Ohio is filled with tiny towns that blew off the map like specks of dust. Many of their names still remain in print. When I drive through these towns, I wonder: Who lived here? What did their people dream? How many families stayed on until the end? Often, no one is left to explain. Obscurity is the only ghost left.
On this trip, I sought to escape into the woods and forget the world and the terrorism that I’d been watching on television. But the news always managed to intrude. Finally, I crossed over the Adams County border and felt the world slowly recede.
The first thing I did was look up a native guide named Stephen Kelley. (When searching for ghost towns, the traveler should seek an expert who knows the history, the local topography, and, certainly, the temperament of the people.) Considering the rugged terrain and rural isolation, and considering that I’ve had shotguns pulled on me in such places before, I figured that a guide would be useful, even if he came unarmed.
I met the amateur archaeologist and preservationist at his Victorian house in Seaman, a village of several hundred people in northern Adams County, about sixty-five miles east of Cincinnati. You know you’re in Seaman because it is the only town in the area with a hitching post on Main Street—and Amish horsemen using it. When I entered Kelley’s white house, he was excited about having just acquired a grooved stone ax, one of the most recognizable prehistoric artifacts found in Adams County and Ohio. He ran his fingers across its smooth surface. “Unfortunately, when the pioneers started tilling the soil and discovering these relics, they called them tomahawks,” he told me. “The settlers incorrectly assumed that these stone pieces were meant for warfare, because most of the contact between the pioneers and Indians had been in war up until then. The term tomahawk endures. So I always go around telling people, ‘Please don’t call them tomahawks!’ Oh, I’m the life of the party.”
The genteel, dry-witted man in his fifties looks like a modern pioneer: long sideburns, black boots, and a western string tie. When he finally has something to say, he talks in a logical, deadpan way, with a hint of sarcasm.
Adams County, population 27,330 in 2000, is his ancestral home and one of Ohio’s most rural counties. Kelley retains a strong interest in its heritage, but he does not ignore the negative. “In 1900, our county had more than thirty thousand people and a lot of small towns,” he explained. “By 1950, the population had decreased to twenty thousand, and some towns had declined. Why? No work. Our people left to help build the West.” They left towns named Tulip, Lynx, Harmony, Unity, Sunshine, Harshaville, Jacksonville, Whippoorwill, Panhandle, Squirrel-town, Tranquility, Scrub Ridge, Beaver Pond, Smoky Corners, Jaybird, Bacon Flat, and my all-time local favorite, Sodaville. I had to experience Sodaville, which I imagined as a place that once had Coca-Cola machines on every corner.
On the way, we drove through places of meager means that had almost faded until a few Amish farmers and tradesmen moved in from northeast Ohio in the 1970s. They bought farms and opened bakeries— even a pallet factory. Although the towns didn’t grow much at their cores, the surrounding countryside grew and allowed the Unity General Store to remain open. It is a small, white frame building with a wooden floor and tight little aisles packed with loaves of bread and cans of groceries. We stopped to buy candy bars. A teenage Amish boy was standing at the worn wooden counter, contentedly eating a summer-sausage sandwich. The meat carried a distinctive aroma. The look on his face screamed contentment. “He may never go home again,” proprietor Eugene Ryan said. Not far away, an Amish man was selling baked goods and weighing them on a battery-powered scale. He insisted that he will never compromise with high technology (or any worldly ways), but incidentally, credit cards are welcome.
Driving through the rugged countryside and its flinty hamlets, we experienced hallowed ground: land still untouched by smog and bulldozers. Near Burnt Cabin Road (another name from pioneer times), I saw a black buggy rolling along the south side of the road. The Amish have revived some local hamlets, preserving them like still lifes.
I remembered once seeing a photograph of an old Harshaville, population sixty-eight in 1890. The town had a post office, blacksmith shop, buggy repair shop, and other businesses; and now I was looking at the same kinds of businesses (minus the post office). As we drove through town we spoke of the miller Paul Harsha, who became wealthy living in this remote place in the 1840s when he opened a water mill on Cherry Fork Creek and built a brick house overlooking his new town. It is still occupied, as is his son’s house by the creek. These two are among the only six homes remaining. The covered bridge still stands over the creek in Harshaville, as it did when General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate horsemen rode into town in 1863. Things have changed a little, however; Amish buggies now clatter along gray paved roads, and electric towers protrude like whiskers from the faces of charcoal hills.
Making a right turn on some country road I didn’t recognize, we crossed Bundle Run Creek and stopped. Across the great bow of green soared a vulture, wings fully extended like a six-foot black fan. It circled, swooped, and landed in a field. Lacking the sharp claws of most birds of prey, vultures must make do with eating dead animals that they spot with telescopic eyesight. Adams County is filled with vultures, hawks, a few eagles, and other big birds. During one of my visits, sixty black vultures, birds protected by the state, died after eating meat poisoned by insecticides. To put the loss into perspective, consider that black vultures are known to live at least a half century. Perhaps a few of the sixty were around when Adams County’s ghost towns were still active in the 1940s.
I hadn’t stopped thinking of vultures when Kelley looked around the woods and announced that we were now sitting in the middle of another ghost town—Steam Furnace, home of the first steam-powered smelting furnace west of the Alleghenies in the early 1820s. Today, the only thing steaming in Steam Furnace is the fog burning off the creek. One house stands.
At one time, furnace towns boomed in southern Ohio. A neighboring Adams County town, Marble Furnace, employed six hundred workers. The town that grew up around the furnace took its name from the big smokestack that, from a distance, appeared to be made of marble. Hundreds of woodcutters chopped trees day and night and piled thousands of cords in mounds, set them on fire, and created much-needed charcoal. Their blazing glory lasted about a decade. By the 1830s, Adams County’s furnace towns were losing business, being undercut and surpassed by the more efficient furnaces of southeast Ohio. Adams County supported four company towns—Steam Furnace, Marble Furnace, Brush Creek Furnace, and Brush Creek Forge Furnace.
“This place was busy at one time,” Kelley said of Steam Furnace. “It developed into a company affair. The workers had to live out here in the woods. Giant mounds of cut wood and black hills of charcoal lay all around, in a wasteland of ashes. Then, all of a sudden, the fires went out. Steam Furnace and the other furnace towns had no reason to exist.”
Kelley pulled out a brown paper bag and removed a crude gray metal object with a dish fashioned on the bottom. He said, “This is a slut lamp made in Marble Furnace. It belongs to the county historical society.”
“A what?”
“A slut lamp. S-L-U-T. Now please don’t call it a whore lamp, as a woman in the courthouse mistakenly does. In pioneer times, slut meant animal fat. It was often used with a wick for a lamp. This one’s made of cast iron, and it’s worth $350. I wish I could afford one.”
Moving on down an unidentified country road, we arrived in another ghost town, Mineral Springs, an old health-resort town. The area reminds me of a moon base, isolated and self-contained. The town peaked about 1915, when the advancement of medical science and the automobile made the resort obsolete. Some people in the Mineral Springs area call it Tree Heaven. Conservationists can’t stop talking about it. It is a scenic place to visit. Wandering the woods, I realized that this is one place that the developers won’t touch—at least for a century. The terrain is too wild, too much trouble to tame. It is also an eerie place on the nights when General Electric, a major landowner, tests its jet engines a few miles away. The hills light up in white and roar ferociously, like a scene in a science fiction film. By day, the land is silent again.
White men first saw the springs about 1787, when the first surveyors entered the wooded county. Natives claimed the water had curative powers. Despite the presence of hostile Shawnee, surveyor Nathaniel Massie bought land in what is now northeast Adams County. He thought people would want to drink water that supposedly cleansed the kidneys and cured various ailments. The trouble was, a Shawnee camp sat only three miles away and the wilderness was filled with bears, cougars, and poisonous snakes. Massie finally gave up and sold the property, which included the mineral springs that fed Grassy Hill (also known as Peach Mountain).
Word of the spring’s curative powers soon spread throughout the region, and in 1864 Hillis Rees bought the property and built a two-story log hotel just south of one of the springs. He also started a little resort town, Sodaville, to serve the increasing number of visitors who came to drink the water. By 1872, the town had a post office, two gothic hotels, cabins, and bridle and hiking trails. In 1881, the Cincinnati and Eastern Railroad extended its tracks to the area. Visitors got off the train at the Beaver Pond community, and traveled several miles by wagon to Sodaville.
Resort owners promoted the area’s medicinal waters in an era before the development of the modern pharmaceutical industry. In the nineteenth century, such spas were popular across America, especially in rural Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana. (Today, people don’t need to visit such places; they can buy spring water in plastic bottles.)
Around the spring, pioneers observed large numbers of animals drinking the water. Soon they learned that the water contained large amounts of minerals. Speculators came in, built resort hotels, and with advertising lured people from the city and country. Doctors recommended that people drink twenty glasses of water a day. In southern Ohio and Kentucky, the water contained high concentrations of sulfur, which people often described as tasting like burnt gunpowder. Nevertheless, they drank it in volumes. An analysis of the water at Mineral Springs also revealed chloride of magnesia, sulfate of lime, chloride of calcium, chloride of sodium, oxide of iron, and iodine. Visitors often drank water filled with natural diuretics, cathartics, and sudoifics— namely, salt, various sulfurs, chalybeate, vitriol, alum, copperas, iodide, and Epsom salt.
As I traveled through the site where Sodaville once stood, I imagined visitors taking wagons and horses and, later, railroads up the big hill to a few small hotels and related buildings in the thick woods. Outdoors at night, Japanese lanterns provided warm light, and candles and gas lamps lighted the rooms. By 1900, hotel parlors echoed with music from wind-up spring phonographs and visitors debated the world’s problems, laughed, and ate wild game. They also hunted, went fishing, received treatments on their aching limbs, and drank more water. Some people came here on vacation in summer, trying to escape the heat of Cincinnati and Portsmouth.
We drove around looking for Sodaville but found nothing left of the town. I wondered how it got its name. Kelley read my mind and said, “There’s always a residue when the water evaporates on leaves and on the ground. It fizzes and dries white—like soda.” A few years after Sodaville’s founding, other entrepreneurs bought land nearby and founded Mineral Springs, a resort and town named after the spring itself. Other than serving their guests, Sodaville and Mineral Springs had no purpose. Resort owners built a school and church with sharply pointed roofs. They named their church the Little Brown Church in the Vale.
“The area around the resort had an interesting mix of people—the native country folks and the city dwellers who came to the spa,” Kelley said. “They had little in common and probably didn’t have that much contact inside the town. For years a lot of local people have tried desperately to help this county live down its tough reputation. The truth is, it was a wild, rough county. One hill feud continued for twenty years. When the old man of a feuding hill clan died many years ago, he was buried with a loaded shotgun and a fiddle. In the early 1900s, a newspaper reporter wrote, ‘All was quiet this week. Not one killing in Adams County.’ During Prohibition, the county sheriff sold moonshine out of the basement of the courthouse. On the other hand, we’ve had some sheriffs who were champion still-busters.”
Taking gravelly Peach Mountain Lane, we found the clearing where Mineral Springs once existed. Instead of towns, we saw an Ohio historical marker:
Medicinal value of springs promoted by Charles Matheny 1840. First Hotel built 1864 and resort named Sodaville. Under ownership of General Benjamin Coates 1888–91, Smith Grimes 1891– 1908, and J. W. Rogers 1908–20. Mineral Springs Health Resort nationally known for its large hotel complex and recreational facilities. This hotel destroyed by fire 1924. Smaller hotel, built in 1904 a quarter mile north, continued operation through 1940.
Looking around, we saw the decaying red roof of a Mineral Springs hotel protruding from the woods. Although the sun burned my arms, the air was cool and pleasant on the “mountain.”
“The second hotel stood over there in that forest,” Kelley said. “It’s frustrating because our old family homes and even this hotel are left to rot. But around here, people don’t care. Down the road, a guy is selling a house that was built in 1805. What will happen to it? It will probably be torn down. It’s always the same story. In the early 1940s, when the Mineral Springs resort was nearly out of business, my mother worked in the hotel. The war was on then, and nobody wanted to come out here. Hotel owners used to tell people that they could spend some time in Mineral Springs and not worry about getting dressed up and dealing with pretense. ‘Social rivalry is unknown here,’ they always said.”
At the four remaining houses in Mineral Springs, two women worked in their gardens and hardly noticed us. With the exception of the school, which has been restored, no public buildings remain. Pieces of the church lay scattered in a pile. Through the window of one house we saw a dozen looms. Kelley said a Cincinnati woman, Jeanette Macmillan Pruiss, comes out to conduct classes in weaving. Her late husband, the respected surgeon Bruce Macmillan, spent parts of summers in Mineral Springs. “He bought hundreds of acres,” Kelley said. “Fortunately for us, he bought and restored the old school and the cottage next door. He preserved our past. He was a world-class traveler. Doc always said, ‘I just returned from Hong Kong. Recently, I went to Berlin.’ I’d stand there and think I must be the world’s greatest hick. I hadn’t left Adams County.”
When census takers arrived in Mineral Springs in 1890, they counted 108 permanent residents. The town had three ingredients for success: a post office, a train depot, and an express office. The resort included a bowling alley, a post office, a billiards parlor, hotels, and fancy gazebos. A brochure promised an idyllic summer retreat: “Hot and cold baths provided. Acetylene gas is in every room. The water is known to cure various diseases, including dyspepsia, indigestion, disordered liver, chronic irritation of the bowels, costiveness, hemorrhoids, chronic diarrhea, catarrh, diseases of the urinary organs, gravel and kidney diseases, female diseases, dropsy, ulcers, and all nervous and skin disorders.”
Kelley laughed at the description and said, “When the owners ran out of diseases, I think they made up some more.”
While Mineral Springs was attracting Cincinnati residents in the early 1900s, conservationist E. Lucy Braun discovered the woods around the town. Braun, who lived on the east side of Cincinnati in her own woods, loved the wilderness; to her, there was no better place to work than Mineral Springs. A pioneer of the modern environmental movement, Braun helped introduce the public to the word ecology and in the process became a nationally known botanist.
Emma Lucy Braun was born in Cincinnati in 1889. Her fascination with the woods of Mineral Springs would come naturally, for she and her older sister, Annette (a well-known entomologist who worked with her sister), grew up with schoolteacher parents who encouraged their children to respect and appreciate the woods. In 1914, Braun earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati, where she went on to teach until 1948. In 1917, she helped establish the Cincinnati Wild Flower Preservation Society. In 1931, her Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas was the first book to inventory Ohio’s natural areas. Even after she retired from the university, Braun continued to roam the woods of Adams County as well as the great forests in eastern Ohio and in Kentucky. She became the first female president of the Ecological Society of America.
“The Brauns are credited with discovering all the rare plant life here and publicizing it by writing about it,” Kelley said. “It all started in the ’20s and ’30s, when E. Lucy and her sister came out here. They brought in other botanists to see their discovery. It has had a lasting impact.”
She called the area the Edge of Appalachia, and she loved it. In 1928, she wrote The Vegetation of the Mineral Springs Region of Adams County, which is still in print. In 1967, the National Park Service opened the E. Lucy Braun–Lynx Prairie Preserve in Adams County.
The Mineral Springs resort peaked in the early 1900s when Alfred and Eugenia Bader bought the Mills Hotel, one of several hotels at the springs. The couple renamed the place Hotel Baderton and expanded the business. It operated from spring till late fall. The hotel featured a wide front porch with many rocking chairs, rooms furnished with brass beds, and a reading room. Log cabins—named Old Kentucky, Uncle Pat, Aunt Hannah, Blue Ridge, and Luke McLuke—surrounded the hotel on fifty-one acres, which included a long frame bowling alley, tennis courts, and riding trails. Visitors could stay there for twelve dollars a week, or twenty-one dollars for two people. (Special rates were offered for children and servants.)
Alfred Bader called the resort the Switzerland of America. In a 1915 booklet, he wrote: “Here in this joyous Pleasure Ground the old grow young and the young grow younger … leave all your cares behind. Plunge headlong into Magnificent Virgin Nature and be riotously, gloriously happy. Here in this joyous VACATION LAND, this HEAVENLY HAVEN, you may soothe jaded nerves, restore appetite, cure indigestion, add pounds to your weight, elasticity to your step, sparkle to your eye, color to your cheek, and set the rich, red blood of perfect health racing electrically through every vein of your body.”
“Modesty was not one of Bader’s most endearing traits,” Kelley said. “He was a promoter who made a lot of money in the five years that he owned the place.”
He pulled some old black-and-white photographs from a folder: Sprawling wooden hotels painted white in 1900; E. E. Richards presiding over his open-air fruit cannery on Peach Mountain in 1908, while guests look over his produce; two young women smile as they sit on a stone wall at a hotel in 1910; two boys sit on a massive wall overlooking the Big Spring in 1910; and ten carpenters, who built the Upper Hotel in 1904 for R. B. Mills, sit on a stone edifice at the Lower Spring.
When the Great Depression worsened in the 1930s, Mineral Springs nearly went out of business, a victim of hard times and changing lifestyles. The public had fallen in love with the automobile. The fortunate few with spending money wanted to travel and sightsee rather than spend a vacation at a rural health spa. The resort continued to decline and finally closed in the late 1940s. It could not survive postwar America’s fascination with cars, music, and kids.
Nowadays, Mineral Springs lies near an eighty-eight-acre nature preserve, among an ocean of trees that cover the mountain. I walked with Kelley under the arms of ancient oaks that folded across the road like outstretched arms. At the old school, we stood on the porch and listened to the afternoon silence for a minute. I felt a rare serenity as I stared at a sky of deep blue. Slowly then, my ears tracked the screams of a distant blue jay. His melancholy lullaby plummeted, and we stood there looking at the houses and listening to the birds. Kelley shook his head as though perplexed by some minor mystery.
We walked around and found a wall that surrounded the original Big Spring. Visitors carved their names and initials all over the stone. Some were professionally inscribed. Among the dozens of names were “Wm. Schaefer, RIP. O. 1880. Lizzie M. Seiwert, 1901. Rosalia G. Smith, 1900. Wm. G. Popp Wil. Del. 1901. C.A. Liberman, Geo’town O. ’04. O. J. Fetter, 1922. Harlan Walker, Dayton, O. 1904.”
Behind the main spring basin, a larger, fancier inscription read: “TAKE A DRINK ON Wm. BRUCKMANN.”
I said, “He must have been a politician or somebody important, because his name is prominently displayed. It’s as if he owned the place. Apparently the owners wanted people to see his name.”
Kelley said, “He was a Cincinnati brewery owner in the early 1900s. For a long time I wondered about him. I wondered about all these people. Did they enjoy themselves out here? Were any of them cured by the medicinal waters? What did they do for entertainment on hot summer nights? Mr. Bruckmann was one of the resort’s wealthier patrons. Look at this inscription. It’s so beautifully carved in the rock. He must have been a big tipper. One day I realized that I had missed his humor—the double meaning behind the words, ‘Take a drink on … ’ It’s safe to say he came out here to drink more than beer.”
Bruckmann came from a long line of German American brewers in Cincinnati. His family’s name was synonymous with beer in the Queen City. They distributed Dixie Beer, featuring a logo of a horse’s head and a horseshoe. The Bruckmann brewery operated from 1856 to 1950 at Ludlow and Spring Grove avenues. William was a jolly man and one of three brothers who took over the brewery from their father in 1887. All the Bruckmanns had good senses of humor, particularly William. He belonged to a recreation club that on Sundays operated a little steamer—not much larger than a big canoe—on the Miami and Erie Canal. He’d take people to and from his brewery.
Probably Bruckmann inscribed his humorous line at Mineral Springs before December 1, 1918, when Congress prohibited the use of grain to brew beer, and thereby changed his and his company’s fate. Bruckmann must have found the news unthinkable. No beer? Has Congress gone mad? That feeling was shared by tens of thousands of Cincinnatians who consumed large quantities of locally made alcoholic beverages. To call Cincinnati a “wet” city was an understatement. It produced almost one-third of the beer made in Ohio. In those days, drinking was more than a passion in Cincinnati; it was an all-consuming hobby. With its hundreds of German beer gardens, breweries, and neighborhood saloons, Cincinnati was a community nearly drowning in booze—until January 18, 1920, that is, when the Wheel Café received its last shipment of beer, two days before the Eighteenth Amendment, or Prohibition, took effect. In one day, Cincinnati breweries closed and familiar Bruckmann bottles disappeared—Bruck’s Jubilee Beer and Big Ben Ale (“Always Right, Day or Night”). Other major names in Cincinnati’s brewing industry, including Christian Moerlein, disappeared. But Bruckmann did not. The firm jumped on the no-beer wagon and produced nonalcoholic cereal beverages—called “near beer”—and malt tonic, which Cincinnati residents considered poor substitutes for the real thing. Yet that’s all they had, unless they bought illegal brew from some three thousand speakeasies in the city limits.
When Congress finally repealed its Prohibition laws, Cincinnati’s Bruckmann brothers, William and John C., were ready. On April 7, 1933, delivery trucks pulled out of Ludlow Avenue to deliver downtown Cincinnati’s first legal beer in thirteen years.
Once again, the world was ready to take a drink on William Bruckmann.