Kevin Williams

Hope springs eternal

sbradford — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:42:42 +0000

Hope springs eternal

August 1, 2026

It was a cloudy, misty afternoon that belied the spring season when my children and I arrived at Glen Helen Nature Preserve near Yellow Springs, in search of the nearby town’s iconic namesake.

We had heard tales of locals drinking from the spring (some for decades), and my children and I were enchanted with the prospect. But there’s a lot to think about before sipping (or chugging) that clear, cool water from the Yellow Spring, or any of the hundreds of naturally occurring springs in the state.

ACCORDING TO A MAP from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, most of Ohio’s springs are in the southeast part of the state, with a fair number in central and southwest Ohio as well. Steven Lyon, an associate professor at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, says they’re driven by the state’s geological history and the prevalence of limestone, sandstone, and shale.

“Much of what we see in Ohio comes as a result of the glaciers that once covered the state,” Lyon says. “Geology determines how much water is in the ground and how easily it moves; then, if the geology intersects with the surface, you can get natural springs.”

But just because they are naturally occurring doesn’t mean the water is necessarily clean and pure. Nick Boutis, executive director of the Glen Helen Association, which oversees the Yellow Spring, says the water coming from the spring there is not routinely tested and is not certified as a source of clean drinking water. “Water that looks and smells clean can still have nitrites, coliform bacteria, or other human-caused pollutants that you would not want to ingest,” he says.

Erik Larson, professor of geology at Shawnee State University, who studies this sort of thing, says he steers clear of drinking fresh spring water as a matter of practice. “I personally wouldn’t drink it; there’s just too many ways that the groundwater can get contaminated by any number of things, so it’s just not worth it to me,” he says. “But lots of folks do.”

LYON SAYS WHAT DETERMINES whether you can drink water from springs (or rivers or lakes) is what activities are happening in the watershed.

“If there are people living in the region above where the spring is, then things like E. coli from their waste can be an issue,” Lyon says, noting that a leaky septic tank could spoil an otherwise pristine spring in a populated area. He also noted that farms and cows can bring things like cryptosporidium or other pathogens. “That’s why we can drink straight from small streams up high in the mountains, since no people or animals live above them,” he says. “All it takes is one microscopic bad guy in the water to make you sick, so in a populated area especially, best to steer clear.”

If people and their activities are few and far between, and the water goes through the geology getting filtered, risk can be lower. Sandstone in particular, Lyon says, is good at filtering water. “Think about all the people in the state that have well water at their house rather than municipal water.”

FOR MANY LOCALS WHO CHERISH the crisp, cold, clear water coming from the ground, the risk is one they’re willing to assume.

Just outside of Greenfield, for example, on a piece of private property just over the Ross County line, runs another freshwater spring that locals have drawn from for generations.

I watch as visitor Greg Gentry fills about 100 1-gallon jugs in an hour. He says his family goes through about 20 gallons a week, but it’s his first time at this particular spring. “It tastes good,” Gentry says. “We’ll see how it stores before getting more.”

Buchtel Spring, outside Nelsonville, is another spring popular with locals, as is Christopher Spring in Cadiz and the Malabar Spring in Holmes County.

Spring-seekers expecting a bubbling spring emanating from the earth might end up disappointed. Water from the spring near Greenfield, for example, flows cleanly and crisply from a pipe that property owners have put in to route it from the earth and make it easier to collect. Many of the more popular springs in the state have been similarly piped.

BACK IN YELLOW SPRINGS, within minutes of being on the trail in the Glen Helen Preserve, we ran into a local woman who not only kindly guided us to the spring, she told us what we had heard elsewhere: that people drink from it all the time with no problems.

We heard it before we saw it. The tranquil yet unmistakable sound of water rushing and rippling over rocks confirmed we were headed in the right direction.

Soon, we came upon the cool, cascading water spurting out in a steady stream. Where the water came from the earth, rocks were tinted a bright yellow-orange from the water’s high iron content, but after the spring water had run over the rocks for a few feet, the iron had been filtered out and the rocks were clean.

Iron, however, isn’t all that’s in the water here. Boutis says it also contains trace amounts of arsenic and cadmium. “If a person used it as their sole water source, those trace amounts could bioaccumulate and cause problems,” he says.

DESPITE THE WARNING, we filled some cups, and I guzzled it straight down. It tasted pure and clean and it was truly refreshing. I can’t speak for others, but we never felt any ill effects.

Tags

outdoors

nature

Earth quake

sbradford — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:36:19 +0000

Earth quake

April 1, 2026

Kevin Williams

Features

The early hours of February 22 were typical for a Sunday morning in rural Highland County. Absent the typical weekday rush, most residents of the area in rural southwestern Ohio were still sleeping, or perhaps up and enjoying that first cup of coffee or starting to get ready for chores or church.

But then, a little before 6 a.m., something happened that was not at all typical. Dozens of posts and comments on social media forums described a sound like thunder, rattling windows, and items falling from shelves. Turns out, the shaking that caused the early wake-up call was an earthquake — a mild 2.5 temblor deep below the earth’s surface a couple of miles or so east of Hillsboro.

Ohio, of course, is not immune from seismic activity. There are several long-dormant fault zones known as remnant strain faults underneath the Buckeye State, according to Mike Brudzinski, a geology professor and earthquake expert at Miami University in Oxford — and some of those, he says, have energy built up in them like a cocked gun.

But knowing which faults are ready to fire is still out of scientific reach.

“Over long periods of time, small changes in stress in the earth can tip a fault over the edge,” Brudzinski says. “How many cocked guns are left and how many faults are really primed? There is no way to know; we really can’t anticipate when and where they will occur. Our ability to forecast earthquakes is not great.”

While Hillsboro may have been the site of the most recent shaker, Brudzinski says that Anna, a town of 1,500 people between Dayton and Lima, is the earthquake epicenter of the Buckeye State.

Anna, which sits atop the Anna-Champaign Seismic Zone, a fault deep below the surface, frequently experiences small trembles — but also was the site of two of the largest earthquakes in Ohio’s recorded history (see list below). “You might be able to make the case that for magnitude 5.0-size events, Anna is the only place in the state,” Brudzinski says.

But it definitely isn’t the only place that shakes. Magnitude 3.0 events are a regular occurrence northeast of Cleveland, for example, though many of those are related to fracking rather than naturally occurring faults in the earth’s crust.

The biggest earthquake threat to folks in Ohio, in fact, actually comes from outside the state. The New Madrid Seismic Zone, which runs through Missouri and Illinois, spurred magnitude 7.0 earthquakes in the early 1800s that were felt as far away as Boston. Brudzinski says a hypothetical 7.5-plus event in the northeast part of that zone today likely would cause widespread disruption over the entire eastern part of the country, including much of Ohio. Damage would be greater than even a 6.0 event centered in Anna — where the damage would still be significant, but likely would be more contained to the immediate area.

Brudzinski says there is a good chance most Ohioans will not experience an earthquake in their lifetime. He says that a “big one” could happen here, “but it could happen in a lot of other places too.”

A deep rumbling accompanied the tremor, and those living on traffic arteries were inclined at first to believe the noise was caused by passing trucks. Because of the quietness of the hour, the quake was noticed by many more persons than the one which shook Ohio the previous Tuesday. Tumbling brick chimneys and shattered glass awakened residents of Anna, where the latest quake probably centered, similar to that of last week, seismologists reported."

— The Bluffton News, March 11, 1937

EIGHT NOTABLE OHIO EARTHQUAKES

Anna (Shelby County), March 9, 1937, magnitude 5.4. The largest earthquake in Ohio history. Caused severe damage, including cracked buildings, toppled chimneys, and structural issues.

Anna (Shelby County), March 2, 1937, magnitude 5.0. Occurred one week before the larger quake. Damaged churches and chimneys throughout the area.

LeRoy Township (Lake County), Jan. 31, 1986, magnitude 5.0. Struck near Cleveland in Lake Erie. Felt in 10 states and southern Canada; caused broken windows and cracked plaster.

Lima (Allen County), Sept. 19, 1884, magnitude 4.8. Significant for the late 19th century.

Portsmouth (Scioto County), May 17, 1901, magnitude 4.2. Dislodged bricks from chimneys and cracked windows.

Crooksville (Perry County), June 20, 1952, magnitude 3.9. Caused minor to moderate damage.

Pomeroy (Meigs County), Nov. 5, 1926, magnitude 3.6. Caused minor to moderate damage around southeastern Ohio.

Youngstown (Mahoning County), Dec. 31, 2011, magnitude 4.0. About 2.5 miles northwest of the city.

Tags

Ohio history

Ohio

Throwbacks

sbradford — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 17:38:42 +0000

Throwbacks

February 1, 2025

Kevin Williams

Features

“People call here thinking that we have the answer to every question,” Hunter says. “WVNU was the internet before the internet; for some around here, it still is the internet.” He reaches for a stack of papers, finds the report, and gives the caller the information. “Thank you — you’re a lifesaver!” the woman gushes.

Greenfield, with a population of just over 4,000, sits nestled among the quiet hills of rural Ross and Highland counties between Hillsboro, Washington Court House, and Chillicothe. A mural downtown celebrates the Patterson family, widely recognized as the first African American auto manufacturers in the United States. High school sports and county fairs are at least as important as anything going on anywhere else in the world.

It’s from here that WVNU, a tiny 2,300-watt radio station known as Lite 97.5, has been broadcasting adult contemporary hits from the second floor of a downtown office building for the last 30 years.

From another era

From 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. each weekday, echoing into the diners and dollar stores within earshot of the 2,300-watt station, crackles the reassuring voice of Nelson Hunter — greeting sleepyheads, harried soccer moms, and coffee-sipping executives over the airwaves with a soothing, chatty mix of music and talk. Hunter (most people know him simply as “Nelson”) is indispensable to people’s sunrises here, and just as reliable.

Nelson is a throwback to an earlier era of radio, when disc jockeys spun records, announced school closings, read obituaries and high school sports scores, and visited county fairs. While he no longer physically spins records in this digital age, he does hand-pick the tunes he plays — a rarity in radio today.

It’s not only neighborhood news filling those airwaves; celebrities, eager to talk about their latest book or movie, join in from faraway places (a booking agency in New York secures the interviews). Over the years, Nelson has chatted up the likes of Cher, Florence Henderson (“She was so nice,” he recalls), Valerie Harper, President Bill Clinton, and Joan Jett, to name only a few.

Meanwhile, as Hunter keeps the tunes playing, celebrities chatting, and school closings up to date, a robust support system of advertisers including grocery stores, car dealerships, and hospitals help keep WVNU afloat. Indeed, on a recent morning, a collection of commercials was airing for a hardware store, a bank, the local community college, and another bank.

Staying local

WVNU was founded 30 years ago by local businessman Pat Hays and his wife, Elaine. After years of resisting overtures from national radio conglomerates, they sold it in 2024 to Jackson-based Total Media, which operates more than a dozen such stations in nine small towns around southeastern Ohio and just across the river in West Virginia (they both have stayed on with the company). Total Media is owned by Alan Stockmeister, a lifelong Jackson resident and entrepreneur who currently serves on the board of trustees at Ohio State University.

“That local aspect is the most important part of what we are doing,” says Gary Mincer, Total Media’s VP and general manager. “There’s no one even close to us in terms of that local coverage that our stations provide to their communities, while at the same time helping local businesses find marketing solutions that they otherwise wouldn’t have. That’s always been the vision of our founder and owner: to be a part of these local communities and improve people’s lives.”

WVNU (along with all the Total Media stations) has kept up with the times, though, and has joined the streaming era. Anyone anywhere in the world can listen to the local shows live on each station’s website. Afterward, most of the programming comes in from satellite, though the stations do longer blocks of local programming for high school sports or during county fair week — when WVNU, for example, broadcasts all day, announcing the names of 4-H and bake-off winners.

Not just radio

Just as local radio hangs on in an age of conglomeration, small-town newspapers also often play a role. While newspapers nationwide continue to shut down, according to Axios, at an average rate of more than two per week over the past few years, that hasn’t stopped the presses at places like Total Media’s Telegram in Jackson and Vinton counties or the Attica Hub in Seneca County.

The larger metro dailies may be a shell of what they once were, but the Hub, for one, continues to go to press each week much as it has for the past 128 years. It has survived by carving out a niche as an “auction newspaper,” publishing scores of auctions each week while maintaining its local news chops.

A recent edition featured advice on keeping backyard bird feeders full, news from the local school board meeting — and dozens of auction announcements.

Publisher Deborah Cook and a staff of three keep the paper going. She says print still has a place, at least in the string of small towns the Hub serves.

“There are still a lot of people that do not have social media or the internet,” Cook says. “People still want to see their kid’s pictures in the paper.”

The role of local media

And that’s the point of local media, says Kent State University assistant professor of journalism Andrea Lorenz. The local press acts as a “civic glue” that holds small towns together, and when it disappears, communities become fragmented.

“Rural areas sense a loss of community, especially when they don’t have the keystone media that once connected us all,” Lorenz says, adding that when the local newspaper goes away, people go to other sources for their news, and that can cause fragmentation and polarization.

But Lorenz stays optimistic despite the grim environment for newspapers. “There are a lot of great start-ups,” she says. “Many people are putting their brains to how can we fix it — not to bring back what used to be, but how can we make it better.”

Tags

local media

small businesses

Small town, BIG sounds

sbradford — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:38:44 +0000

Small town, BIG sounds

September 1, 2023

Kevin Williams

Features

When Lora Lynn Snow first saw the inside of the Ariel Opera House in 1987, the first thing she noticed, of course, was the quarter-century’s worth of bird droppings that coated just about everything.

But almost immediately, she saw beyond the disrepair of the once-spectacular Gallipolis theater. Where others could only see pigeon poop, Snow saw possibilities.

“I ignored the piles of rubble,” Snow remembers. “I heard the building singing, and it was love at first sight.”

Today, thanks to that love affair — and a lot of hard work — Gallipolis (population 3,300) is home to one of the most distinctive, if unlikely, symphonies in the country. The Ohio Valley Symphony, replete with tubas, French horns, cellos, bass violins, flutes, harps, trumpets, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and more, begins its 34th season of performance at the Ariel this month.

The hills that hem in this tiny Ohio River town on the southern tip of the state are truly alive with the sound of music.

Homecoming

But it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Snow. An oboist who grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, Snow had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ohio State before moving to Arkansas.

There, she played in several ensembles and taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for a time before she and her husband decided they needed a change. “It was so hot, just an oppressive heat,” she says.

So they moved back closer to home, to Gallia County, in 1980. She taught music in the Gallia County Local School District and at the University of Rio Grande and played in several regional symphonies and chamber groups.

It actually took a few years before she discovered her calling.

Discovery

The French refugees who settled Gallipolis in the late 1700s had brought with them a strong appreciation for the arts, and that influence has always been apparent. It’s no surprise that the Ariel sprang up there in 1895 at the height of the “opera house” movement. The Ariel hosted music and theater programs, vaudeville acts, and movies for decades.

Eventually, though, Hollywood’s economics overpowered the Ariel, and the theater shuttered in the early 1960s. It stayed that way for 25 years. Snow, growing dissatisfied with her experiences with cutthroat musicians and taskmaster conductors, decided she wanted to start her own symphony, one that would operate in her own kinder, gentler way.

But in tiny Gallipolis? There were plenty of snickers and skepticism at first, but she knew she could count on the area’s rich arts history to draw upon. What she didn’t have was a proper venue — until someone mentioned the town’s old, decrepit opera house.

“I had no idea the Ariel was there,” Snow says. “I finagled my way inside, and the acoustics were phenomenal. They just don’t build them like that anymore.”

Rejuvenation

Right away, Snow began raising funds. She held a community cleaning party. She even consulted the Centers for Disease Control about the best way to remove pigeon droppings. So, long before COVID-19 made N-95s an everyday sight, masked stagehands went high into the rafters to methodically uncover the Ariel’s former glory, from the top down.

The Ohio Valley Symphony performed its first concert on April 1, 1989, and officially moved into the Ariel at its grand reopening on June 9, 1990. Renovations have continued in the years since, and the Ariel today hosts not only the OVS, but a bevy of other events: music and theater productions, arts classes, even weddings.

To this day, Snow still plays with the symphony as its principal oboist. So if something is “off,” whether with acoustics in the hall or chemistry among the musicians, she’ll know about it.

Small-town nice

Snow is the only musician in the symphony who’s based in Gallipolis. Most come in from larger cities like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati — drawn, Snow says, by the OVS’s reputation as a nice place to play, in terms of the venue and the personalities of the ensemble and the entire town. Members of the community, in fact, house many of the visiting musicians, which helps to foster bonds between the community and the symphony.

Concertmaster Manami White, for example, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed violinist based in Cincinnati, says she herself has enjoyed that experience and that lifelong friendships have been forged because of those opportunities.

It’s led to a loyal and supportive following in Gallipolis, as locals who might otherwise have never stepped foot in a symphony hall have been drawn to the Ariel. The quality of the programming, of course, doesn’t hurt, either.

“When you go to a concert, it should give you shivers, make you gasp,” Snow says. “Art without that is pretty empty. If you care for the artists and provide a positive work environment, the audience will notice. We have a rep as a nice place to play.”

Snow says that, inevitably, newly arrived musicians will finish their first gigs and tell her, often incredulously, how much fun they had.

“Working hard and having fun are not exclusive,” Snow says. “I’ve always felt doing both was a good thing.”

The symphony’s 34th season

Sept. 16 — “Around the Campfire,” with guest conductor Luke Frazier, founder of the American Pops Orchestra.
Nov. 4 — “Salute to Our Veterans,” with Carl Topilow, founding conductor of the Cleveland Pops.
Dec. 2 — “The Christmas Show!” — with Steven Huang, newly named conductor of the New Westchester Symphony in White Plains, N.Y.
March 16 — “The Enigmatic Elgar,” conducted by François López-Ferrer, resident conductor of the Académie of the Opéra de Paris.
April 27 — “Brahms and Beyond,” conducted by West Virginia State Philharmonic director Scott E. Woodard.

Every concert ticket includes a 6:45 p.m. pre-concert chat with the maestro and soloist of the evening, as well as a post-concert reception.

Visit www.arieltheatre.org for details.

Tags

French connection

sbradford — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:52:03 +0000

French connection

August 1, 2023

Kevin Williams

Features

France began its effort to colonize North America not too long after Christopher Columbus arrived here in 1492. At times between 1656 and 1750, in fact, France controlled more of the continental land mass than Britain and Spain combined.

France’s dream of controlling the continent ended with Britain’s victory in the French and Indian War, and the vast majority of North American places and people have since conformed to English traditions.

But there are plenty of pockets that continue to cling to French customs.

Quebec, for instance, continues to be a Francophone island in English-speaking Canada that’s held steadfast to its language for hundreds of years. In spots of northern Maine, French is used as typically as English, and French-inspired poutine and ployes are as familiar on menus as burgers and pizza. The Cajuns of Louisiana still embrace their past with gusto and richness — so much so that the number of French-speakers in the bayou has actually increased in recent years. In Missouri, where St. Louis was once known as the “Paris of the West,” an effort is underway to preserve a unique Midwestern dialect of French, a leftover legacy from the plentiful French towns that once dotted the region.

Ohio has its own French Connection, of course, including well-known Gallipolis (literally, “City of the Gauls”), founded by loyalists to the crown who were fleeing the French Revolution. Several years after the Gallia County settlement was established, another French enclave came to being on the other side of the state, anchored by the town of Versailles in northern Darke County.

From Stark to Darke

Western Ohio’s first families from France began their journeys here in 1825, settling first in Stark County, then continuing shortly afterward to what was then Jacksonville in Darke County.

By 1837, their number and influence had grown so much that they petitioned to change the town’s name to Versailles. French settlers also founded the nearby hamlets of Frenchtown and Russia (an homage to French settlers who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars in Russia). The three towns became the hub of French culture in Ohio.

In 1846, the French settlers in the area erected a log church to serve 40 families in Frenchtown. Residents John Berge and Clare Pequignot became the first couple to tie the knot in the congregation. Twenty years later, a more permanent church — christened Holy Family — was erected with distinctive French features, inside and out; it still stands today. Many original French family names persist in the area as well: Subler, Pequignot, Berge, and Didier dot mailboxes in town and in the surrounding countryside.

French flair

In Versailles, the French influence is seen in architecture, murals, and memories.

There is a water feature downtown with cherubs and a wine barrel. Murals with French countryside scenes are on some downtown walls, and a miniature replica of the Arc de Triomphe is in a community park. The city’s logo even incorporates a fleur-de-lis.

But while it may still be visible in the area, the French culture hasn’t necessarily held on with the same tenacity in Ohio as it has in other enclaves in North America.

Deb Pohl, 74, whose ancestors came from Switzerland and France, is president of the Versailles Historical Society. She has memories of two sisters walking around town who still spoke French to one another, but she says most of the French dialect had disappeared by the time she was a teenager.

“I think French-speaking died out with the second generation back from me,” she says.

Not gone yet

Keith Didier, 57, would beg to differ, as he, for one, still speaks French. He takes care of the Holy Family cemetery as well as its heritage — and has become a caretaker of French culture in the area. “We had a lot of the typical traditions — midnight mass, French tarts, noodles,” he says.

The original settlement’s small size, relative to, say, Quebec or even New Orleans, made it tougher to keep traditions alive — a melting ice cube compared to a melting glacier. But other factors might also have been at play.

Pohl, for example, says that after the initial French waves, Prussians, Irish, Germans, English, and others moved to the area, which created a more diverse population.

Esteemed Miami University French professor William Marion Miller examined the sustainability of the area’s French culture in an article he wrote for the French Review in 1946.

“The French seemed to make no effort to perpetuate their cultural tradition or European heritage, to retain their French customs, or even to keep their native tongue alive,” he wrote. “The French folk wanted to become Americans as quickly as possible.”

Miller, however, drew at least one incorrect conclusion from his research. At the time, he noted that the last of the French settlers lived on rural roads outside of Frenchtown and Russia, and predicted that “10 or possibly 15 more years will see the last of these French-speakers.” But he misjudged the tenacity of Francophone culture. Almost 80 years after his article landed in the French Review, the French culture in Darke County, while perhaps not quite a flame, is still at least a warm cultural ember.

Tags

history

Ohio history

Ghost parks

sbradford — Tue, 31 May 2022 18:25:04 +0000

Ghost parks

June 1, 2022

Kevin Williams

Features

Theme parks never really die. Even long after the exuberant screams of happy thrill-seekers have faded and the last caramel corn has been munched, if you find the right spot, you can still almost hear the sounds of the midway and even recognize some of the physical remains of long-abandoned amusement rides that may have entertained generations of carnival-goers past ...

Perhaps no state — except maybe Florida — is more synonymous with amusement parks than Ohio. Cedar Point to the north and Kings Island to the south draw millions of visitors each year and are among the top theme parks in the world.

Amusement parks in Ohio date as far back as the mid-1800s. In fact, Cedar Point originally opened as a public beach in 1870. Kings Island, while celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, traces its origins to nearby Coney Island, which also opened originally in 1870.

They are far from the only parks to open and close within the Buckeye State. Along with the 15 or so parks in operation today, the National Amusement Park Historical Association lists nearly 100 “lost” amusement parks in Ohio. Jeffrey Stanton, who runs the website www.lostamusementparks.napha.org, says that smaller parks couldn’t compete with the larger ones.

“The younger generation likes only thrill rides, so the big parks remove the older rides that once appealed to my generation and add only thrill rides,” Stanton says. The smaller parks didn’t have the budget to compete, he says, and it didn’t help that the land they occupied became more valuable than the dollars they could generate.

“So rather than make $50,000 a year running the park, some developer offers $10 million for the land,” Stanton says.

These amusement parks weren’t just places for families to spend a day in the sun; they also provided first summer jobs for countless kids, from lifeguards to ride supervisors. Carolyn Enderson, 52, remembers working for nine summers — from when she was 16 to age 24 — at Americana Amusement Park outside of Monroe. The park was a rumpled, smaller alternative to the flashier Kings Island, not 20 miles away, with an adjacent park called Fantasy Farm — complete with farm animals and barn-themed rides. Americana was a place for families and corporate picnics, where July days crawled by, and guests bought frozen bananas on a stick to battle
the heat.

“I liked making new friends each season and meeting lots of people each day,” Enderson says. “I think I prefer the small parks. It’s not so busy, and you can enjoy walking around because it’s smaller.”

“My first memory of Americana was back when it was called LeSourdsville Lake,” remembers Linda Nienaber. “It was in the spring of 1970, toward the end of first grade. We had a great time there. I remember sliding down a giant slide, riding on the mini roller coaster, and having a picnic on the grounds for our lunch. A couple of years later, my family and I went there for my dad’s company picnic. That was the first time I rode on the roller coaster with my older sister.”

One of the biggest and best parks of its day was Woodsdale Island Park, located on a now-long-gone island in the Great Miami River. The late Trenton historian Doris Page often talked of the park as the Kings Island of its day, according to her son, Gary Page, drawing tourists by train from Cincinnati and Dayton to its wooded banks. In its heyday, it boasted a restaurant, merry-go-round, boathouse, and other entertainment amenities.

Few people are around today, however, who even know exactly where that park stood — it was wiped out during the great flood of 1913, and the river’s fickle channel has changed often over the years.

“I’ve talked to others about the location — no one can give me an answer,” Page says. “I believe the river channel has moved so many times over the years, it’s hard to imagine that there was an island in the river.”

Farther north, on the western edge of Dayton in what is now Possum Creek MetroPark, the crumbling remains of a dance floor and rusting hulks of old street cars sit silent sentinel at the site of what used to be Argonne Forest Park. Steps to the park’s old swimming pool can still be seen.

Michele Taggart of Youngstown recalls Idora Park, one of the nation’s only urban amusement parks, which operated on the south side of town from 1899 until 1984.

“It was so fun — they even had a lion’s mouth on the garbage can, so it was fun to throw away trash,” Taggart says.

Chippewa Lake Amusement Park in Medina County has proved nearly impossible to kill off. It operated for a century, beginning in 1878 with a roller coaster that had to be manually pushed to the top of the first hill. After the park closed in 1978, it sat largely intact as nature and the elements took their toll. Today, the skeletons of a few old rides and buildings still haunt the now-overgrown park, but the Medina County Park system owns the land, with plans to open it as a public park and wetland. Some old park structures will survive as historical homage.

Mary Boulton grew up in Brunswick, Ohio, and remembers the park well.

“I remember when my family, including five siblings, made our yearly trek to Chippewa Lake Amusement Park,” she says. “My dad’s company picnic was held there every summer. We all looked forward to that yearly event, and it would be the one time a year we could catch up with old friends and make new ones.”

Tags

Country home

sbradford — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 15:32:07 +0000

Country home

May 1, 2022

Kevin Williams

Features

A small village in southern Ohio may seem like an unlikely country music hot spot, but Bainbridge, population 3,000, boasts a tradition rivaled only by the country music capital of the world.

Bainbridge is home to the Paint Valley Jamboree, the oldest continuous country music show in Ohio — and second nationally only to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The Paint Valley Jamboree began in 1967, and in fact it benefited from its seemingly remote location. “Artists from Nashville could stop here and play a show on their way to the East Coast,” says Tim Koehl, owner of the Paxton Theatre, home of the jamboree. “It was a great halfway point.”

For its entire lifespan, the Paint Valley Jamboree has been held in the cozy, yet stately — and acoustically friendly — confines of the Paxton, a century-old building anchoring a corner of downtown Bainbridge. It has attracted such country luminaries as Waylon Jennings, Dottie West, Merle Haggard, Connie Smith, Johnny Paycheck, Minnie Pearl, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Porter Wagoner.

Today, the jamboree continues to draw from a reservoir of talent to play alongside its house band, the Original Jam Band.

Still, as musical tastes change, Koehl and his team have a tricky balancing act: trying to preserve the history, traditions, and nostalgia of the jamboree, while also trying to bring in a younger audience.

“People hear the word ‘jamboree’ and some just tune out,” says Wade Hamilton, who books musicians and runs the theater’s sound board. So, this year the jamboree has unveiled a new logo and look that incorporates classic rock into country vibe. The “Fifty 50” logo alludes to both the music mix and the proximity to U.S. Route 50, which joins the East and West coasts.

For Hamilton, the beauty of the jamboree is in the exchange of stories and traditions and the passing of the torch between generations of country music.

“My favorite part is the camaraderie between the performers,” he says. “There’s so much musical history at the Paxton that folks are just always excited to play there. Musicians spend time before and after the show swapping stories and tunes backstage. It’s fun to be a part of that.”

He says that the long history of the jamboree brings a sense of pride to folks in the Paint Valley as well. “People love to bring family and friends to the theater when they’re in town visiting and always ask for a tour and a story or two,” he says.

Many long careers in country music began on the stage of the Paxton, and that history is enshrined on a “Wall of Fame” backstage full of framed and autographed photos. There’s a story with each photo, and Koehl knows them all. Koehl, 70, is the savior of the Paxton Theatre, purchasing the property in 2013 from previous owners. Over the years, the theater has been in various stages of glory and disrepair, depending on the era. Koehl and his wife, Deb, created the nonprofit Paxton Theatre Foundation for the theater’s operations and upkeep.

The Paxton now does more than just the jamboree. For instance, the jamboree takes a break each July, when the theater is turned over to local youth who stage a summer theater production, often a Disney play.

“Our summer programs gets 40 to 50 children who would never be able to get on a stage otherwise, a place to perform,” Koehl says. “That’s one of the things I am most proud of.”

COVID was rough on the jamboree, forcing a pause in the schedule in 2020. In the end, though, it may have helped more than hurt, because the theater team was able to invest some time and money into improvements. Now they just need to get people to return — and they’re building a performance schedule that’s on par with the best of Nashville, so that shouldn’t be difficult.

“It will be a feel-good mix of music, and that is the goal,” Hamilton says.

One hundred and 10 years after the Paxton Theatre opened as a township hall, and over 50 years after the first Paint Valley Jamboree, Hamilton marvels at the building’s longevity and functionality. The sound, which pours off the stage in crisp, clear notes, is what keeps acts coming back.

“The Paxton was built as a township hall before they had sound systems, so they designed it so acoustics would travel, everyone would be able to hear what was on stage. It was designed for productions,” Hamilton says.

“Every group that we ever have in there, the first thing they comment on is how the sound is incredible,” Hamilton says. “We are lucky that someone had the forethought 110 years ago to think about the sound.”

Paint Valley Jamboree at the Paxton Theatre, 133 E. Main St., Bainbridge, goes on the second Saturday of each month through the season. General admission tickets are $12, and streaming tickets are available for $8. Visit www.paxtontheatre.org.

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Ohio activities

Ohio attractions

music

High point

sbradford — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 15:18:35 +0000

High point

April 1, 2022

Kevin Williams

Features

High ground is challenging to find in Ohio. Alaskans, with their towering Denali, or even Arkansans, with their Ozarks, probably chuckle at the thought of our “high spots.”

Of course, the best-known Ohio pinnacle — the highest point — is Campbell Hill, which rises 1,550 feet above the surrounding plains. But with the manicured lawns of the Ohio Hi-Point Career Center technical school atop it, one doesn’t necessarily get much of a “wilderness” vibe there.

For a taste of rural and wild, head to Buzzardsroost — Ohio’s “other roof” — a rocky outcropping overlooking the untamed and chocolate-colored Brush Creek, which carves a treacherous valley through Adams County. The view atop Buzzardsroost is one of the best Ohio has to offer. And at close to 1,000 rocky feet high, it seems like one of the state’s highest points.

Each time of year offers something different. Winter is a solitude of quiet and barren beauty. Spring is a time of reawakening and colorful songbirds. Summertime cloaks the hills in emerald beauty and wildflower bouquets. And autumn? Stake out a spot and watch the trees covering the valley alight in flaming oranges, crimson reds, and crisp rusts.

Adams County is a study in contrast to the rest of the state. The hardscrabble hills are honeycombed with creeks that pour down from the rocky ridges. Black bear meander into the county from the east in search of summer fruits and honey-filled hives. The hills of Adams County are the westernmost whisper of the Appalachians. The county’s rocky ridges shrouded in a summer haze have earned them the moniker of the “Little Smokies,” miniature cousins of their Tennessee counterparts. The place is also steeped in Civil War lore, and the ghosts of Morgan’s Raiders still haunt from their trail of terror through the Union hinterlands.

The Buzzardsroost trailhead is well marked off Route 125 near the town of Lynx — the name an homage to the bobcat, which still prowls these forests. There’s an overflow parking lot on the other side of 125 if the smaller trailhead lot is full — which happens at certain times of year.

An estimated 8,000 hikers have been coming to Buzzardsroost each year recently, according to Mike Hall, Appalachia forest manager at the Nature Conservancy, which manages the trail.

“The secret’s out,” says Carly Powell, a hiker in the Cincinnati Hikes Facebook forum of Buzzardsroost, advising people to arrive early in the day for a hike to avoid crowds.

The Buzzardsroost preserve honors Emma and Christian Goetz, siblings and scions of the well-known Cincinnati beer barons, who would come here to escape the city. A century later, people are still coming here to escape the city.

The trail underwent significant upgrades over the past couple of years, making the Buzzardsroost beauty easier to access. While the hike is still rigorous, wooden planks and boardwalks now make the terrain easier to traverse.

Look closely and you will notice lizards skittering up many of the trees. Eastern fence lizard numbers have been on the decline in Ohio in recent decades, but they’re common on the rocky top of Buzzardsroost, where they sun themselves.

About halfway up Buzzardsroost, the trail splits into a loop: one branch off to the right, the other to the left. The right side is slightly longer at 1.2 miles, the left is an even mile. I decided to take the long journey up and save some time down with the shorter route. I enjoyed the solitude, as this rural outpost had rendered my phone signal-less and I was relishing the quiet.

The recent improvements to the Buzzardsroost trail were born from necessity, says Chris Bedel, preserve director. The growing popularity of the trail was a continuing threat to the native vegetation that occurs there. There’s also the issue of the steep cliffs — if you meander off the path, enticed by the beauty of a view, you may find yourself on the edge of a drop of hundreds of feet.

All of the improvements have been made with one eye on the future, but one looking back in homage to E. Lucy Braun, the famed ecologist from the University of Cincinnati who studied the area back in the late 1920s and ’30s. “The photo on the sign is E. Lucy knee-deep in prairie vegetation instructing a group of college students, thus showing the lushness of what the prairie vegetation looked like prior to heavy visitation,” Bedel says, adding that Braun was instrumental in the protection of Buzzardroost through her research, advocacy, and even her efforts to form what would become The Nature Conservancy itself.

As I ascended Buzzardsroost, the sounds of cars on 125 faded, and a whispering wind from the south dredged up warm valley air. When I finally made it to the top, I was greeted with a serene panorama of Adams County’s rugged beauty. I wanted to linger and soak in the history and majesty of the area. I munched on granola and watched vultures ride the thermals as they rose from the valley. And I was high enough above Brush Creek to catch a phone signal. My solitude was broken by the ping of a text and suddenly my escape into the wilderness was interrupted. Next time, I’ll turn off my phone.

Notes from the trail

Make sure not to confuse Buzzardsroost Rock with The Earl H. Barnhart “Buzzard’s Roost” Nature Preserve in Ross County. Buzzardsroost Rock is located on State Route 125 near the town of Lynx.
Take a water bottle and a snack and plan for a 2 1/2-hour hike.
Explore the nearby Wilderness Trail, which runs a 2.4-mile loop through the Edge of Appalachia Preserve.

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Food from the forest floor

aspecht — Sat, 01 May 2021 18:59:40 +0000

Food from the forest floor

May 1, 2021

Kevin Williams

Features

After a long winter, the arrival of spring carpets Ohio with blankets of blossoms, festoons trees with brilliant buds, and sprinkles forest floors with spicebush splendor.

The season’s beauty seems even more welcome this year, after a snowy and cold pandemic winter. Many folks, however, may not be aware that so much of the splendor is edible.

Toss in a handful of redbud leaves to add garnish to a salad. Fry dandelion flowers into fritters. Make mashed “potatoes” out of Ohio’s only native tuber: the sunchoke (better known as the Jerusalem artichoke), or steep the leaves from spicebush into a refreshing summer tea. Morels, of course, are prized by mushroom-hunters who covet their earthy, exotic taste.

The pandemic has made people take a closer look at the ground beneath them.

“The pandemic gave native gardening another shot in the arm,” says Chris Chmiel, owner of Integration Acres outside of Albany in Athens County. “It’s a safe activity: Go out and do some foraging while social distancing.”

Integration Acres is located on a wooded, rural, bucolic parcel of hills, where goats lazily graze and the scent of earthy black walnuts drifts through the air. The farm focuses on cultivating locally grown products like pawpaws and other foraged, forest-farmed products. Those include persimmon seeds and spicebush berries (Appalachian allspice). Integration Acres is one of the largest pawpaw processors globally, producing several tons a season.

Chmiel has been at the forefront of raising awareness of Ohio’s native edibles. Chmiel started the annual Pawpaw Festival in 1999 to celebrate Ohio’s state fruit at the height of its ripeness each September. In 2019, the festival attracted 10,000 people curious about Ohio’s native edibles, and though the pageantry was paused for 2020, plans are for the festival to resume this year, Sept. 17 through 19.

Ohio’s native edibles aren’t as well known as others, mostly owing to the quirks of plant genetic evolution. The native hickory nut, for example, has a beautiful, nutty taste on par with pecan — you could easily justify putting hickory nut pie on your Thanksgiving menu.

But hickory nuts, unlike pecans, are time-consuming to shell, even when done by machine, so the nuts have never caught on on a large scale, despite the taste. If you have the time to spare, then get your hands on some Ohio hickory nuts and start shelling; you’ll be rewarded.

Even the pawpaw, for all its versatility and fruity splendor, is tough to make commercially viable on a mass scale.

“They are super fragile and bruise eaily, so it’s hard to get them to the grocery store,” Chmiel says. In addition to their fragility, their window of ripeness is narrow — so that combination means most people haven’t heard of pawpaws and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they got some.

Chmiel says the secret to enjoying pawpaw is to eat them at the right time. If they aren’t ripe, they’ll taste horrible. “When they’re ripe, they’ll fall from the tree, and that’s when you have to get them,” Chmiel says. Eating them fresh is best (“It’s like eating tropical pudding,” Chmiel says), but if you have enough, you can freeze them year-round for smoothies, ice cream, and other desserts.

Tanner Filyaw is the sustainable forestry program director for Rural Action, an Athens County nonprofit that develops sustainability in the region’s forests, where conditions and culture have long made native edibles valuable. He says that just about any Ohioan with some natural habitat on their property can usually find something to cultivate and forage, even in Ohio’s glaciated north and west, where native edibles have mostly been cleared for farming over the years.

However, he says, the native plant life and biodiversity of Ohio’s Appalachian region have remained mostly intact, and that has created a veritable salad bowl in the hills of Athens, Gallia, Meigs, and other counties in the area where chickweed, wild greens, and violets beckon.

“Every property is different, but every property has at least some habitat,” Filyaw says. Much depends on “microclimates” unique to each property: a cool creek bed, a sunny slope, or a dark forest floor.

Upon a property owner’s request, Rural Action representatives will come out to a parcel and develop a management plan, matching the best habitats with the most suitable native elements. Many times, the property owners will already have foragable native plants on their property.

As a general rule, the north and east slopes of hillsides are where you find prized plants like ramps, morels, sunchokes, and medicinal herbs like ginseng. Pawpaws tend to favor shady stream corridors.

Ohio’s Appalachia is steeped in deep traditions surrounding medicinal and food folklore, so there is a receptive audience to Chmiel’s message. “The native-grown foods really bring people together,” Chmiel says.

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nature

Wild hogs

aspecht — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:13:28 +0000

Wild hogs

December 31, 2020

Kevin Williams

Features

Lon Swihart cares for 120 hogs on a bucolic farm in rural Preble County. Hog farming is part of the landscape and cultural fabric here in towns like Eaton and West Alexandria. The annual Preble County Pork Festival brings 125,000 visitors to Eaton each year to appreciate (and eat) swine. Swihart, who also teaches science at nearby National Trail High School, has seen the hog farming landscape change over the past few decades.

“Fifty years ago, everyone secured their farms with strong fences,” Swihart recalls, because family farmers knew that hogs needed to stay penned.

Today, many of the pork producers are larger, corporate-owned operations where the pigs are kept indoors and escape is impossible, so many of the fences have disappeared. Swihart’s farm has a 4-foot-high cement wall and double fencing. But, it turns out, the best fences are made from love and happiness.

“My hogs don’t want to go anywhere — they are happy here,” Swihart says. He can count the times on one hand over the decades that a hog has gotten loose, and each time it has come back. His hogs prefer life on the farm over a life on the lam.

“They run around for an hour and then miss it here — they have food and friends — so after about an hour I’ll see them pacing on the other side, wanting back in,” Swihart says.

State wildlife officials depend on farmers like Swihart to keep their hogs happy and secure, because an escaped pig is destructive. The USDA puts the price tag of crop destruction by feral swine north of $1.5 billion annually.

While American black bear, bobcat, bald eagles, beaver, and other animals that were generally wiped out from Ohio in the 1800s are making a welcome comeback in the state, feral hogs are a large mammal that officials do not welcome.

On a warm June day in 2016, a truck loaded with thousands of “feeder piglets” careened out of control on U.S. 35 outside Xenia, tipping over a guardrail and rolling down a wooded embankment. The metal truck ripped open like a tin can, and many pigs perished in the crash. But others were luckier and escaped, melting into the nearby woods, their haunting squeals piercing the calm day.

It can take only a matter of weeks before a piglet transforms from cute-as-Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web into a hairy, tusk-growing rototiller. State wildlife officials set up a perimeter in Greene County to corral the pigs, and that time they were fortunate, as no pigs escaped.

State wildlife officer Jared Abele arrived in Vinton County 10 years ago and immediately noticed the pig problem.

“My first few years, you could tell the population was rising,” Abele says. The telltale signs of feral hogs were visible throughout the county: flattened corn, rooted-up gardens and crops, and mud rubs on trees.

Vinton County was the perfect hog storm, possessing many of the traits feral hogs thrive upon: comparatively few people and plenty of thick woods and rocky ridges crisscrossed by creeks and dotted with ponds.

The hogs prefer to come out under cover of twilight or in the early dawn. They spend their summer afternoons soaking in muddy ponds and creek bottoms. Most people don’t see the hogs; they see the after-effects that resemble a small tornado, but Abele has seen them loose in Vinton County.

“I came across a couple — they are very elusive. As soon as they saw me, they took off,” Abele recalls. He said the ones he’s seen in the wild in Ohio range anywhere from 100 to 250 pounds, but he has seen photos elsewhere of wild swine approaching 400 pounds. Abele says the ones in Ohio seek refuge in thick oak forests and hickory stands, where they forage on mast. “They are always close to some kind of dense underbrush,” he says.

In Ohio, the feral swine are a motley mix of lucky escapees from pig farms or, more commonly, Eurasian wild boar released on private property for game hunters. While other states have had difficulty tamping down on their wild pig populations, Ohio has thus far managed to get the upper hand. The hogs established a beachhead in Vinton County, and some remain in the southern part of the state, but they’ve largely been contained.

“We have made progress in leaps and bounds,” says Tyler Genders, wildlife disease biologist and feral swine coordinator of the USDA APHIS Wildlife Services, which oversees the state’s hog containment program.

COVID-19 has touched virtually every segment of work in the United States, and the same goes for Ohio’s feral hog containment. Wildlife officials perform outreach to educate folks about the dangers and collect reconnaissance on feral hog movements. That outreach has pretty much ground to a halt in the age of social distancing and mask wearing. “All outreach is virtual now; we are not able to make eye-to-eye contact with landowners, and that has made the outreach a super difficult process this year,” Genders says.

Officials are hopeful that the pigs aren’t regrouping under cover of COVID.

There are parallels to COVID-19 and feral swine — both are elusive, and any pockets left uncontained can flare up fast. That’s why outreach is so important. Genders says that there have been reports of feral hogs in Guernsey and Noble counties. Adams, Scioto, and Gallia counties have also had a share of porcine visitors.

Chances are a feral hog will see you before you see it, and it’ll slink off into the brush. But if you do find one, the best thing to do is walk away. While encounters with hogs are rare, they do happen. A feral hog attacked a woman in Upper Township in Lawrence County in 2011. It took two shots from the revolver of a responding sheriff’s deputy to subdue the animal.

Meanwhile, back on Swihart’s Preble County farm, the focus is on keeping the hogs happy.

“Their buddies are here. They may think the grass is greener on the other side, but they quickly realize it is not,” Swihart says.

If you spot a feral hog in rural Ohio, wildlife officials would appreciate your report at 800 WILDLIFE or wildinfo@dnr.state.oh.us.

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wildlife