Footville Is Where the Worlds Meet
In Ashtabula County, in the northeast corner of Ohio, I pulled over to look at a panorama of wheat. On the radio Reba McEntire sang, “Is There Life Out There?”
I knew there was—somewhere. I just had to find it.
The afternoon steamed as I took State Route 46 into Ashtabula, a city of about twenty-five thousand people and the largest community in Ashtabula County. Despite its size, it is not the county seat. Jefferson is. It is a small town—no more than three thousand people—that happens to be centrally located, which is why it’s the county seat. Ashtabula has a Lake Erie harbor reminiscent of a New England fishing village. At this harbor, conductors on the Underground Railroad helped escaped slaves board ships and head to Canada.
While in town to eat lunch, I glanced at the lead story in the daily newspaper: “Hot … Very Hot.” By 1 P.M. the temperature had reached an uncharacteristic ninety-five degrees with humidity so high that it curled wallpaper. The restaurant, recommended to me by a service-station attendant, stood across the street from a white concrete flying saucer with a red stripe around its middle and a glass bubble on top. I asked a young waitress (these days, I consider thirty a young age) what the saucer used to be and she mumbled, “Gas station.”
“When?”
She shrugged and said, “Long time ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “In the 1960s?”
She looked at me as though I had just emerged from a spaceship. “No. The ’80s!”
No matter. To me, the saucer was fascinating—as large as a medium-sized airplane and mounted on top of a square box where the cashier once sat. Her estimate notwithstanding, the place is a perfect piece of 1960s pop-culture architecture.
After taking a picture of it, I got back on Route 46 and headed into the rural county. No particular reason. I just wanted to say I visited the extreme northeast corner of the state. According to my 1915 Rand McNally map, the county once was the home of now dead or dying towns such as Dick, Wick, Cork, Sweden, Denmark, and Padanararn. In Jefferson, I stopped at the Henderson Library and met director Susan Marirovits. She explained that many of Ashtabula County’s small towns declined during the twentieth century. They lost their momentum. “I’m from Rock Creek, about seven hundred souls,” she said. “It used to be twice that size when the railroad stopped in town. In fact, Rock Creek used to be larger than Jefferson, but Jefferson has started to grow a lot lately, attracting some industry. The mayor rubs his hands together and says, ‘We could triple the population of this town in ten years.’ I say, ‘Well, maybe that’s not so good.’ You see, we’re used to having a peaceful town. Naturally, this has caused some philosophical differences in Jefferson. I don’t think we have to worry about that happening in Rock Creek.”
Looking over the hot landscape, I tried to imagine it in the winter. I couldn’t. I had heard many horror stories about snow in northeast Ohio. But they can’t come close to the big snow of February 3, 1818, which struck the entire Mahoning Valley and areas to the north. At first the snow came down moderately, and pioneers thought it was going to be like any other snowstorm. Then it came faster, more furiously, until it coated everything but full-grown trees. “The earth was covered four feet deep,” wrote the editor of the Historical Collection of the Mahoning Valley in 1876. “No stumps, no fences, no logs were to be seen on the newly cleared fields. All was smooth as the surface of a calm lake, and presented a most desolate appearance. I will not attempt to describe the labor of the days immediately succeeding the storm, in clearing away the snow, and opening such roads as were necessary for the convenience of the people. Deer were plenty at the time. They found it very difficult traveling through the snow. They could move only by leaps and bounds, and when they alighted were completely buried. The mercury soon went below zero, and continued frozen for many weeks.”
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, New England settlers arrived in what is now Ashtabula County. The federal government owned much of the region then, and sold it to land companies to generate badly needed funds. Earlier, English monarchs had granted title to Virginia and Connecticut. The new government, fearing a major dispute, agreed to set aside tracts for the two states. Connecticut’s land, most of it called the Western Reserve, was sold to the Connecticut Land Company. New arrivals to the Western Reserve brought their own Yankee concept of how a small town should look—greens, spires, frame houses, and brick streets. Pioneer Turhand Kirtland observed in his diary on June 3, 1798: “Arrived at Grand River, encamped, found … as fine large strawberries as ever I saw.” The Western Reserve turned into a major agricultural area in a few years. By the mid-1800s, the area had so many dairy farms that the Western Reserve was called Cheesedom. Nearly every community had a cheese factory.
Pioneer towns included Eaglesville, Austinburg, Mechanicsville, Morgan (now Rock Creek), New Lyme, Ship, Gould, and Cherry Valley. Many towns died before the mid-1800s; they lost their main businesses, transportation routes, or other reasons for existing.
In 1799, Judge Eliphalet Austin was bitten by what was assumed to be a rabid dog near his home in Connecticut. When doctors thought he was developing signs of hydrophobia, they advised him to take a trip. (Obviously, the judge had a strong malpractice case.) Feeling better, he decided to go to land he owned in the Western Reserve. He founded Austinburg, which would become the home of the first church in the Reserve. In 1804, the area’s first revival was held there, bringing forty-one souls to the Lord that night. But the church had neither building nor pastor. Determined to find a preacher at any cost, the judge’s wife rode alone on horseback all the way to Connecticut—six hundred miles, one way. Impressed with her determination, the Reverend Giles H. Cowles agreed to return with her to Austinburg. The congregation’s women, meanwhile, had been busy selling subscriptions, as they called them, to raise money to build the church. In 1812, it had the distinction of being the first building erected in the new land without the aid of whiskey as a refreshment. The men complained but were allowed to drink only beer.
Austinburg (originally spelled Austinburgh) became a premier pioneer town. It was the home of the Ashtabula School of Science and Industry, described as “a manual-labor school to educate the pious and worthy young man for the gospel ministry.” At its peak in 1850, the town had 1,285 people. It was one of the Western Reserve’s earliest abolitionist centers, before West Andover, Cherry Valley, Hartsgrove, and Rome. Austinburg’s pioneer Underground Railroad station keepers included Aaron C. Eliphalet and Joab and L. B. Austin. The road from Austinburg to Ashtabula was well protected by local abolitionists against slave bounty hunters. The abolitionists used to boast: “You might as well attempt to get a saint out of heaven as a slave out of Austinburgh.”
By 1920, however, the town’s population had declined to three hundred. Today, it is the home of only a few scattered houses.
Later that afternoon, I pushed reason aside and stepped into the summer sauna. Driving south on Route 46, I accidentally turned left on a gravel road and got lost among the fields. A sign in a field read: “Lenox Township—Zoned for Growth.” A dairy barn was painted with a large mural of cows. Hawks circled above, and buzzards, with necks like B-29s, pecked on some roadkill. In this country, a stranger can get lost easily; tiny township roads intersect one another at seemingly a million points. In Ashtabula County, many local roads are made of gravel and road signs are wooden arrows painted white with black letters. As I headed east on one road, trying to find Eagleville, a cloud of dust rose before me like a funnel. A big 1980 Buick, moving at least fifty miles an hour, suddenly shot past me, leaving me sitting in dust as dense as morning fog.
I stopped at a farmhouse to ask for directions. An older man sat on the porch and looked at me skeptically.
“Not much in Eagleville.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“There ain’t even a general store any longer.”
“No problem.”
“Bet you’re lookin’ for the cemetery. You one of them gemologists?”
“A genealogist? No, I’m not.”
Looking disappointed, he turned toward the door.
Eagleville was not difficult to find, once I got back on a concrete road: a dozen older homes, well maintained, with a cemetery and the Eagleville Bible Church. I stopped in the parking lot and drank a Coke. I thought that Eagleville is the kind of town you pass on country roads and, mesmerized by the white lines on gray pavement, you ask yourself: Did I pass a town back there? Eagleville is also an obscure piece of history floating in time. Its name came from an eagle that perched on somebody’s mill, according to local legend. The story might be true, for our ancestors generally took no great care in selecting names for their towns. If the community didn’t bear the name of a rich pioneer or important official, like Austinburg, then the name selectors could get creative. The map of northeast Ohio illustrates the point: Novelty, Delight, Mecca, Freedom. Often, though, names like Eagleville simply stuck over the years because the town’s official name—if there was one—didn’t impress the people.
Nobody knows why Eagleville stopped growing. In the mid-1800s, it was a major business center, with a gristmill, cheese factory, hotel, hattery, tanneries, cabinet factory, shoe shop, millinery shop, saw mill, three blacksmith shops, several general stores, a school and a large Congregational church. Then, the place inexplicably vanished. “Like so many towns that once had some industry,” Marilyn Aho of the county historical society told me, “Eagleville just petered out. It grew in the first place because the railroad came in. People from Jefferson came to town to catch the train to Warren. Of course, the train’s long gone and so is Eagleville. When automobiles came in, people no longer had to stop. They just kept driving through town.”
Eagleville did produce one shining story, however: Colonel Roswell Austin, who lived on a farm near town with his wife and son, Henry, was known for his understatement. “When Henry was a well-grown boy,” local historian Laura Peck Dorman wrote in 1924, “his father sent him one afternoon to drive up the cows. He left the house and disappeared and was not seen again for years. Exactly seven years, to the hour and day, he was next seen there, driving up the cows from the Mill Creek flats. His father’s only remark, as the boy came up to the house, was: ‘Henry, you’ve been a long time getting those cows.’”
Footville was my last stop in Ashtabula County. No need to ask why I went there. The name was enough. I was disappointed to learn that it was named for a founding father by the name of Foot. I had hoped for something stranger, maybe a founder with a foot fetish. I continued into town anyway.
Marilyn Aho warned me: “We have a lot of little places that are no longer towns. I call them Ashtabula County’s ghost towns. Places like Footville. It’s defunct.”
Defunct is a dirty word if it’s used to describe your town. One older woman in Footville insisted that the community is bigger and better than ever. Of course, she’s lived there only ten years. The remains of Footville do not support her claim. Gone are the lumber mills, a hotel, blacksmith shops, and a cheese factory (1871–1905). In the winter of 1842, the first classes were held in the new Footville School. Five years later, Lauren B. Foot built a new school, which still stands. Students attended it until 1935, when enrollment declined to twenty-five children. The next year, they were sent over to Trumbull Center for their education.
Since then, the old building has been used at times for meetings of the Ruritan Club, a group formed during Ohio’s agrarian past to promote harmony between rural and urban people. At the turn of the last century, a distinct social gap existed between the two; city people commonly referred to their rural cousins as rubes, hicks, hayseeds, and bumpkins. Then came Sears, Roebuck and the mail-order companies, and suddenly any farmer from Ashtabula County could buy a white shirt and fancy collar band. Differences slowly melted.
These days, about one hundred people still live in the countryside around the intersection of Graham-Trask Road and State Route 166, near a park with a wooden church and former school that isn’t used much these days. Downtown Footville is so small that it barely exists. (Its population reached all of sixty-nine people and a post office in the 1890 census.) The sign for the Footville Community Church is weather-beaten and you cannot read the times of the services. No matter. There are no services.
Footville and the Ruritan Club—its few elderly members were still getting together only a few years ago—find themselves out of sync with the times. There isn’t much demand for small cheese factories and blacksmith shops anymore, and no one is seeking harmony between city and country people, who all too often are meeting each other on the road to home. So in this cockeyed modern world, Footville tries to make its place. On occasion, a big-city resident—the television camera operator from Cleveland comes to mind—will join the back-to-the-country movement and buy one of the few houses left in Footville. But he will be disappointed. The noise died a long time ago in this town; the softball diamond went back to grass. When I stopped at the house next door and asked a woman if the church ever conducts special services, she said, “Every so often, an old person will request to be buried out of there.”
I wouldn’t give Footville much chance of staying alive in the next few years, but then, who knows? If more people like John McMahan move into town, the population erosion could reverse itself. McMahan is not exactly a stranger to this place. The thirty-something pop musician grew up in Footville and for several years worked his ancestral farm. Then he heard the call of the road, which few musicians can ignore. He has traveled all over the world, living in New York, Europe, and, later, Cleveland, which was close enough to home that he and his wife moved back to Footville. He commutes the forty-five miles to Cleveland.
“There’s something magical about the topography of this land that appeals to me,” he said. “In this corner of the county, it’s rolling and beautiful. The rest of Ashtabula County is flat. In the 1800s, my great-great-grandfather, Hiram Spafford, helped found this community, and now every day I pass the trees he planted along the road 160 years ago. I live in the house he built in 1830. My brothers and sisters live around here, too. So there was a lot for me to come back to.”
McMahan said he knows, all too painfully, that few people are interested in Footville. When he tells people where he lives, they look at him with bewilderment. “It’s the same old situation: the people left town to go where the money was, the city. The population of Footville was once much greater than it is today, but I believe all that will change in the coming years. People are going to get a taste of the city and find out they don’t dig it. They’ll want to come here. Back home.”