One day in 1861, a weary John Batterson Stetson arrived at his sister’s little house in Waynesville in rural Warren County. The train trip had been arduous for the sick but hopeful man who wanted to earn a fortune and a reputation out West. But first, he knew he had to achieve the nearly impossible: conquer tuberculosis. He never doubted that he would win.
In those days, Ohio and Waynesville were technically no longer the West, except to Easterners like Louisa Stetson Larrick. Since 1803, when Ohio entered the Union, the borders of America’s great western nether region had slowly expanded to include Missouri and beyond. That’s where John Stetson was heading—toward the golden horizon. On the way, he wanted to see his sister Louisa and recuperate at her home.
Only months earlier, on the Larrick family farm outside of town, Louisa’s world had finally crashed. She felt trapped and hopeless. Her marriage was crumbling. She felt stifled by Hiram Larrick, whom she had married in 1838, so she left him and moved into the little house in town. For that bold move she earned the contempt of many townspeople, who did not take separation or divorce lightly. To them, leaving a spouse was sinful and disrespectful.
Her move, as well as the impending visit from her brother, would change the direction of her life and those of millions of other people, but at the time she didn’t realize it would mean anything to her. She only worried about her health and the health of her children. She prayed they wouldn’t catch tuberculosis, and that her brother would miraculously recover. She did not consider turning him away.
Louisa and John were products of an Eastern upbringing and a large family. Born March 2, 1819, in Connecticut, Louisa was the daughter of a small-time hat manufacturer, Stephen Stetson III, and his wife, Marianne Batterson. Brother John was born May 5, 1830, in Orange, New Jersey. Being eleven years his senior, and one of an army of twelve children, Louisa was never extremely close to John, but her parents stressed togetherness and a strong family bond. They made it known that John, being a son, would one day enter the family business as a partner. Louisa, as were other girls of her era, was expected to marry her way into prosperity.
John didn’t fare much better. Although he didn’t receive a partnership in the family hat factory, he worked for his father long enough to learn the hat trade from the inside. His brothers earned all the money and left him struggling. So he decided to start his own factory.
But tuberculosis changed his plans. When doctors diagnosed the young man just before he turned thirty, his father assumed John would not live to see his thirty-fifth birthday. So Stephen Stetson had another reason not to invite John into the business. It was just as well, for a short time later his father lost all his money through a bad investment deal. He died soon after.
On the advice of his physicians, John Stetson left the cold, polluted Philadelphia for the West and its clean, warm air. He never thought much about dying, for he had too many dreams to fulfill. He wanted to be rich. The doctors said perhaps the clean air would help restore John’s lungs, but they warned him that tuberculosis was a contagious, debilitating disease for which there was no cure.
In Warren County, John stayed with Louisa while he gathered his strength. The country air seemed to revive him. He felt stronger every day. From Waynesville, John left for St. Joseph, Missouri, where he found a job in a brickyard. Months later, he was promoted to manager. He saved his money and bought the business. He believed he would be healed and his material needs would be met; he didn’t worry about the future.
On the verge of financial success a year later, he watched as the flooded Missouri River washed away his business and his dreams. Despondent, he attempted to enlist in the army at the start of the Civil War in 1861, but recruiters turned him down because of his disease. He felt even worse. They would take anyone, he told himself as he wandered. On the trail he met a group of prospectors heading to Pikes Peak and other faraway places to search for gold. They accepted him. On long nights in camp he passed the time by experimenting with furs for hats. Others marveled as he took pieces of leather, shaved them, boiled them, loved them, and molded them into about any shape he desired. He preferred high crowns and wide brims to keep the sun out of his eyes.
John Stetson became an artist with leather.
Meanwhile, Louisa Larrick’s town was suffocating her. It was too old-fashioned for her eastern tastes. People talked about her.
When I arrived in Waynesville, in search of her story, I envisioned the town as it was in 1860. I walked along its old-fashioned streets and imagined seeing Louisa walking to the general store. Superficially, at least, the town hasn’t changed much since she lived. Most of the architecture is nineteenth century, and the town’s antique shops sell the same kinds of utensils, tools, and other materials that the townspeople used back then.
These days, Waynesville, a Quaker community cut from the wilderness in 1797 and named for General Anthony Wayne, promotes itself as the antiques capital of the Midwest. Despite its old and Anglo pedigree, Waynesville’s image is that of a German town. The annual Ohio Sauerkraut Festival assures that the taste and odor of old-fashioned sauerkraut drifts into people’s consciousness and typecasts Waynesville as the home of sauerkraut and antiques. In that way, perhaps, the town has changed.
But there’s more to Waynesville than musty rooms and cabbage. A few weeks after the annual October festival comes Halloween and a much closer approximation of Waynesville: the Most Haunted Town in Ohio. A writer applied the nickname in the 1990s, and nobody has bothered to dispute it. In fact, some townspeople have encouraged it by proclaiming Main Street as America’s Most Haunted Street.
Ghost stories are the folklore of Waynesville, which lately has been promoting itself as haunted. Supposedly, haunted buildings line Main Street like tombstones in a country cemetery. Thirty years ago, town historian Dennis Dalton started collecting the old stories and interviewing people. So I asked the conductor of the “Not So Dearly Departed Tour” himself to show me around town and introduce me to Louisa Larrick—or, more exactly, to her reputation.
Dalton is the perfect neighbor for the job; he grew up in Waynesville in the 1950s, and he knows every house and legend. He is one of those vanishing characters, bigger than his reputation and perpetually in a good mood. He is the last of an indispensable breed, the small-town storyteller, historian, and folklorist. Physically, he reminds me of a Dickens character—ruddy-faced, robust, talkative, and dressed in an early 1800s costume befitting his status as Warren County’s official town crier.
As we walked down Main Street, Dalton explained the stories behind each old house. I realized that Waynesville is at once a living town and a ghost town. Its past is superimposed on top of its present, slightly off-kilter, the way those old 3-D pictures look before you put on cardboard glasses. “I make the tours historical,” Dalton said. “I tell about the times, the buildings, and the town. These stories are a part of us—our own folk tales. They can’t be separated from the history of the village because it is all one. As a result, the people who take my tour leave here with more than just tales of ghosts.”
On the surface, the village looks benign enough. Frame buildings are painted light yellow, peach, light blue, green, tan, and white. The brick Wayne Township House, a “newer” structure built in 1878, is painted red. The downtown is meant for walking and greeting neighbors. White wooden porches spill over into green yards. Black iron streetlights give the feel of New England. Yet two Waynesvilles exist, each without the other knowing. In Dalton’s world, Waynesville is a town of ghosts, inhabited by the living but still dominated by the dead. He has studied their every move until he feels that he knows them.
When Dalton was growing up in Waynesville, Main Street had a variety store, a department store, several supermarkets, a canning factory, a greenhouse, two barbershops, a theater, a hardware store, a luncheonette, and a weekly newspaper. Now, the town consists mainly of antiques shops; merchants sell the past. With little industry, Waynesville should be dead. Yet other small towns envy Waynesville’s economic success.
More than seventy antiques and specialty shops operate in five blocks. In the late 1970s, the antiques business provided the failing, out-of-the-way town with a strategy to compete. To R. Kevin Harper, a former village administrator who later helped the town exploit its past, Waynesville achieved a nearly impossible goal—thriving in a regional economy that is based on the suburbs. “We’ve capitalized on our own history,” he said.
In addition to sharp entrepreneurs, Waynesville has other spirited boosters. They lurk in parlors and old shops, waiting for the annual return of Dennis Dalton and company. It’s a long wait, but they don’t have a lot of options. They’re ghosts.
“I started this tour in 1987, right after I did the Haunted Hot Dog Roast in Springboro,” Dalton said. “It has grown every year. I have to turn visitors away. They’re fascinated. I think maybe it’s the intrigue of the unseen. But I don’t want people thinking that I’m exploiting our folklore. People simply have unusual experiences in this town.”
I told him that I am fascinated with one story: Louisa’s. She always did consider herself an Easterner although she lived in Waynesville from the late 1830s till her death in 1879. After leaving her husband, she spent most of her time in the two-story frame house at 234 South Main Street. It became her refuge from an unhappy marriage and the eyes of a prying village. Today her old home is the Cranberry Bog, a specialty shop. I stepped inside and walked around the three rooms on the first floor. They were crammed with dozens of home décor items, including framed prints and artificial flowers and soaps. The shop smelled sweet.
Outside, Dalton and I surveyed the frame architecture: beige with green shutters, two stories, a small brick chimney, a white wooden picket fence on one side of the yard, an addition on the back, and a small wooden front porch filled with wicker chairs. The front steps were lined with purple petunias.
“The Larrick House was built in 1820,” Dalton explained. “In 1861, it became the home of Louisa, a Yankee from the old Stetson family. She had met and married Hiram Larrick and came to live on his family homestead on the southeast side of Waynesville. She never did like the town much, though. I can understand why. This was still the West to her. There wasn’t much beyond it but St. Louis. She found the life disagreeable. Women smoked pipes. Small children chewed tobacco and spat on the sidewalks. Swearing, public drunkenness—life was rough and uncouth here. She became disenchanted with her life and husband.”
Perhaps that’s because by 1860 Louisa had become a Victorian baby machine. A native of Rockingham County, Virginia, Hiram Larrick had come to Ohio years earlier. He sought financial security but ended up needing a fortune to pay for all his children. After marrying on August 26, 1838, the couple produced nine children together—six girls and three boys: Elizabeth, 1838; Sarah, 1842; Lucy, 1846; Mary, 1847; Martha, 1849; Susan, 1851; John, 1853; Hiram, 1856; Ada, 1858; and George, 1859.
Dalton explained: “In 1861, after rearing her oldest children, Louisa separated from her husband’s bed and board and moved into this cottage in town. Imagine the audacity of that woman! Separation and divorce were not considered minor social offenses in Victorian Ohio. In this case the woman had initiated the separation, which was unthinkable.
“That summer, her brother visited her after being sent west by his doctor to recuperate from consumption. Few people in those days ever survived consumption, or tuberculosis. He also suffered from asthma and other respiratory problems. His doctor could think of only one strategy—go out into the sunshine and warm air—which is what Stetson finally did. Out in Missouri, he took up with some wildcat gold miners. Another gold rush was going on then. He went the distance with them, more than seven hundred miles. He didn’t get rich. When his strength returned, he started back to Philadelphia.”
One night on the trail, on his way to the boomtown Central City, Colorado, Stetson told a cowboy that he could make a fur hat without tanning the leather. Using the hides of rabbits, Stetson felted a strange-looking hat that protected its wearer against the rain and the sun—exactly what one of the cowboys had requested that night and bet Stetson that he could not make. When he arrived in Central City, Stetson sold the hat to a Mexican cowboy for a five-dollar gold piece. It was the first Stetson cowboy hat. With it came an idea: manufacture the hats.
“On the way home, John stopped in Waynesville to see his sister, the only person he could think of who might help him,” Dalton said. “He needed money. He had failed in the gold rush. He told her he wanted to start a one-man hat factory in Philadelphia. Louisa listened to his dreams and schemes, and grubstaked him with sixty dollars to help open the John Stetson hat factory. Sixty dollars was a lot of money to Louisa, probably her whole savings. John returned to Philadelphia and in 1865 opened a small factory with only a hundred dollars. He bought ten dollars worth of fur, went to work, and created the hat of the West, which he later named the Boss of the Plains.”
With its six-inch crown and seven-inch brim, the hat looked like a sombrero. It could carry a half-gallon of water but received the nickname the ten-gallon hat. At first, Stetson sold his hats to shops in Philadelphia. When customers had little interest, he sent free hats to clothing distributors across the southwest. Soon, a few orders trickled in, then more, and within a year many western residents were wearing the Stetson. It became synonymous with cowboys; they used it to shade their eyes, beat out campfires, carry grain, drink water from, sleep on as a pillow, and whip their horses. In 1885, as sales continued to increase, Stetson opened a large factory in North Philadelphia and hired four thousand workers. In the 1890s, the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police started wearing a Stetson hat, as did Canadian soldiers who served in battle in South Africa. The hat became a North America icon.
“He built the business into a multi-million-dollar operation,” Dalton said. “He also manufactured dress top hats for gentlemen and, of course, his biggest seller, what we call the cowboy hat. Had he not come to Waynesville, and had his sister not listened to his dream, the American cowboy could have gone hatless—or, at least, not as well prepared to deal with his environment.”
Dalton walked up onto the veranda of the Larrick cottage and peeked inside. The shop was now closed for the day. He started talking slowly: “We believe it is the ghost of Louisa who haunts this place; she lived out the rest of her life here and had little contact with her brother. She led a rather sad life. In 1887, the Larrick family contacted John Stetson and asked him for $250, the final payoff on a $5,000 loan that was the family farm mortgage, and John refused. By then, $5,000 was a paltry amount to Stetson. He was a multimillionaire. Somehow, the Larrick family managed to scrape the money together, though, without Uncle John’s help. This happened two years before Hiram Larrick died. Not that John excluded his sister completely. Every Christmas, John sent hats back to the men in the Larrick family, but he was a terrible skinflint who sent them ordinary hats and the women common clothing. Yet in 1889 he paid $16 million for a broke Florida college, Deland, and put it back on its feet. Now it’s the Stetson law school in St. Petersburg. I went there and could feel Stetson’s personality all over the place.
“Well, Louisa, I’m sure, felt slighted. After all, she’s the one who built his fortune with her grubstake. He did leave her one legacy, though. As I tell everyone, it wasn’t stock in the business, a million dollars, or even a special hat named in her honor. It was tuberculosis. It struck her down in 1879, when she died poor. Meanwhile, John B. lived on—until 1906, when his company was selling two million hats a year.”
John Stetson did repay his sister the sixty dollars. He built his business and fulfilled his destiny—live a long life and prosper. He once said, “There is no advertisement equal to a well-pleased customer.” He had millions of them. He left a fortune of more than $10 million. But after World War II, tastes changed. Men stopped wearing hats all the time, even in the southwest. By 1960, his firm was still making 4.5 million hats annually. In 1971 the John B. Stetson Co. main plant in Philadelphia closed, after making hats for 105 years. That year the Stevens Hat Manufacturing Co. of St. Joseph purchased the firm’s remaining inventory and equipment to continue making the famous Stetson hat.
“Poor Louisa couldn’t help but feel left out of her brother’s success,” Dalton said. “I imagine she shed some tears in this house. But who’s to say? She died in this very place and was carried across the Little Miami River to the Miami Cemetery, where everybody assumes she has been sleeping peacefully. But other people who have owned this building over the years would disagree. Every so often, some unusual things happen. One owner, an antiques dealer, told me she was reading in the back when she heard a commotion in the shop. She walked out there and saw something she will never forget. On the walls hung graduated iron ladles, used to dip lard during hog butchering. They were heavy. All of a sudden, they started swinging together, right on the wall, as if on cue and in time. No breeze could move those big things. The woman just stood there, totally aghast. Another time, a visitor to the shop asked her who was baking gingerbread in the kitchen. (This happened in the early 1970s, when they still had a kitchen in here. Of course, no one was baking anything at the time.)
“On another occasion, a young policeman saw a figure in the north window as he made his rounds at two A.M. It was on a moonlit night. He felt a sense of wanting to turn around and look over his shoulder. He saw something, a pale figure. When he got the nerve to take a better look, the figure dissolved before his eyes. We do know that Louisa has been seen in the last fifteen years. A neighbor across the street glanced over and saw a woman in the doorway. He described her as small with dark hair. He thought it was the shop owner, but his wife reminded him that the owner was away for the weekend. When he looked back, the figure dissolved into the wall behind her. He said she wore a print dress with a high collar. A Larrick descendant once told me that the figure fit the description of Louisa—right down to the dark hair and small frame.
“Only a few summers ago, a young sales clerk was working alone in the antiques shop when she heard a loud pounding on the front door, just before closing time at five P.M. She looked and saw nothing. She heard it again, and looked and saw a gloved hand—an old-fashioned woman’s glove. The woman kept pulling on the doorknob. The clerk yelled, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re closed. Come back tomorrow.’ The sound continued and the clerk rushed to the door and opened it, expecting to find an old woman. But again, she saw nothing. She closed up for the day and went out front, where her father waited to drive her home. She asked him who the old woman was at the door a few minutes ago. He said, ‘I’ve been sitting out in front for fifteen minutes, and nobody has come up to the door.’”
Dennis Dalton looked at me and didn’t say a word. He finished his tour and we stepped off the porch and headed briskly down Main Street. If I had been wearing a hat that afternoon, I would have tipped it generously to Louisa Stetson Larrick.