Finding Utopia

Randy McNutt

Description

In Finding Utopia, Randy McNutt sets off again to explore Ohio's forgotten nooks and byways. He begins where his last journey ended-on roads less traveled-finding more ghost towns, battlefields-turned-cornfields, and old memories that beckon him like spectral hitchhikers. On the way, he meets another cast of quirky and determined people who struggle to keep their towns on the map.Aided by his aging Jeep and a longing to escape, McNutt discovers a pioneer inn that harbors the ghost of a headless coach- man (and a surprising personal connection); a Victorian town that looks like an empty movie set; the gruesome battlefield on which the U.S. Army suffered its worst defeat ever by Native Americans; and a gunpowder manufacturing town that was blown to atoms on a sizzling summer day in 1890. Often encountering a past that is livelier than the present, he walks through another town where magnetic water once "cured" many ailments, stays the night in a stagecoach inn known for a ghostly cat and its owner who still roam the halls, finds a town built on cranberry bogs, and uncovers what's left of a World War I training camp sitting atop ancient Indian mounds. In tiny Utopia, for which this book is named, he descends into an underground stone chamber to hear tales of the spirits that haunt it.McNutt's first two books-seamlessly combining the genres of travel narrative, history, and memoir-won praise for effectively merging past and present, and giving readers a strong sense of place. As with those, Finding Utopia will appeal to anyone interested in heritage tourism, folklore, Americana, Ohio history and lore, back roads, ghosts of many kinds, and small-town life.

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612777290
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Finding Utopia

ng ia

Another Journey

into Lost Ohio

Randy McNutt

™ Black Squirrel Books  Kent, Ohio

For John Lowery Jr.

© 2012 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

all rights reserved isbn 978-1-60635-131-4 Manufactured in the United States of America

™ ™  BLACK SQUIRREL BOOKS Frisky, industrious black squirrels are a familiar sight on the Kent State University ™ campus and the inspiration for Black Squirrel Books , a trade imprint of The Kent State University Press. www.kentstateuniversitypress.com

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction: Moving On 1

Part One: Big Dreams, Small Places  1 Finding Utopia 11  2 The Pull of Magnetic Springs 24  3 In Search of the Believers 35  4 Autumn at SunWatch 47  5 Knights of Shawnee 53

Part Two: Lost Legends  6 Army of the Damned 69  7 A Village of Bones 84  8 The Road to Fort Laurens 100

Part Three: Back Roads  9 Freedom’s Towns 109 10 Colors of Tranquility 124 11 The Legacy of Edward McClain 136 12 Ghosts of Rogues’ Hollow 141 13 Confederates on the Island 148

Part Four: Ghosts of the Stage Lines 14 The Wickerham Secret 161 15 Riding the Line 174 16 Major Buxton, I Presume 188

Part Five: Vanishing Places 17 Ammo Towns 199 18 Phoneton Calling 205 19 Freezing on the Underground 210 20 Above the Fruited Bog 218 21 Camp Sherman of the Mounds 224

Ghost Town: The Naming of Ohio Bibliography 245 Index 250

vi Contents

232

Introduction: Moving On

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remembers it in his image.  —Joan Didion, “In the Islands”

One steamy August morning I returned to the house where I grew up to clean out the garage.Knowing it would be a backbreaking, heartbreak- ing job, I had postponed it—once, twice, even three times. It was the final step in preparing the little yellow Cape Cod for sale.  I would have preferred to hire a junk removal company, but the place—the contents—meant too much to just turn it over to strangers. When I said this to a friend who also grew up in the neighborhood but now lives out of town, he said, “Really now, who cares?”  I did. That was the problem.  While I worked at sorting through things and packing up boxes, images of my family’s past rolled and flickered in my head, much like a surreal film. I saw my late father, who struggled to buy the place in 1956, wrestling a bed frame through the front door and then, twenty years later, my newly widowed mother being consoled by friends and family in the small living room.  Two years after my mother’s death, in 1997, my wife and I moved into the house. Being there gave me a deeper connection to my parents than I had felt in my younger years. I better understood all that they had endured.  On winter days, the drafty house comforted me like a warm blanket. From its back windows I could see Pierce Elementary School, where I

Introduction1

had spent four pleasant years of my childhood. The building’s contin- ued presence—right there before me, all day long—reassured me that our friendly neighborhood wasn’t changing, despite what reality had been whispering in my ear.  Once a prosperous working-class neighborhood of Hamilton, Lin- denwald became my family’s harbor of safety. We knew every family on our block and many on the other blocks. It was the quintessential Ameri- can neighborhood, a small town within a city, and Pierce School was its focal point. The 1920s school, which my mother attended for a couple of years, offered space for community meetings and athletics programs for local kids.  Months after we moved into my boyhood home, my mind started mixing childhood memories—of the school, of the neighbors—with the present. By then, Pierce had become a little weathered but still proud. Before retiring to bed every night, I’d look out at it like a sailor does the North Star. In frigid weather, the warm glow of its lighted classrooms always comforted me. I felt confident knowing that the school and its neighborhood had survived the Great Depression, the cold war, and the personal tragedies of my parents and neighbors. With the school serving as a backdrop, I’d write at a little desk in my office (my sister’s old bedroom), pausing every fifteen minutes or so to glance out the window onto my backyard and Pierce, two blocks away. There was always a memory to see out there—like the time my friend Tom, a paperboy, smacked me with a rolled-upCincinnati Postand broke my little finger on our way home from school.  Now, decades on, thePostis gone, Tom is retired and living in New Mexico, and Pierce is closed. A senior living complex could replace it—appropriately, I suppose, as my baby boomer generation ages.  I pondered these things as I roasted in the frame garage—a vengeful oven filled with the day’s heat and humidity. I worked mostly alone, sift- ing through treasures that had been buried in the loft for decades. I re- jected offers to help. After all, only I could know that a dusty wooden kite box must be saved for my high school friend, Larry, and that a broken Zorro sword—aren’t they all broken?—is a piece of pop culture history.  I understood that the price of moving is your life—you throw it away, piece after piece, while you relive times long forgotten. You can’t help but think of your family. The years go by quickly, like chapters in a forgotten novel. They are not all pleasant. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively . . .

2 Finding Utopia

 As I stood listlessly in the sweltering garage, looking out at the drive- way, in my mind’s eye I could see a red-haired boy slugging a Wiffle ball and running baselines chalked onto a newly blacktopped street. Over the cheering of young teammates I could hear the familiar tick, tick, tick—the white plastic ball bouncing across the hard surface. The sound echoed through my mind as the ball rolled past the fielders and into Mr. Martin’s driveway and infinity.  This occurred on our little patch of planet: a small postwar subdi- vision in an old neighborhood where my mother, my two aunts, my maternal grandparents, my great-grandparents, and others once lived, dating back to the late 1800s.  In 1996, Lindenwald and its people became a chapter in my book Ghosts.The neighborhood was, after all, a ghost of Ohio’s past and a critical part of Hamilton’s present. Fourteen years later, after debating the matter for months, I finally decided to leave because things weren’t the same—not even close. My street had begun to feel like somebody else’s. Who are all these people? Too many newer residents, often rent- ers, shared neither my passion for the neighborhood nor a modicum of common sense.  Despite this, moving was still difficult. The neighborhood’s collec- tion of aging trees had always comforted me—my bit of permanence in an impermanent universe. On a walk around a half-dozen blocks, I could see all kinds of trees, architecture (including 1920s bungalows with cherry banisters and mudrooms), and, of course, the ubiquitous Cape Cods. When I walked down the street, I could at once see many homes, their histories, and their people—past and present. In Linden- wald, I always knew what was and what is. I liked that. Sometimes I’d glimpse the long ago, peripheral images that ran through my mind. I saw my friend Michael Cahalane walking with me along the railroad tracks as we solved the world’s problems in a less complicated time. This was before he left for Vietnam, a war from which the heroic Marine did not return. I could also see my aunt and uncle, who lived two blocks away, working in their yard, flowers blooming everywhere. In my mind my aunt greeted me with a hug while my uncle watered his dahlias.  As I cleared out the garage on that August afternoon, wiping my face and daydreaming of past victories on the blacktopped ball field, an un- familiar woman walked up the driveway. Her mouth was moving, but I could not hear her until I snapped back into reality. She was saying something about the house being attractive; she was assuring me that it

Introduction3