled with Germans who drank locally brewed spirits, hence the local derivative of the German Schnapps. Later the town changed its name to a more mundane Furmandale, to honor a Hamilton educator named Furman.

Nearby, workers toiled in a sawmill, carding mill, distillery, and other factories in a town named Black Bottom. The town was named for the black, rich soil. Black Bottom died after the local paper mill moved to Hamilton in the 1850s. Nowadays, the paper mills are closing in Hamilton, victims of a digital world.


The Observer’s Randy McNutt is the author of Ghosts: Ohio’s Haunted Landscapes, Lost Arts, and Forgotten Places, from which this piece is partially excerpted.