Jonathan Alder, a native of Virginia, is best remembered for his life as an Indian captive in Ohio during the 1780s and 1790s. He was taken prisoner and adopted into a Mingo family in 1782, towards the end of the American War for Independence. Adler would fight with other Ohio Indians against the Americans in the Northwest Indian War, but after the Greenville Peace Treaty of 1795, he left his Indian family and returned to the life, culture, and community of pioneer Americans, those who had just won their claims to the Scioto Valley.

When visiting with friends and their young children, Alder enjoyed relating stories of his youth, including an account of Crawford's Destruction of Salt-Lick Town in October 1774, which somehow has largely become lost to history. Alder relates that he heard first-hand accounts of Crawford's raid from the elders of his adopted Mingo family. Their telling of the story is a terrifying account of what today would be considered a monstrous war crime -- the killing of innocent civilians who ran in panic with their children and grandchildren as the Virginians shot indiscriminately at the villagers.

According to Alder's account, the younger men of fighting age were all absent from the village at the time, so only old men, women and children were there. "About noon the village was surprised by the sudden appearance of a body of armed white men who immediately commenced firing upon all they could see. Great consternation and panic ensued, and the inhabitants fled in every direction."

William Crawford would later write in a letter to George Washington: "we got fourteen prisoners, and killed six of the enemy, wounding several more. We got all of their baggage and horses, ten of their guns, and two white prisoners. The plunder sold for four hundred pounds sterling, besides what was returned to a Mohawk Indian who was there."

Mingo elders, it turns out, passed down further details about Crawford's raid, details that many pioneer American historians apparently thought best not to repeat. According to Alder, when the Virginians entered the village, "One Indian woman seized her child of five or six years of age, and rushed down the bank of the [Scioto] river and [swam] across to the wooded island opposite, when she was [then] shot down at the farther bank." The elders told Alder that "the child was unhurt amid the shower of balls, and escaped into the thicket and hid in a large hollow sycamore standing near the middle of the island, where the child was found alive two days afterward when the warriors of the tribe returned."

This massacre at the Forks of the Scioto, in modern-day, downtown Columbus, has largely been wiped off the map of our history books, omitted from our public monuments, and our official historical markers. But, here, not far from the floating monument to Christopher Columbus, is the site of a horrid chapter in American history. Crawford would have hell to pay (or karma would have its way) for these tragic deaths. His actions here, along with another more infamous massacre at Gnadenhütten, when Americans killed 96 peaceful men, women, and children, would contribute to his own horrific death in June of 1782. After having been captured by Indian warriors in northern Ohio, Crawford (who had not actually been at Gnadenhütten) would be burnt at the stake, his torture and death revenge for Salt-Lick Town and the more recent American atrocities at Gnadenhütten.

Sources:

Jean Backs, "Jonathan Alder - A Man of Two Worlds" Ohio State Parks Magazine (Fall/Winter 2004).

C. W. Butterfield, ed., "Crawford to Washington, 14 November 1774," in The Washington-Crawford Letters, being the Correspondence Between George Washington and William Crawford, from 1767-1781, on Western Lands (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1877), 54-57.

Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio (New York & Chicago: Munsell & Company, 1892).

Larry L. Nelson, ed. A History of Jonathan Alder: His Captivity and Life with the Indians (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2002).

William Henry Smith, ed., "Arthur St. Clair to Governor Penn, 4 December 1774," in The St. Clair Papers: The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair (Cincinnati: Robert Clark & Co., 1882), 347-350.

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Hike or ride the Mackletree Bridle Trail, which runs up Rocky Hollow and contemplate the life's work of Dr. E. Lucy Braun, the pioneering female naturalist who first comprehended the significance of Shawnee's "mixed mesophytic forest." The Mackletree Bridle Trail runs up Rocky Hollow and connects with Shawnee State Park’s CCC Overlook Trail.

A long list of women naturalists have hiked Rocky Hollow and studied it as an example of the mixed mesophytic forest in Ohio. With the construction of Roosevelt Lake and Shawnee State Park in the 1930s, Rocky Hollow became easily accessible and popular with naturalists and, for decades, Dr. Braun led her students and other visitors up this hollow and around its ridges.

Through her tours and publications, Dr. Lucy Braun raised awareness in scientific circles about the great biodiversity found in the hills of western Scioto and Eastern Adams counties, highlighting Shawnee Forest’s status as an endangered "mixed mesophytic forest." While the typical North American forest is dominated by two or three species, the mixed mesophytic can cradle up to eighty different woody species in its canopy and understory. Among them are beech, yellow poplar, basswood, sugar maple, chestnut, sweet buckeye, red oak, white oak, yellow locust, birch, black cherry, cucumber tree, white ash, red maple, sour gum, black walnut, and various kinds of hickory. "Yet the coherence of this forest region remains one of America's better kept secrets," notes a recent publication of the Library of Congress.

Braun's work helped generate support for the protection of the region’s forest through the creation of the Shawnee Wilderness Area in 1972 and other area National Natural Landmarks in the Nature Conservancy's Edge of Appalachia Preserve System. Braun, sometimes referred to as the "Lady Botanist," was a native of Cincinnati. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and went onto serve her alma mater as professor of ecology. Her book, "The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America," brought her international acclaim and she went on to become the first female president of the Ohio Academy of Science. Braun theorized that the mixed mesophytic forest's hollows "are the likely ancestral source of most temperate-zone forest species in the eastern United States" and thanks to her work, ecologists have begun to refer to it as the "mother forest."

It was Braun who first championed a site within Shawnee Forest for protection and designation as a National Natural landmark. In 1970, at the age of 81, Braun accompanied National Park Service officials on a hike in Rocky Hollow, during which she argued for federal intervention in order to save the mixed mesophytic forest of Shawnee. Braun lamented the destruction of the Old Forest and called on Americans to save what remained: "Thoughtlessly and ruthlessly he destroys what only long ages can produce. With scarcely a thought for the future, he clears right and left. While a few of these remnants do still remain, let us make every effort to preserve them permanently that we and future generations may know of the great gift bestowed upon us."

One NPS official noted that she "sees hope for the future if we find and save these bits of semi-mature forests that still contain mixed mesophytic species. .... Dr. Braun believes that the Ohio State Forests are not adequately protected and if this one were made a Natural Landmark, it would help in its preservation”

After Braun's death in 1971, interest in Rocky Hollow continued at the National Park Service. In September 1974, Rod Risner, Shawnee State Park naturalist, led Carol Stein, a biologist working on behalf of the National Park Service, up into Rocky Hollow. During her hike, Stein recorded the incredible variety of plants found here. “New York fern, beech fern, silvery glade fern, interrupted fern, lady fern, sensitive fern, Christmas fern, rattlesnake fern, maidenhair fern, and ebony spleenwort" grew in abundance. She noted the presence of "Disporum maculatum, a rare species in Ohio." And, among the other flowering plants, she recorded "wood-betony, crested dwarf iris, sweet white violet, coralroot orchid, woodland jack-in-the-pulpit, rattlesnake-plantain orchid, wild ginger, perfoliate bellwort, horse-balm, solomon’s plume, three-lobed violet, naked-flowered tick-trefoil, dodder, white snakeroot, and puttyroot orchid." Risner reported that earlier in the year "ladyslippers, showy orchid, and trilliums occur in numbers along the east ridge" of Rocky Hollow" and pointed out "earth-star fungi and fern moss on the slopes."

At the ridgetop, Stein related “an abrupt change in vegetation from a mixed mesophytic association to an oak--blueberry association," which here includes "American dittany, rattlesnake-plantain orchid, coreopsis, coralroot orchid, and striped pipsissewa." Stein's official conclusions are worth considering: "In my opinion, Rocky Hollow meets national natural landmark criteria by being an ecological community significantly illustrating characteristics of the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau physiographic province." However, before any designation be made within Shawnee Forest, Stein called for additional studies of the Shawnee Wilderness Area and Snake Hollow area as possible candidates.

In 1982, building upon the work of Braun and Stein, Marshal A. Moser, a certified Wildlife Biologist working on behalf of the National Park Service, completed another study of Rocky Hollow. Moser concluded that Rocky Hollow could be cited as the basis for designating the whole Shawnee Forest and and The Nature Conservancy's 'Edge of Appalachia' preserves as a National Natural Landmark. “This region of south-central Ohio along the edge of the Appalachian plateau has sites of enough ecological and geological significance to merit another landmark designation. If possible a 'region-wide' designation ... should be investigated."

"Within the troubled eastern deciduous forests, the crisis of the mixed mesophytic poses a special case," writes Mary Hufford. "If, as Braun argued, the central Appalachian coves sheltered biodiversity against the extreme cold that interrupted the evolution of surrounding forests, it follows that the same coves could again become banks of species diversity, sustaining heat-intolerant plants in a period of global warming."

The work of Dr. E. Lucy Braun points to the critical role female scientists have played in the success of the modern Environmental movement and in the saving of Shawnee Forest. Braun bridged the original Conservation Movement of the Progressive Era with that of today's Environmental Movement.

What lessons can we draw from the life & work of E. Lucy Braun? What impact might climate change have on the significance of Shawnee Forest? If the recommendations of Braun, Stein, and Moser have yet to be fully implemented and if the needed work of conservation & protection is yet to be completed, what sites in the Forest are in greatest need of rescue?

Sources:

Mary Hufford, "Stalking the Mother Forest: Voices Beneath the Canopy," Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia, American Memory, Library of Congress. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/tending/essay3a.html>

George Laycock, “The Lady Botanist,” in The Richard and Lucile Durrell Edge of Appalachia Preserve System. Adams County, Ohio (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Museum Center, 2003).

Marshal A. Moser, Jr., "Rocky Hollow, Scioto County, Ohio: An Evaluation of a Potential National Natural Landmark," Division of Natural Landmarks, US Department of the Interior (1982).

Carol Stein, "Evaluation of Rocky Hollow, Shawnee State Forest, Ohio, as a National Natural Landmark" (1974).

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The Theodore Roosevelt Preserve was dedicated at 3pm on December 5th, 1922, by Governor Harry L. Davis. It began with 20,000 acres as a "game and reforestation preserve." At the time of its dedication, the preserve had about 2,000 ring-necked pheasants and several hundred wild turkeys, with plans to add "deer, bear, partridges, and dozens of other kinds of wild game."

Of the original 20,000 acres, 15,000 was purchased through funds contributed via hunting license fees. An additional 5,000 acres was purchased by the state agricultural extension division, "specifically for reforestation, however the entire tract" according to Governor Davis was "to be used jointly for both purposes." The state paid on average $5 per acre.

Davis told the gathered crowd, "Ohio's completion of this work for the re-establishment of wild life and for protection and replenishment of natural resources is being watched throughout the country, as ours is of the first and certainly one of the largest state enterprises of this kind in America. The state plans a gradual extension of the scope of these activities until every acre of land in the state that is now lying waste will be contributing to our food supply and to the production of timber. From every standpoint this utilization of land … is an investment which will bring its returns a thousand fold to us and succeeding generations."

Some in the press had called for the new preserve to be named for Governor Davis, himself, for his role in supporting its creation. One writer of a letter to the editor of the Portsmouth Times called for the preserve to be named for the Shawnee Indian nation, a suggestion that may have eventually led to the naming of the state forest lands that were adjacent to the preserve and came to encompass it in the early 1950s. But, Governor Davis believed that it should be named for the father of the American conservation movement.

Davis told the assembled crowd, many of whom had traveled by automobile from Portsmouth: "With this event, Ohio launches upon a definite program for the conservation of its natural resources. It is a purpose that at once recalls the greatest figure in modern history - great sportsman and outdoor enthusiast, and bitterest foe of nature's despoilers - who began and waged the national fight for conservation of natural resources - Theodore Roosevelt. Because of this close association of what was cherished by Roosevelt with what we are trying to carry out, I am convinced, Roosevelt, if alive today, would be pleased to see this work go forward and to have his name chosen to honor this great state enterprise."

In 1934, during the Great Depression, 400 acres of the Roosevelt Preserve were set aside for the creation of a state park, originally known as the Roosevelt State Park. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a jobs program for unemployed young men and World War I veterans, would build the original infrastructure of the park and forest. In time the park's name would be changed to Portsmouth State Park, before finally taking the name Shawnee State Park in the early 1970s.

This memorial, which includes the likeness of both Roosevelt and Davis, was originally located near the entrance to the Preserve's Headquarters at the intersection of Forest Road 1 and State Route 125. At some point, after the development of the state park, when the public visitation shifted from the preserve to Roosevelt Lake and its campgrounds, the bronze plaque was placed in storage, until it was forgotten. Then, in the 1990s, Park Manager Kevin Bradbury discovered it in a maintenance shed. Thanks to Bradbury's efforts, the original memorial plaque was given a new home on the shores of Roosevelt Lake, near the Park Campgrounds, where visitors can now easily appreciate its words.

In August 2022, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Roosevelt Game Preserve with the erection of a new historical marker. The ceremony included a dedication speech by Mary Mertz, the Director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Mertz told a gathered crowd of some one hundred people:

"After World War II, state lawmakers consolidated the assortment of state lands to provide consistent management and administration of public lands and facilities. Ohio’s modern system of state parks was officially formed 73 years ago - in 1949 when the Ohio Department of Natural Resources was created. Since then, ODNR has been proud to manage lands from Lake Erie to the Ohio River – and everywhere in between. And today, 100 years later, through careful conservation efforts and the support of sportsmen and women, Ohio is a state rich in wildlife.

"Sportsmen and women and people who love outdoor recreation are the catalysts that drive conservation in Ohio and across the nation – so thank you for your work, thank you for being here, and thank you for your commitment to protecting our natural resources!

"But for us at ODNR, it’s not just about the land – it’s about showing the connection between our natural world and people and the historic events that brought to us to where we are today. Before the mountain biking trails and campsites, there were people and events that breathed life into the beautiful places across the Buckeye State."

The words of Director Mertz reminds us that our state parks and forests are rich not only in natural beauty and biodiversity, but also in human history, a history that connects Shawnee State Park and the old Roosevelt Game Preserve to the original conservation movement embodied by the life and legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt.

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Hike or ride along historic Buckhorn Ridge Bridle Trail, which runs through the heart of the Shawnee Wilderness Area, dividing the waters of Upper and Lower Twin Creeks.

In the 1850s, William Flagg, a New York City businessman-turned novel writer, once sought refuge and enlightenment here, as he oversaw his stone quarry business. At the Point of Buckhorn Ridge, where Flagg built his log cottage, experience one of the region’s most dramatic Ohio River overlooks, with the formerly hustling river town of Buena Vista now resting almost silently below.

Flagg, while visiting a sister in Cincinnati, had first fallen in love with the daughter of Nicholas Longworth, one of the Queen City’s most wealthy and powerful businessmen, and longstanding promoter of the wine making industry in the Ohio Valley. He then became enthralled with the world in the hollows and along the ridges of what is now the Shawnee Wilderness Area. Flagg would plant vineyards and orchards on his lands on Lower Twin Creek, where he also built a stone cellar for storing his wine. Flagg spent extended periods of time here in the 1850s and 1860s, until the cabin burned in an unexplained fire.

In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a road to the Point of Buckhorn Ridge and this road serves as a testament to the quality work done by the CC Boys. After its closure in 1972, once the area became protected as a Wilderness, the road has only been minimally maintained as a horseback bridle trail.

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The distinctive A-frame construction of the Nature Center dates to circa 1969, when it was built for a privately owned cabin rental complex, known as the High Meadow, which was briefly located on the current site of the Shawnee Park Lodge.

The High Meadow A-Frames cost $75 a week to rent, and included a canoe, which was tied up on the shore of the then new Turkey Creek Lake. After the State of Ohio purchased the location, the cabin was relocated next to the Turkey Creek Lake Spillway and converted into a Nature Center.

In 2007, Shawnee State Park relocated and restored a log cabin, which had been originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. The cabin had been built as part of CCC Camp Shawnee No. 1. and was located near Pond Lick Lake in the Shawnee State Forest.

CCC work within the forest included the removal of deadened American Chestnut, which had succumbed to an Asian blight in the 1920s. Using this salvaged timber, the CCC built a number of log structures, such as this cabin, which is a perfect example of what scholars have called CCC "parkitecture," the distinctive rustic construction style used in CCC park improvements across the nation.

Today, it serves as an interpretive center on the history of the park and forest. Visitors can learn how the Shawnee once called these hills home, when the game was thick and Europeans were few and far between. Following American settlement, which led to deforestation and the extirpation of buffalo, deer, and black bear, a Conservation Movement would give birth to Ohio's Roosevelt Game Preserve and Shawnee State Forest in the 1920s. And, from these beginnings, with the help of Franklin D. Roosevelt's CCC, would develop what is today Shawnee State Park.

Today the Nature Center and CCC Cabin Museum are popular attractions with area residents and visitors from throughout the tri-state region of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Here, park visitors can learn about native and invasive plant and animal species, which are found within the park and larger Shawnee State Forest. The Center and the Park Naturalist, along with numerous volunteers, carry on the tradition of free educational nature programing, which dates back to the Park’s origins in the Roosevelt Game Preserve, which kept a “zoo” of forest animals in the 1920s and 30s.

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In June of 1936, Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps addressed a letter to two Ohio senators, Robert J. Bulkley and Vic Donahey, regarding complaints he had received from Nimrod B. Allen, Secretary of the Columbus Urban League. Allen claimed that CCC officials had discriminated against black Ohioans in violation of the non-discrimination clause that had been included in the federal legislation which created the jobs program. Fechner defended the CCC and claimed that the law had required that black enrollments be no less than the percentage of African Americans in the general population. According to Fechner, segregation by itself was not considered to be discriminatory, following the general principals of “separate, but equal,” as laid down by the US Supreme Court in their infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896.

“Whether we like it or not,” explained Fechner, “we cannot close our eyes to the fact that there are communities … that do not want and will not accept a Negro Civilian Conservation Corps company. This is particularly true in localities that have a negligible Negro population.” In hopes of over-coming what Fechner described as “vigorous” local opposition, he directed that black CCC units be only assigned to camps located within their home states. Fechner explained that even this proved to be insufficient as evidenced by an incident in Ohio, wherein a “camp had been assigned to a work project near one of your smaller cities. We went ahead and built and equipped the camp. When a company was selected to occupy the camp it was found that the only company available was one composed of Ohio Negro enrollees.” The end result, “when the citizens of the community learned that a Negro company was to be sent to the camp,” wrote Fechner, “they absolutely refused to permit the company to occupy the camp and we were forced to completely abandon the project.” The CCC Director provided no further specifics in his letter to the senators, never mentioning which Ohio community and which camp had been so vigorously resisted.

Local opposition to the New Deal jobs and conservation program was not unusual, but the introduction of segregated black companies of CCC enrollees into predominantly white communities did prove, in some instances, to be particularly volatile, as racial tensions did on occasion flare up. One such incident, which may or may not have been the case mentioned by Director Fechner, occurred in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio.

On December 6th, 1934, a suspicious mid-day fire destroyed the barracks and camp of a segregated, black company of CCC enrollees. Co. 584 had first arrived at Camp Adams in the Shawnee State Forest nine months earlier. One of seven camps in the state forest (four of which that were African-American), Camp Adams was the most remote, located deep in the forest, near the Scioto and Adams County line.

With unemployment rates as high as 25% nationally, and perhaps as high as 50% for African Americans, the Great Depression provided the impetus for the creation of a major national jobs program that was directed at reforestation and soil conservation, but also came to include the construction of over 800 state parks. In Ohio, the State Relief Commission worked with county commissioners and their relief agents to “select single men between the ages of 18 and 25, primarily from families on the relief rolls.” Enrollees agreed to a six-month enlistment and, in turn, would receive $30 a month, $25 of which had to be sent back home to family dependents. They got to keep $5 a month for their personal use. Thus, the CCC enrollees became known as the “Dollar-a-Day Boys.”

The role of African-American enrollees in the construction of Shawnee State Park and Forest has long been forgotten and conflicts between the segregated camps and members of the local community have been essentially lost to time. In total, while the camps were occupied, some 800 African-Americans were at work in Shawnee.

Records of the fire that destroyed Camp Adams proved be easy to locate, but frustratingly few in number. A photographic record of the camp and its African American enrollees surfaced in the records kept by the Ohio Division of Forestry. There we find pictures of the burnt barracks and other buildings of Camp Adams, recorded soon after the blaze in December 1934. Reports showed up in regional newspapers, including the most detailed account of the conflagration and its immediate aftermath, which was published by the Portsmouth Times.

On December 7th, the Daily Times reported that a special army board of inquiry had been launched by Major Robert Barrett of Ft. Hayes in Columbus and Captain Elmer J. Armstrong, the District Commander of CCC units in the southern Ohio. Initial reports indicated that “more than 180 men of the company were working in Shawnee forest and only 18 were on camp duty when the blaze was discovered.” The Daily Times noted that “the camp is in Churn creek valley and a strong wind was sweeping between the hills. …. The four barracks, kitchen, mess hall, recreation building, power house and supply building were destroyed.”

Captain Armstrong, the district commander, who happened to be visiting a nearby sister camp — CCC Camp Gordon on Turkey Creek — arrived on the scene of the fire just in time to see all but the Administration building go up in smoke. Before the fire had subsided Armstrong had already submitted a request up the chain of command for an immediate transfer of Co. 584 to Fort Knox in Kentucky. Within seven hours of the fire, nearly 200 African American enrollees had been sent by truck to the Norfolk & Western railway station in Portsmouth, where a special train would carry them west to Ft. Knox. The Daily Times reported that the “enrollees will either be assigned to work on the reservation at Fort Knox or will be distributed to other CCC camps to complete their term of enlistment.”

At Fort Knox, Army officials completely exchanged the roster of Co. 584. The unit kept their original number, Co. 584, but they were reconstituted as an all white company of newly minted enrollees and within five months — by the end of April, 1935 — Co. 584 was back on Churn Creek in Shawnee Forest. This time, however, they were white dollar-a-day boys, not black. The company, in another unusual move, was soon switched out four months later in August, and replaced with a new segregated black unit, Co. 3506.

Two questions we may never know the answer to are as follows:

1.  Was the decision to remove the unit and exchange the company’s roster done to resolve a situation that had already proven to have a tendency towards violence and property destruction? In other words, did the CCC and Army suspect racially motivated sabotage and arson and then act accordingly?

2.  Was the decision to station another black unit at Camp Adams a deliberate political move on the part of state and/or federal officials. In other words, is this evidence that CCC and state officials ultimately decided not to cower in the face of local opposition.

The case for arson and sabotage — the case for a hate crime — is circumstantial. Camp inspection reports and other race-related controversies did end up in the local courts and press, and they do suggest the possibility of racially fueled foul play.

The initial official explanation of the fire was based upon the conclusions of W. G. McGrew, the company commander, and Major Elmer J. Armstrong. They concluded the fire had resulted from the carelessness of an enrollee who “failed to close the draft” on the wood stove in his barracks. The stove’s fire, it was said, had been rekindled at the noon hour (as usual) by one of the eighteen men who were on camp duty for the day. His error, according to this explanation, caused the barrack to burn and its flames and embers were then blown by the wind so that the fire spread to other nearby structures. The timing of the blaze is also notable, as it came in the early afternoon when the vast majority of the men were at work in the forest.

Most significantly, however, the fire occurred in the months following a violent incident that had led to the arrest of the company’s baseball team and arguably contributed to local opposition to the enrollees in the community. On Sunday, May 27th, 1934, while traveling to play a game in the nearby town of Manchester, the black enrollees of Co. 584 passed a truck carrying another baseball team — a group of white locals — who played in a different league. Whether fighting words were exchanged or not (the record is unclear), the two teams continued on their way without recorded incident. However, in the late afternoon, when both teams were returning home by the same routes, they passed again. This time, one of the CCC men swung a bat and struck one of the white players, hitting him “on the forehead and side of the face, knocking his eye out upon his cheek and causing other injuries” — such was the account recorded in a Congressional Report on the incident.

With the incident occurring just outside the town of West Union, the Adams County Sheriff arrested all of the CCC ballplayers and lodged them in the county jail. At first they refused to identify who amongst them had delivered the brutal blow, but when Captain V. O. Jackson, their commander arrived and personally threatened the men with expulsion from the CCC, explaining that after seven days they would be listed as AWOL and dismissed. Ultimately, Wilkins Green was identified and offered up to the authorities. The other men were released. Then, in an unexpected turn of events, on Thursday, the 31st of May, after four nights in jail, the charges against Green were dismissed. E. B. Edgington, the Mayor of West Union, questioned ten witnesses and concluded that there was “no evidence against [the] accused.” The Prosecuting Attorning E. S. Young, however, “indicated that an additional investigation would be made of the affair with the view of presenting the facts to the grand jury.” Whether Young ever took a case to the grand jury is unclear, but no record of an indictment and trial are known to exist.

Justice (whether deserved or not) for William Graham would not be meted out by the local or state courts. Six months after Camp Adams had burned and soon after the new all white company of enrollees had reopened the camp, William Graham and his family sought financial compensation for the medical bills and permanent injuries he had suffered due to the incident. Their claim would be filed with Congress and its report on the question would be printed in April 1937, nearly three years after the incident. Congress would ultimately authorize a settlement worth $3,500, “for the loss of his right eye and impaired hearing of his right ear, the result of having been struck in the right side of the face with a ball bat on May 27, 1934, in the hands of an enrollee of Camp Adams.”

Much of the details of the incident that can be found in the historical record thus come from the Congressional Report on the damages claim. Here we find the only eyewitness accounts of the incident, all of which come from the perspective of area white residents. The voices of the black CCC enrollees remain frustratingly silent in the congressional and larger historical record.

Even before the baseball team incident, local opposition to the camp had been noted in an inspection report filed by William P. Hannon on January 31st, 1934. The standard inspection form asked whether there had “been any trouble of any nature since camp was installed?” After consulting with the company officers, Hannon reported that one local resident had written “a letter complaining against Colored men being located here.” Otherwise, Hannon noted that there were “no complaints” about “the conduct of the men.” Additionally, the report noted that the “barracks are very clean and neat appearing - Fire extinguishers in all buildings and fire barrels and buckets inside and outside of all buildings.”

A second camp inspection report from September 1934 offers additional information, additional pieces to the puzzle. Interestingly Inspector T. J. McVey states that local opinion of the company’s conduct was “favorable.” And, as to whether there had been “any trouble of any nature since the camp was installed,” McVey stated that “2 [men had been] arrested and convicted of drunk and disorderly. One convicted of theft.” No mention was made of the arrest of the baseball team for an assault on a local resident. McVey did, however, note that there was a very high number of men (some seventy-two in total) that been dishonorably discharged since the camp’s inception — thirty-eight of which were due to “elopement” and seventeen for “refusal to work.” McVey noted that the company officers “can give no reason for [the] large number.” Whether any of the discharges were related to the baseball team’s difficulties is impossible to argue. The camp, according to McVey, had also recently been subjected to an unusual quarantine order, which barred contact between the camp and the local community. The quarantine ran from the 24th of August to the 5th of September 1934, three days before McVey arrived in camp for its inspection, and just a few weeks after the dismissal of the case against Wilkins Green and the failure of the grand jury to issue any indictments against the enrollees of Camp Adams. The quarantine, according to McVey’s report was issued due to the existence of one case of small pox, otherwise the “general health” of the enrollees had been “good,” with the men having gained an average of 12 pounds since their arrival.

Barracks fires were unusual. There is only one other such fire reported in Shawnee Forest during the whole history of the Three-Cs, and it occurred at the camp of another all-black unit, Co. 1520 in January 1934. One of their barracks had burnt, with no reported explanation. Though it is worth noting that the fire occurred relatively soon after what CCC officials termed a “riot.” In June of 1933, soon after their first arrival in the forest, camp official reorganized the company and assigned new squad leaders over the objections of the enrollees. Seventeen men, identified as the ring leaders were arrested at gun point and discharged from the CCC. Co. 1520, as far as the records indicate, never again was the source of controversy. The camp inspection report from September 1934, noted the “riot,” but concluded that the men’s morale was “good” and that there was currently no opposition to the camp in the local vicinity.

General opposition to bringing in outside labor, whether white or black, however was seen soon after the first announcements of the location of CCC camps in the Shawnee Forest region. In nearby Portsmouth, local charitable organizations that helped with county-wide relief efforts recommended that the reforestation and soil conservation projects proceed, but they objected to bringing in men from other regions of the state and paying them only $1 a day. Instead, they recommend that local unemployed men be hired to work in the camps and that they be paid $3 a day. This they said would help the local economy and community by removing residents from the local welfare rolls.

What we end up with then is a fragmentary historical record of newspaper reportage, records in the National Archives, and a Congressional report, all of which provides (in the case of the burning of CCC Camp Adams) a circumstantial case for racially motivated sabotage and arson. It appears that Army officials acted quickly to resolve a racially-charged situation that had tapped into local opposition to the Civilian Conservation Corps, but they did so in ways that may have reinforced racial prejudice in the region. While the quick decision to transfer the company was driven by the necessity of providing food and shelter to the men, the reconstitution of Co. 584 as a white unit, which was then sent back to Camp Adams, does legitimately raise some questions, which perhaps further research can answer.

In the meantime, we are reminded how often the historical record, particularly that regarding African Americans in Appalachia is frustratingly incomplete. However, knowing the racism of the day and age, it is not that far fetched to imagine that fighting words were exchanged between to the two baseball teams on the Sunday morning of May 27th, 1934, when they first passed each other on State Route 41 and that when they chanced to meet each other again that same afternoon, the men on the back of the trucks, white and black, took swings at each other, with only William Graham unfortunately getting hit.

The mayor, without sufficient evidence, then dismissed the case against Wilkins Green, but anger and opposition nevertheless boiled over when the grand jury failed to bring indictments. The camp was then quarantined. Whether done so on purely medical grounds or as a precautionary measure to limit local contact due to heightened racial tensions, the camp and its company of young black men had most definitely become the object of concern for local residents. It doesn’t involve too much imagination to conceive that when the local courts failed them, an area resident or group of residents decided to torch the camp in hopes of running off the unwanted camp of black forestry workers. This act of sabotage was then accomplished in the middle of the day, when only a handful of men were on camp duty, the bulk of the unit having left camp for their day’s work in the forest.

Whether the arsonist or arsonists lit only one barrack (or any at all) will remain conjecture, but the fire does appear to have raged first in one of the barracks, before it spread to the other buildings. Ultimately, whether it jumped from the first barrack by the assistance of the arsonist or arsonists, or by the wind, matters not. The end result was that the black company of CCC enrollees had been burned out.

Sources

“162 Arrive for New C.C.C. Camp - Negro Company Sent to Churn Creek Site From Camp Knox,” Portsmouth Times (15 November 1933). “African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps,” New Deal Network, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.  Web. http://newdeal.feri.org/aaccc/. Backs, Jean. "Unsung Heroes of the Tree Army," Ohio State Parks Vol. 14:1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 2-6. Cole, Olen, The African American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1999). Fechner, Robert to Robert J. Bulkley (4 June 1936), “African Americans in the CCC,” New Deal Network, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Web. http://newdeal.feri.org/aaccc/aaccc05.htm.

Fechner, Robert to Thomas L. Griffith (21 September 1935), ”CCC Negro Selection,” Box 700, General Correspondence of the Director, Record Group 35, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. “Fire Razes CCC Camp,” Steubenville Herald-Star (6 December 1934). “Flames Raze Camp Adams - 200 Colored Enrollees Sent to Fort Knox Within Seven Hours After Fire,” Portsmouth Times (7 December 1934) Gower, Calvin W. “The Struggle of Blacks for Leadership Positions in the Civilian Conservation Corps: 1933-1942,” The Journal of Negro History 61:2 (Apr., 1976): 123-135. “Camp Adams to be Opened with 24 Large Tents — Frame Barracks Saved from Fire to Become Mess Hall — Changes in Effect,” Portsmouth Times (31 March 1935). "Camp Report, Co. No. 584," Camp Adams, Stout, Ohio (31 January 1934), Division of Investigations, Camp Inspection Reports, 1933-1942, Box 164, Records of the Civil Conservation Corps, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. "Camp Report, Co. No. 584," Camp Adams, Stout, Ohio (8 September 1934), Division of Investigations, Camp Inspection Reports, 1933-1942, Box 164, Records of the Civil Conservation Corps, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. “Camp Report, Co. No. 584,” Fort Knox, Kentucky (30 March 1935), Division of Investigations, Camp Inspection Reports, 1933-1942, Box 164, Records of the Civil Conservation Corps, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. "Camp Report, Co. No. 584," Camp Adams, Stout, Ohio (18 May 1935), Division of Investigations, Camp Inspection Reports, 1933-1942, Box 164, Records of the Civil Conservation Corps, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. "Camp Report, Co. No. 3506," Camp Adams, Blue Creek, Ohio (9 July 1936), Division of Investigations, Camp Inspection Reports, 1933-1942, Box 164, Records of the Civil Conservation Corps, NARAII, College Park, Maryland. “CCC Force is to Move to Fort Knox After Fire in Adams County Camp,” Cincinnati Enquirer (7 December 1934). King, Charles C., ed., A Legacy of Stewardship: The Ohio Department of Natural Resources 1949-1989 (Columbus, 1990). “Forest Camp Under Guard - Seventeen Negro Members of Conservation Corps Arrested After Disturbance,” Massillon Evening Independent (17 July 1933). “Forest Workers Rebel, Are in Jail - Negroes in Shawnee Forest Camp Object to New Squad Leaders,” Zanesville Times Recorder (16 July 1933). Maher, Neil M. Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008). Medina, Daniel. “Civilian Conservation Corps, Racial Segregation, and the Building of the Angeles National Forest,” Departures, KCET (10 February 2014).  Web. https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/civilian-conservation-corps-racial-segregation-and-the-building-of-the-angeles “Name of Assailant Revealed By Negro Group Held in Jail,” Portsmouth Times (29 May 1934). Neatrour, Anna. “Segregated Camps for African Americans,” Roosevelt’s Tree Army: Civilian Conservation Corps. Digital Public Library of America. September 2015. http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/civilian-conservation-corps. Quigley, Barbara. “African Americans and the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Winter 2005: 44-47. “Release Accused Enrollee - West Union Mayor Holds No Evidence Against Accused,” Portsmouth Times (1 June 1934). Salmond, John A. “The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Negro,” Journal of American History 52:1 (June 1965): 75-88. Salmond, John A. The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham: Duke University Press, 1967). Sherraden, Michael W. “The Local Impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 10:3 (September 1983). Smith, Langdon. “Democratizing Nature Through State Park Development,” Historical Geography:  An Annual Journal of Research, Commentary and Reviews 41 (2013). Smith, Michael. “Blacks in the CCC: A Forest Army Post in Honor of Black History Month,” Forest Army:  Remembering the Civilian Conservation Corps (23 February 2011).  Web.  http://forestarmy.blogspot.com/2011/02/blacks-in-ccc.html Speakman, Joseph M. “Into the Woods: The First Year of the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Prologue Magazine: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall 2006). “Use Guns to Halt Uprising in Camp - Civilian Negro Troops Voice Protest to Wage in Ohio; Arrest 17,” Akron Beacon Journal (17 July 1933). “William E. Graham — Report to Accompany H.R. 705,” Report No. 438, 75th Congress, First Session (29 April 1937).

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One need not refer to well-known bestseller lists to appreciate that more Americans are familiar with Allan Eckert’s telling of frontier history than with the writings of any dead or living, academic historian. Every generation has its own popular historians, the one’s whose writings feed a society’s desire to know their origins. And, if Eckert’s popularity is any indication, those writers who play loose and fast with historical detail and do so in the name of drama and narrative appear to be the most popular and influential. They are the writers of myth and legend as much as they are writers of history. Eckert’s tale of the conquest of the Scioto & Ohio Valleys speaks to the psyche of many Americans who came of age in the Cold War.

During the 1960s and 1970s, thanks largely to Eckert's influence, a popular myth arose that Tecumseh -- the great Shawnee leader -- had once fought and killed Americans near the Mouth of the Scioto. In October 2001, the Scioto County Commissioners dedicated the Allan W. Eckert Trail, which winds its way along the Ohio River through the Earl Thomas Conley Riverside Park. The trail offers the visitor with a view of the banks and bottom lands at the confluence of the Scioto and the Ohio. When the Moundbuilders and their Shawnee descendants after them built their villages and farmed these rich alluvial soils, the Mouth of the Scioto was not located where it is today. There is an Old and New Mouth to the Scioto. The Eckert Trail is located just down the Ohio River from the Old Mouth, which had been the location of Lower Shawnee Town in the 1740s and early 1750s. By the 1780s, when Tecumseh is said to have fought here, Lower Shawnee Town had long been abandoned, with a new growth of trees shading the lands where the village once stood.

In the 1830s, the Scioto River was given a new mouth. In an effort to facilitate trade at the southern terminus of the Ohio & Erie Canal, the strip of land, known as the Isthmus, was cut near the steep East Side bank of the Scioto at Portsmouth; the waters of the Scioto were thus diverted directly into the Ohio, creating the New Mouth. By this point, the American settlement of Alexandria, which had been located on the West Side of the Old Mouth (upon the very same grounds of the even older Lower Shawnee Town) was long abandoned and its streets turned into fields of corn. As Alexandria faded and the pioneer generation passed to their graves, the legends surrounding Tecumseh and the Mouth of the Scioto would only grow.

Back from the river, above the West Side of the Old Mouth, is Raven Rock and beneath it is where Eckert located the opening scene of his most successful work -- the outdoor drama "Tecumseh!" As legend has it, Raven Rock was one of the strategic overlooks, which enabled Indian warriors to see the approach of American boats (both up and down river). From these heights and distances, they had the time to set their river bank ambushes, with devastating consequences. Here, according to Eckert's telling, Tecumseh first proved himself in battle, helping kill and capture American settlers, only later to proclaim his opposition to the torture and execution of one of the American prisoners.

For Eckert the story of Tecumseh near the Mouth of the Scioto is a hero’s coming of age tale; it defines Tecumseh's character and establishes the narrative’s moral compass. Tecumseh is, at this point in his life, still a young warrior, one who lives in the shadows of his older brother, Cheeseekau. As the fates would have it, Simon Kenton and a small band of Americans are out scouting land and hunting near the Old Mouth of the Scioto when they are attacked by Shawnee warriors. The Indians run off the Americans, though one is taken prisoner and is being beaten, tortured, and is set to be killed when Tecumseh intervenes and chastises the other warriors for their “dishonorable” treatment of the American. Tecumseh wins over his brother Cheeseekau and with some resistance, the other warriors embrace Tecumseh's position -- they will no longer torture and kill prisoners in their fight to stop the encroachment of Americans onto their land. Simon Kenton, Eckert’s eponymous “frontiersman,” comes to respect Tecumseh because of this, and, at the end of the drama, when Americans kill Tecumseh during the Battle of the Thames, it is Kenton who purposely misidentifies Tecumseh’s body to protect it from mutilation, the ultimate dishonor inflicted upon the Indian dead, at hands of savage American warriors.

In Eckert’s telling, the nobility of men like Tecumseh and Kenton were no match for the more common land-hungry, racist, and violent American settlers and their well-armed, though frequently poorly trained soldiers. It was men like future U.S. president William Henry Harrison and future Ohio governor Thomas Worthington, who wrestled these lands and waters from the hands of Native Americans, and the tragedy of it all, of course, is that the characteristics so celebrated by Eckert, the very aspects of the drama that ensures the story of Tecumseh remains popular in the region, were not enough to ensure an indigenous victory in their efforts to block the western expansion of the United States.

In recent years, John Sugden's research into the life of Tecumseh has challenged Eckert's and earlier accounts of this eventful moment. Sugden returned to the original source of the story, an account of Tecumseh life by Stephen Ruddell, an American who had been taken prisoner and adopted by Tecumseh's family when he was a young boy. In Ruddell's telling of the tale, no date or specific location was given, except that Tecumseh was 15 years old at the time and it involved flat boats on the Ohio. It turns out that Benjamin Drake, Tecumseh's first biographer, had erroneously claimed, without any additional evidence, that the attack occurred above Maysville on the northern shores of the Ohio. Relying on newspaper accounts from the time and Tecumseh's approximate age, Sugden made the case that the attack occurred further down the Ohio, near the Mouth of the Great Miami in March of 1788.

Eckert's literary fabrication begs the question: Did Tecumseh ever visit Raven Rock? We may never know for sure, but, in all probability, he did, at some point, stand atop this "Indian lookout," but there is just no historical record to establish the fact.

At the time of his death in 2011, at the age of eighty, Eckert had published over forty books. He was a native of Buffalo, New York, and was raised near Chicago. Eckert attended the University of Dayton and Ohio State University and went onto became an Emmy Award-winning script writer for "Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom."

According to his own accounting, Eckert received some 1,100 rejection letters before he published his first book, "The Frontiersman: A Narrative" (1967). This book brought him everlasting fame and became the first volume in his “Winning of America” series, upon which he was still working at the time of his passing. When he last attended an opening night of his outdoor drama in the summer of 2010, he told the cast and crew that the legendary Tecumseh “was the embodiment of what a human being should be.”

Visitors to the Riverside Park should consider combining a walk along the Allan W. Eckert Trail with a hike up to the top of Raven Rock. Imagine the Ohio River bottoms here covered in Old Growth forest, with a large maple grove near the foot of Raven Rock. Picture a Shawnee village and an American frontier settlement being washed away by flood waters.

Please note, however, that a free permit from the Ohio Division of Natural Resources is needed to visit the Raven Rock Nature Preserve.

Sources:

Allan Eckert, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative (Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stewart Foundation, 2007).

Allan W. Eckert, Tecumseh! A Play (New York: Little Brown & Company, 1974), 4.

Benjamin Drake, Life of Tecumseh and his Brother the Prophet with a historical sketch of the Shawanoe Indians (Cincinnati: H. M. Rulison, Queen City Publishing House, 1856), 68-69.

John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998), 48-52.

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In 1938, during the North-West Territory sesquicentennial celebration, Portsmouth residents put on a "gigantic parade" through the city, carrying a large stone at the "head of the procession." The City Recreation Department placed the stone "in concrete at the base of the flag pole" and local dignitaries dedicated the new city park, which they named Alexandria Point. Located just outside the city's flood wall, the park provides visitors with a scenic view of the modern-day confluence of the Ohio and Scioto Rivers.

The stone, with its 1802 inscription, explained the Daily Times, had recently been recovered from the Westside bottoms of the Scioto River. Local historian Alfred Fagan believed it to have originated as a cornerstone from the now abandoned village of Alexandria, which area residents and the history books remembered as the first American settlement at the mouth of the Scioto.

The Alexandria Stone makes for an odd historical marker, as the date with which it is inscribed has no direct connection to anniversary of the adoption of the North-West Ordinance, which was being celebrated in 1938. Nor does it refer to the date of Alexandria's founding, which was first settled in 1796. And, lastly, it has been removed from its original historic location. It is, however, all that visibly remains of abandoned Alexandria.

The stone's original inscription may have had included the initials, "E. L." inscribed over the date, 1802. It's possible the letters represented the initials of Elias Langham, who officially surveyed and platted the village in 1799. Langham did own at least one lot in Alexandria, where he built a residence, but it does not appear he ever lived there for any extended period of time. In short, whether the Alexandria Stone came from Langham's house, we will never know.

The stone was recovered in 1931 by Squire Oscar Foster, who acquired it from a family living near the mouth of Carey's Run, not far from where Alexandria had once been located. "He chanced upon it at the home of a West Side family who were using it as an outdoor step and who were not aware of its historical significance." Foster then gave the stone to Alfred Fagan, whom the Portsmouth Daily Times described as "the city's most ardent and knowledgeable historian" and a descendant of Judge John Collins, one of the first settlers of Alexandria. Thus, Fagan, the 80-year old great-great grandson of Collins, is the one who arranged to donate the stone to the City Recreation Department for its installation in Alexandria Point Park.

Interestingly, Robert Dafford's mural of Alexandria depicts a pioneer river town, with numerous stone houses. There were, in fact, very few such structures. Perhaps one could argue that the vision of Alexandria found on the Portsmouth flood wall reflects the aspirations of Alexandria's founders more than the reality of the pioneer settlement. Extent records suggest that the village had far more log cabins and framed houses than those made of cut stone. This, it should be noted, however, only makes the Alexandria Stone at Alexandria Point that much more rare and historically significant.

Sources:

Barbara Keyser Gargiulo, editor, "Early Reminiscences of Portsmouth," in Scioto County, Ohio Newspaper Abstracts and Historical Reminiscences, 1866-1869 (Milford, Ohio: Little Miami Publishing Co., 2006).

"Old Stone Is Landmark for New City Park," Portsmouth Times (2 November 1939).

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Coming Soon!

The story of the Buena Vista Freestone Company and John M. Mueller, its sole proprietor.

Learn about Mueller's operation, which included quarries up nearby Vastine Hollow, a saw mill and stone office building on the banks of the Ohio, and sales offices in Cincinnati and New York City. "The Stone House in Buena Vista" is one of the many highlights of the Scenic Scioto Heritage Trail and this and other stories associated with the history of the Shawnee Wilderness Area are currently under development and will soon appear here in Scioto Historical.

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At the McKendree Methodist Chapel, near the mouth of Upper Twin Creek, one finds the graves of key players in the Shawnee Wilderness Area's history of moonshine and murder.

Of particular note is the grave of Jonas Cooper. After being shot to death in December 1930, Jonas Cooper's body was brought to McKendree Chapel. Cooper had died at his moonshine still, high up in nearby Vastine Hollow, shot dead by George Rivers, an Adams county special deputy sheriff. Marked by a simple headstone, illustrated with two hands joined in prayer, Cooper's grave and the simple beauty of the Methodist church still attracts visitors.

At Cooper's funeral, a reporter from the Portsmouth Daily Times, spoke with an elderly man who stated, “I knew Jonas Cooper all his life. The creek will sure miss his kindness; Jonas had a big heart and loved his family. He never refused a person in need. Often I’ve seen him give his last cent to the poor. He could not stand to see a person suffer.”

Thanks to the work of Ronny Richards, who has resided on Upper Twin Creek since the early 1970s, the story of Cooper's death has been preserved for posterity. We learn from Richards' account that "over five hundred people were in attendance with many of the mourners standing outdoors under cold, gray December skies, due to the limited capacity of the chapel. Old timers in the crowd said that it was the biggest event ever held at the church or anywhere in Western Scioto County that they could remember. The service lasted nearly three hours."

Visit the graves of Jonas "Am" Cooper and other "Twin Crickers" whose life stories tell the tale of moonshine and murder in what is now the Shawnee Wilderness Area.

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During the second-half of the nineteenth century, Vastine and other hollows of Lower Twin Creek were the center of a major stone quarry industry. Here workers for various firms, including John Mueller's Buena Vista Freestone Company, quarried the famous "City Ledge," a highly valued building stone, which was popular down river in Cincinnati, as well as in Chicago and New York City. Stone from these hills went into the pillars of the Roebling Suspension Bridge at Cincinnati in the 1850s and 60s.

German immigrants and the descendants of Virginian pioneers worked the stone from a ridge-side quarry bench. The huge quarried stones were lowered to the valley floor via massive mechanical inclines, then taken by a narrow gauge tram, drawn by oxen, to the stone saw mill and landing at the Village of Buena Vista. From their they were transported by river to Cincinnati and other markets via railroad.

When the cement block industry and the popularity of steel and cement construction put an end to Buena Vista freestone business around the dawn of the twentieth century, the quarries were abandoned, leaving many massive blocks still piled up, one on top of another, along the ridge side quarry benches. Today, having been included in the Shawnee Wilderness Area, Vastine Hollow has been reclaimed by the forest. Along with the ruins of the tram road and inclines, three large stone-lined cisterns, cut into the bench, remain, filled with the darkest waters.

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In 1934, a segregated, all-black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) unit of enrollees, known as Company 1545, dammed the waters of Mackletree Run and Turkey Creek, creating Roosevelt Lake, the centerpiece of a new state park in southern Ohio’s Scioto County.

On May 20th, 1935, T. J. McVey walked the grounds of CCC Camp Roosevelt on the banks of Turkey Creek in Ohio's Shawnee State Forest. McVey worked for the Inspections Division of the CCC and his "Camp Report," can be found in the National Archives in Maryland.

The barracks of Camp Roosevelt were once located in the open field, across from the entrance of Boy Scout Camp Oyo. Little remains of the old CCC camp, except a stone memorial structure, built by the CCC to house the bronze dedication plate for the original Roosevelt Game Preserve, the precursor of Shawnee State Park. Today the plate is on display in a new stone memorial, located near the Roosevelt Shelter House and the Shawnee State Park Campgrounds.

Camp Roosevelt was the home of Company 1545, a special and extremely rare, segregated, all-black Civilian Conservation Corps unit of enrollees. Their historical significance should be especially noted as the unit, some 220 enrollees, was also made up of all World War I veterans. During the life of this Depression Era conservation jobs program (part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal), over 3 million men enrolled in the CCC, including some 250,000 African-Americans, who were placed in one of the 150 segregated, all-black companies. Camp Roosevelt was one of four segregated camps in the Shawnee Forest, which at one time or another in the 1930s had a total of seven camps.

At the time of McVey’s inspection in 1935, Otto C. Schmidt served as company commander, while C. A. Hermann is listed as "Project Supervisor." The Camp Doctor, L .R. Markey, reported that the "general health of the men has been good, average gain in weight per man has been 6 to 7 lbs." It appears the men of Company 1545 were hungry when they enlisted and were well fed while they worked on constructing the Roosevelt Lake Spillway Bridge and Dam.

As for camp recreational activities, McVey listed: Radio, piano, pool tables, checkers, dominoes, playing cards, chess, boxing gloves, baseball, basketball, volleyball, softball, and horse shoes. Additionally, "enrollees are taken to Portsmouth twice weekly for Recreation."

McVey claimed that "50% of the company attend religious services," which “are held at camp every Sunday morning by Assistant educational advisor [Oscar Rhine] who is an ordained minister.” “Catholics,” he reported, “are transported to Portsmouth by truck where they can attend church services." Camp officers apparently monitored enrollee mail, as McVey noted, "No communistic literature has been received at this camp."

McVey recorded that there were "no bed bugs or other vermin at this camp" and the morale of "the men while in the field" was good. "The enrollees all seem to be satisfied. No complaints." Camp Roosevelt passed McVey’s inspection and received a rating of "Excellent."

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In the mid-1930s the Ohio Division of Forestry, with the assistance of the Civilian Conservation Corps, built Forest Road 9, from Pond Lick Run up to this dramatic ridge-top point. They cleared this spot and placed a picnic area in the center of a roundabout. The CCC enrollees from nearby Camp Shawnee No. 1 constructed wooden picnic tables, benches, and did stonework for a grill & fireplace.

After the construction of over one-hundred miles of “all-weather” forest roads, the state promoted the region as "Ohio's Little Smokies" and Picnic Point originally served as a major attraction for area residents and tourists. The Point’s remote ridge-top location exemplifies how the original vision for the Shawnee State Forest was grounded in recreational and tourist uses. The new forest roads, built by the CCC, were certainly meant to assist in fighting forest fires, but a case can be made that they were also meant to generate auto tourism for Portsmouth, Scioto County, and the larger region of southern Ohio.

The view from Picnic Point, with Portsmouth in the distance, can help a visitor gain perspective on the extent of state owned land in the forest and allows those who stop here the opportunity to contemplate what role recreation and tourism have (and should) play in the management and development of state owned forest lands. There has always been tension within Ohio, as well as within Federal, public land management policy, a tension that dates back to the earliest days of the conservation movement in the late nineteenth-century. That is, to what degree should state lands and their “natural resources” be managed for so-called “wise,” efficient, and sustainable commercial use (such as for logging) versus for human outdoors recreation, the protection of wildlife, and the preservation of wilderness areas, guarding these lands and the flora and fauna found therein from the disturbances of human activities?

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the State of Ohio encouraged the use of Shawnee primarily for recreational and tourist purposes. Beginning with the Roosevelt Game Preserve, the state promoted the “Little Smokies” to hunters, who began coming to Shawnee in large numbers in the mid-1930s when the first deer seasons were established by the Division of Conservation.

At the same time, the state with the assistance of the CCC built Roosevelt Lake and the original infrastructure for Shawnee State Park. The new improvement was conveniently located along the side of State Route 125, deep in the heart of state owned land, near the popular Boy Scout Camp Oyo on Turkey Creek. Construction of the park was the first CCC project proposed by Ohio officials in 1933 and its aim was to improve the Forest for recreational uses.

In 1964, various Ohio newspapers ran a series entitled, “Let’s Explore Ohio State Parks.” The Shawnee edition, which appeared in late August and early September, featured a panoramic photograph of the view from Picnic Point, and it emphasized how beautiful the forest looked with its autumn foliage. Produced with the assistance of the Division of Forestry, the promotional copy read: “Within the southernmost loops of the Ohio River lies a vast wooded area known to many motoring tourists as ‘Ohio’s Little Smokies.’  Particularly in the Fall do these hills take on the hazy blue tinge associated with the most southerly mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.  This view in the 35,000 acre Shawnee State Forest is typical of the easily accessible area just west of Portsmouth.  Nearby is the Theodore Roosevelt Reserve with another 11,000 acres of wooded hill country.  This whole big area in southern Ohio is rapidly becoming a vast outdoor playground which is almost unchanged from the day of the Shawnee Indians and the Moundbuilders before them.  In the Fall of the year, the oaks, maples and poplar trees give this hill country a splendid cloak of color which attracts photographers by the thousand."

Similar rhetoric touting an “unspoiled” forest and “wilderness” would appear in newspapers in 1967, as when the Hillsboro Press Gazette reported, on the Second Annual Trout Derby at Roosevelt Lake: “All road will lead to Southern Ohio the second weekend in May as thousands of campers, fishermen and ‘Sunday drivers’ converge on Portsmouth, ‘in the heart of Ohio’s Little Smokies.’” The Press Gazette noted that “The forest takes its name from the Shawnee Indians, and the 58,000 acres of wilderness is a paradise to the outdoorsman.  Miles and miles of winding trails and roads through an unspoiled area expose the camper to natural beauties and outdoor wonder.”

Today, the Ohio Division of Forestry has a stated mission: “To promote and apply management for the sustainable use and protection of Ohio’s private and public forest lands.” Striking the proper balance between “sustainable use” and the “protection” of “forest lands” remains the greatest challenge for state officials and the point of greatest controversy.

Picnic Point, whose hillside approach on Forest Road 9 has been subject to logging in recent years, is no longer included in the Forestry Division’s “Self-Guided Auto Tour of Shawnee State Forest.” Additionally, large sections of the original “Panoram Loop,” the original scenic route marked out for touring the forest, have been closed to public vehicular traffic, reserved for logging trucks and firefighting purposes. Still other CCC-built roads, such as that which runs from the former site of the Upper Twin Fire Tower to the point of Buckhorn Ridge was completely closed with its inclusion within the bounds of the Shawnee Wilderness Area. Now, maintained as a hiking and horseback trail, Buckhorn Ridge has received the strongest protections (a ban on commercial and mechanized logging), fulfilling the mission of the Division of Forestry to “protect” Ohio’s “public forest lands.”

Picnic Point makes a perfect stop for any auto tour of the Shawnee State Forest, indeed that is its original intended use — a tourist attraction, easily accessible by car or truck, just a short distance from Portsmouth, Ohio.

Sources:

Floyd Barton Chapman, "The Development and Utilization of the Wildlife Resources of Unglaciated Ohio," Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1938.

“Let’s Explore Ohio State Parks,” New Philadelphia Daily Times (1 September 1964).

“Self-guided Auto Tour of Shawnee State Forest,” published by ODNR, Division of Forestry. Web. http://forestry.ohiodnr.gov/Portals/forestry/PDFs/SF/shawnee_autotour.pdf

“Trout Derby to Be Held in May,” Hillsboro Press Gazette (17 March 1967).

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The first of seven Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps to call Shawnee Forest home, CCC Camp Shawnee No. 1 was located on Pond Lick Run, a tributary of Turkey Creek. The enrollees who called this camp home built what became first known as "Shawnee Lake," and what is now more commonly called, "Pond Lick Lake."

Once popular with swimmers, who drove out from Portsmouth, it is now -- thanks to the Division of Wildlife's stocking of channel catfish and bluegill -- a favorite spot for area anglers. After the original CCC shutdown in the early 1940s, the camp would be utilized by the state as a year-round work camp for well-behaved convicts and, then, in the 1970s, the camp became home to a revived, state-level Civilian Conservation Corps.

Today, the stone chimney of the old Officer's Quarters stands on the ridge, overgrown and hidden from view. The flat bottoms of Pond Lick Run, where the barracks once stood and a recreational field had been laid out, are now overgrown with grass and scrub; the old Shawnee Lake, recently restored and improved, is now stocked with catfish and bluegill through the Sportfish Restoration Program.

"When anglers purchase rods, reels, fishing tackle, fish finders and motor boat fuel, they pay an excise tax. The federal government collects these taxes, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administers and disburses these funds to state fish and wildlife agencies." According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, "these funds are used to acquire habitat, produce and stock fish, conduct research and surveys, provide aquatic education to youth, and secure and develop boat access."

Shawnee State Forest -- past and present -- continues to be shaped by Federal conservation programs and collaborations between state agencies remain the key to "saving Shawnee."

Sources: "Fish Stocked at Roosevelt and Pond Lick Lakes," Wildlife News, Ohio Department of Natural Resources (4 May 2015).

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CCC Camp Shawnee No. 2 was home to one of the four segregated, all black companies of Civilian Conservation Corps units, which helped to construct the infrastructure of the modern-day Shawnee State Forest.

Originally occupied on 18 June 1933, Co. 1520 included 200 African American enrollees, which were drawn from cities across Ohio. The army commander and his lieutenants were augmented by locally hired men (both black and white) from nearby Portsmouth, Ohio. Frank and Neal Hairston, for example served as “local experienced men,” providing supervision and technical expertise to the unit. Their projects included road construction, seed collection for reforestation efforts, and fire hazard forest improvement, which included the removal of blighted American Chestnut trees.

Soon after the company arrived in Shawnee and began their work, the camp was the scene of what CCC officials described as a "riot," when thirty of the men refused to work. Ultimately, the disgruntled men were discharged and order restored to the camp. By the fall of 1934, morale had improved. A camp inspection report noted the enrollees appeared “to be satisfied with conditions. As a whole they have no complaints to offer. All say they like the life and are satisfied.” In gauging the local public opinion of the enrollees's conduct,” the government inspector concluded it to be “very favorable.”

Additionally, the report noted that "religious services are held at this camp on Thursday evenings, by local colored clergymen. Catholics are transported to Portsmouth by truck on Sundays. …. 85% of the men attend services.” And, notably, the average weight gain of its enrollees was reported to be 20 pounds, significantly higher than the national average of 11.5 pounds.

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Camp Gordon was one of seven Civilian Conservation Corps camps that were established in the Shawnee State Forest, beginning in 1933. Located in the Headwaters of Turkey Creek on State Route 125, Camp Gordon would be home to first, an all-white company of enrollees and then an all-black and all World War I veterans unit.

The enrollees of Camp Gordon built nearby Wolfden Lake, one of the more picturesque CCC-built reservoirs in Shawnee Forest. They also joined enrollees from Camp Roosevelt to help build and develop the site of Roosevelt Lake, what became Shawnee State Park.

Today, passing vehicles on State Route 125 can catch a glimpse of the ruins of the Officers' Quarters, a stone chimney, which has come to be mistaken for the ruins of an old abandoned homestead.

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In the mid-1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees from nearby Camp Scioto built McBride Lake in the headwaters of Pond Run, a small tributary of the Ohio River.

One of six lakes originally built with CCC labor, McBride is one of the smaller reservoirs, yet one whose curved spillway illustrates the fine stone work of the CCC.

Floyd Chapman, a Field Ecologist with the Ohio Division of Conservation who studied the work of the CCC in southern Ohio, noted that these "lakes were built primarily to provide water for CCC Camps, but are being used at present [in 1938] for public recreation, including fishing, boating and swimming. Such lakes are likewise valuable to wildlife, promote better plant growth, and aid in flood control."

Camp Scioto was the home of Company 552 of the CCC and its work and camp life is well documented thanks to the work of Rudy Yukich, a member of the unit, who kept a photo album of his days in Shawnee Forest. The CC Boys of Company 552 built the reservoir and worked on the construction of Forest Road Nos. 2 and 5. It was enrollees from Camp Scioto that built the Pond Run Fire Tower, which long stood above the lake, offering a dramatic view of the forest and the Ohio River.

Sources:

Floyd Barton Chapman, "The Development and Utilization of the Wildlife Resources of Unglaciated Ohio," (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1938).

Rudy Yukich Collection, Shawnee Digital History Lab, Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Ohio.

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Bear Lake is situated deep in the heart of Shawnee State Forest and only adds to the scenic beauty of what is now known as the Horse Camp. Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees from Camp Bear Creek built the reservoir in 1934 and ever since it has been a favorite spot for forest vistors.

Today, Bear Lake is the location of the popular Horse Camp, where horse enthusiasts camp out and ride the forest's many bridle trails.

One of six lakes originally built with CCC labor, Bear Lake was the first to be finished in 1935. Floyd Chapman, a Field Ecologist with the Ohio Division of Conservation who studied the work of the CCC in southern Ohio, noted that these "lakes were built primarily to provide water for CCC Camps, but are being used at present [in 1938] for public recreation, including fishing, boating and swimming. Such lakes are likewise valuable to wildlife, promote better plant growth, and aid in flood control."

In Chapman's Ph.D. dissertation, which he completed at the Ohio State University, we find the following statistics on Bear Creek Dam.

- Height of dam above stream level ...... 24 ft.

- Height of spillway above stream level ...... 17 ft.

- Length of dam ..... 270 ft.

- Width of dam at base ...... 110 ft.

- Watershed area ...... 330 acres

- Area of impounded water ...... 3 acres

- Storage capacity of reservoir ..... 5,500,000 gallons

- Cost of materials ..... $1016.00

- Total cost (est.) with CCC labor ..... $8000.00

- Man-days of CCC enrollee labor .... 5090

- CCC enrollee pay per diem ...... $1.00

Sources:

Floyd Barton Chapman, "The Development and Utilization of the Wildlife Resources of Unglaciated Ohio," (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1938), pp. 212-216.

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Camp Bear Creek was one of the seven Civilian Conservation Corps camps located in the Shawnee State Forest, beginning in 1933. The camp, with its barracks, officers quarters, and out buildings is now the grounds of the popular Horse Camp, where horse enthusiasts camp out and ride the Forest's many bridle trails.

The enrollees of this camp built the impressive Bear Lake Dam, which impounded the waters of Bear Creek. They cut new forest roads through the area, helping build Roads 3, 4, and 6, thereby allowing motorized vehicle access to the new Forest Experiment Station, which CCC labor built at the Mouth of Snake Hollow.

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With the completion of the Roosevelt Lake Dam in 1934, the Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees of Company 1545 from nearby Camp Roosevelt, built two shelter houses for visitors to the new Roosevelt Lake Park (what is now known as Shawnee State Park). The Mackletree Shelter House and the nearby trailhead for the Roosevelt Lake Overlook Trail has long attracted visitors and is an excellent example of what some call "Parkitecture," the distinctive CCC style of stone and rough hewn lumber built park structures.

Hike the Overlook Trail, which was constructed by a special all-black, World War I veterans unit of the CCC. Blazed and improved with stone steps and benches, this nature trail ascends through a hemlock and beech woods to a scenic overlook that allows vistors to see Turkey Creek and the Roosevelt Lake Spillway Bridge and Dam.

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Floyd Chapman was a Field Ecologist with the Ohio Division of Conservation and spent much of the later part of the 1930s researching his dissertation on the “Development and Utilization of Wildlife Resources,” here, in what is now Shawnee State Forest and Park. Chapman and other forest researchers worked out of the Forest Experiment Station in Snake Hollow on Forest Road 6. Among Chapman's more memorable experiences was his first encounter with a wild American Black Bear (ursus Americanus) in the summer of 1937. Chapman would later publish an account of that the day in "The Ohio Conservation Bulletin."

"On July 19th, at about 6:45 in the evening, while David Blyth, my assistant, and I were taking a roadside count of deer, I suddenly noticed a black object in a large ... field at the mouth of Scantling run, near State Route 125. At first glance it looked like a black horse or cow, but on stoping the car, we saw that it was a bear. The animal stopped at intervals to eat a few blackberries, then began to advance toward us until it was only about 100 feet from the car and its occupants! .... The bear stood still, sniffed the air for a few minutes, then rapidly turned and bowled along toward the woods."

Chapman's assistant, David Blyth grabbed the Forest Experiment Station's "new 16 mm. motion picture camera" and began filming, as illustrated in Herb Roe's painting of the encounter. Chapman and Blyth’s bear sighting at the Mouth of Scantling Run confirmed recent, but undocumented sightings of bears in the Shawnee State Forest. Unfortunately, film from their historic encounter was not preserved, or at least, has not yet been found.

According to Chapman’s review of known records, the last American black bear in the Scioto Valley had been spotted about the year 1831 on the eastern side of the Scioto river, in Jackson County - a good 30 miles from Scantling Run. Having lived and worked in the forest and having made friends with residents of western Scioto and eastern Adams County, Chapman, however, was privy to local stories that suggested “black bears never did quite disappear from the wilderness along the Ohio River.” Since the early 1930s, "blueberry, huckleberry and blackberry pickers who venture into the more isolated ‘hollers’ of Ohio’s ‘Little Smokies’ region had reported black bears; sometimes one or even two old bears are encountered, but more often an adult with one or two cubs."

Local lore, which still circulates among residents of Nile Township and the Forest, includes a claim that "the last wild bear was killed in the forest in the late 1920's" in what is known as Dry Run Hollow, near the old Ranger Station and Tree Plantation on US Route 52. The forest, however, seems to have never been without its American Black Bear. In the 1920s, Chapman noted that "several bears" were kept in captivity at the headquarters of the Roosevelt Game Preserve, which served as the original "nature center" of what is now Shawnee State Park. Some of these bears were "liberated" when the "zoo" was "disbanded in 1932. Whether the bear on Scantling Run in July of 1937 was one of these, we will never know.

The destruction of the region's Old Forest in the nineteenth-century shaped the fate of many species that once made their homes here -- the passenger pigeon, the carolina parakeet, the white-tailed deer, and the Wild Turkey, to name but just a few. For the American Black Bear, it was the combination blow of habitat destruction and overhunting that devastated her population.

Writing in 1917, historian Lyle S. Evans noted that “the American black bear was [once] found in abundance all over the [Scioto] valley.” And, appropriately enough, the Valley’s southernmost institution of higher education, Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, the host sponsor and developer of the Scioto Historical app, has taken for its mascot, the black bear, whom is affectionally called "Shawn," as in “Mr. Shawn,” middle initial “E.,” last name “Bear.” "Shawn E. Bear."

The hollows of what is now Shawnee State Forest and Park may very well have protected the American Black Bear from total extirpation in southern Ohio. Chapman and Blyths' confirmation of a American Black Bear population in the southern Ohio points to the significance of the Shawnee State Forest in understanding the impact of American settlement on the ecosystem of the Scioto Valley. The rugged hills and intermittent streams of this region have played the part of a natural Noah’s Ark, which the state of Ohio, thanks to its conservation efforts, helped save in the 1920s and 1930s, and, now has the responsibility, as stewards of these lands, to protect and maintain.

Sources:

Floyd B. Chapman, "Ohio's Black Bears: Their Last Stronghold is the 'Little Smokies,' The Ohio Conservation Bulletin (Ohio Division of Wildlife, March 1946): 12-13.

Harry Knighton, "Shawnee Forest," undated typescript, Shawnee State University's Digital History Lab, Portsmouth, Ohio.

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In the 1930s, Snake Hollow in Shawnee Forest became the location of a wildlife and forestry research station, which received its funding through state and federal conservation programs. One of the station's major cooperative projects involved the Ohio Division of Conservation, the Ohio State University, the American Wildlife Institute and the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey.

Beginning in June 1935, Floyd B. Chapman lived here and carried out research on the wildlife resources of the forest, documenting the work of the Southern Ohio Wildlife Sanctuary and Demonstration Project, which benefited from the assistance of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps. It was from this location that the first published studies of the flora and fauna of Shawnee Forest were conducted. Today, only the poured concrete foundation and ruins of two small stone bridge abutments remain to mark its location at the mouth of Snake Hollow on Forest Road 6. The forest has reclaimed the site and its significance has been lost to time.

On maps and in local lore, the station has gone by various names. These days, if anyone even knows of its existence, its referred to as the Old Forest Experiment Station. In 1939, the Ohio Division of Forestry published the first map of the area that marked its location, labeling it as the "Central States Forest Experiment Station Cabin." The "Central States" part of its official name points to the cabin's origins in an earlier Federal forest conservation program.

Under the McSweeny-McNary Act of 1928, Congress authorized and financed a national program of forest experiment stations. The stations were chartered "to conduct silvicultural, forest fire, dendrological, and other experiments and investigations, independently or in cooperation with other branches of the Federal Government, and with States, universities, colleges, county and municipal agencies, associations, and individuals, to determine the best methods for the growing, management, and protection of timber crops on forest lands and farm woodlots." Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the Central States' Forest Experiment Station helped fund and staff the research facility in Snake Hollow, where the Ohio Division of Forestry had set aside 125-acres for Station use.

Visit the ruins of the Forest Experiment Station on Forest Road 6 and hike the beautiful Snake Hollow. Contemplate the history of state wildlife and forestry programs, as well as the conservation programs of the Federal government, which played a key part in saving the Shawnee Forest.

Source:

William H. Alexander, "Report of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Ohio Academy of Science," Ohio Journal of Science Vol. 39, no. 4 (July 1939): 187-212.

Floyd Barton Chapman, "The Development and Utilization of the Wildlife Resources of Unglaciated Ohio," Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1938.

Robert William Merz, "A History of the Central States Forest Experiment Station, 1927-1965," North Central Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1981.

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Beginning in the late 1730s, the Shawnee Indians established one of their principal villages here. Some sixty years earlier, in the 1670s and 80s, the Shawnee had been expelled from the Scioto and Ohio valleys by the Iroquois in what historians refer to as the Beaver Wars. By the late 1730s, when the Shawnee returned to their ancestral lands, they were joined by other native peoples, such as the Delaware and Mingo, who had been pushed westward by the expansion of the English colonies.

Once back in Ohio, the Shawnee aligned themselves with the English colonists on the East Coast, opening their settlement to English merchants, who traded manufactured European goods for animal furs and skins. Lower Shawnee Town was strategically located on the rivers, as well as near the Warrior’s Path, a Native American trail that ran from the Great Lakes region, south, across the Ohio River, and over the Appalachian Mountains into the upcountry of the Carolinas. Lower Shawnee Town was sufficiently west, down into the larger Ohio Valley, that few Europeans, whether English or French, were ever seen. Yet, it was also far enough east, up the Ohio River, to make trade with the English practicable and profitable. Game was plentiful; the bottom lands of the Scioto and the Ohio ideal for corn fields; and the English and French were still at arms length.

Before its destruction in a flood in the early 1750s, Lower Shawnee Town was a large and prosperous trading center, with residences and cleared fields for corn on both the Kentucky and Ohio sides of the river.

The English referred to the village as “Lower Shawnee Town” and because the English and their English-speaking successors, the Americans, came to conquer and settle this region (rather than the French), it is the English name by which we know it today. The “Lower” in “Lower Shawnee Town” derives from its location down river from the other Indian villages that were established higher in the Upper Ohio Valley beginning in the 1730s. As an English naming practice its usage is common along the Ohio, as seen in nearby Upper and Lower Twin Creeks, two tributaries of the Ohio near the Scioto and Adams County Line, just down river from the former site of Lower Shawnee Town.

It was here at Lower Shawnee Town, that the French famously asserted their rights to the lands of Ohio. In 1749, the French sent a detachment of troops, under the command of Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville, down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers to assert French claims to the lands of all tributaries flowing into the Ohio.

The year previous, a powerful group of Virginian investors had obtained a royal charter for a corporation known as the Ohio Land Company, which also laid claims to lands in the Upper Ohio Valley. News of recent trade agreements between the English colonists and the Ohio Indians moved the French to assert their claims to the region via Céloron's Expedition.

Thus, Céloron's visit with the Shawnee at the Mouth of the Scioto on August 22-24, 1749, marked the start of a new era in the region’s history; one marked by what modern-day historians refer to as the Great War for Empire (what is also still commonly known locally as the French & Indian War). This colonial era war shaped the history of the Shawnee as much as it did that of the American colonists, whose victory in the contest ensured the further expansion of English colonial trade and settlement over the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains and into the Upper Ohio Valley.

The tense meeting of Céloron and Shawnee leaders in the summer of 1749 is immortalized in the Portsmouth Flood Wall murals of Robert Dafford and its original version by H. H. Wessel (entitled, "Under the Banner of France") can be found nearby in what is now the third floor, Law Library of the Scioto County Court House.

Céloron and his men came ashore in armor, with their weapons loaded and ready for a fight, but there was none. The French forces most likely encamped on the bottoms, on the east side of the Scioto River, across from the village. When Céloron finally addressed the Indians, he delivered a message from the Governor of Canada, which warned the villagers about the nefarious designs of the English:

"My children, the friendship I entertain for you, although far away, has induced me to send M. de Céloron to open your eyes and disclose to you the projects which the English are forming in your regard, and that of the territories also which you inhabit. Undoubtedly you are not aware of the establishments that they are thinking of making there which tend to nothing short of your ruin. They conceal from you their idea, which is to build on your territories forts sufficiently strong to destroy you, if I would allow them to do. I ought then as a kind father who loves his children tenderly, and who, though far away from them, always thinks of their good, to give them notice of the danger which threatens them." The talks proved difficult and Céloron, who had been ordered to expel and plunder English merchants, would leave without evicting the handful of English who were living in the village at the time. Céloron, instead, choose to head down river, without burying one of his famous lead plates, which he attempted to place at the mouth of all major tributaries of the Ohio.

When you visit the site of Lower Shawnee Town, you also visit the site of Abandoned Alexandria, the first American settlement at the Confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers. Despite its strategic and economic advantages, the location of the Shawnee village proved to be problematic for the Shawnee and later, the Americans, who would call these bottoms home.

In 1753 a massive flood overflowed both the Scioto and Ohio River banks, carrying away their log cabins, warehouses, public buildings, and undoubtedly much personal property. In the aftermath of the Flood of 1753, some Shawnee relocated to the eastern side of the Scioto, to where the City of Portsmouth is now situated, but this settlement was also abandoned by the 1760s, when the Shawnee relocated northward, up the Scioto River, to a new town site just north of modern day Chillicothe.

Today all obvious evidence of both settlements is gone. Where corn has been cultivated for hundreds of years, soy beans are now planted. With the earthworks of the Moundbuilders as backdrop, the West Side bottom lands showing little trace of Indian or American settlement, and the modern-day city of Portsmouth in the distance on the higher ground of the East Side of the Scioto's Mouth, the rise and fall of human settlements here encourages a long historical perspective, similar to what French historian Fernand Braudel famously called the "longue durée."

Visit Portsmouth, Ohio, and contemplate the history of the Shawnee, French, and English at the Mouth of the Scioto.

Sources:

Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007).

C. B. Galbreath, editor, Expedition of Celoron to the Ohio Country in 1749 (Columbus, F. J. Herr Printing Co., 1921).

Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774 (University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

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Typical of Virginia Military District surveys, which were conducted with the old metes and bounds method (sometimes called the Virginia Method), O'Bannon's survey reads like a description of the forest's many tree species:

"Beginning at two walnuts and a buckeye on the Bank of the [Ohio] River (upper corner to James Culverson Survey No. 453) running up the [Ohio] River, North seventy degrees, East one hundred and seventeen poles, North fifty degrees, East eighty three poles, crossing Turkey Creek at eighty two poles, North sixty seven degrees, East three hundred and two poles, North forty degrees, East one hundred and six poles to a white oak, buckeye and sugartree, then North twenty eight degrees, West two hundred and fifty poles to three black locusts, then South sixty two degrees, West six hundred poles to an ash and two beeches on the Bank of the Creek, then South twenty eight degrees, East two hundred and fifty poles to the Beginning."

Here on the banks of the Ohio River this random sampling of tree species returned a white oak, two buckeyes, a sugar maple, three black locusts, an ash, and two beeches. O'Bannon's and other pioneer era surveys captured the great bio-diversity for which the Shawnee State Forest Region is known for today.

Larkin Smith never settled on Turkey Creek and there is no evidence he every intended to move from Virginia to Ohio. Smith was a well-connected and prominent politician, representing King and Queen County in the Virginia House of Delegates, beginning in 1785 and would serve as its Speaker from 1799 until 1802. While in Richmond, in mid-April 1795, Smith would sell his Turkey Creek lands to US Senator John Brown of Kentucky and Major John Belli, who had recently completed his service as Deputy Quarter Master on the General Staff for Wayne's Legion. Belli had played a critical role in supplying US forces in the Northwest Indian War's climatic Battle at Fallen Timbers in August 1794.

In the spring of 1795, when Brown and Belli purchased Larkin Smith Survey, negotiations with the Indian nations were just getting underway at Ft. Greenville, but it was expected the resulting treaty would soon end the threat of Indian attacks and open Ohio and the Northwest-Territory to American settlement.

According to Nelson W. Evans, Major Belli first came to his lands on Turkey Creek soon after purchasing them in the spring of 1795. He "placed a man named Wright upon it, who cleared up a part of it, built a log house and planted a orchard." Evans account differs from that of James Keyes, who published one of the first histories of the region. Keyes credited local oral tradition, which claimed that Major Belli had "employed a man by the name of MacBride to go on the land and build a house, clear the land and plant orchards, and make all the improvements necessary on a new farm."

Belli, himself, would not permanently settle on Turkey Creek until 1806. Whether it was a Wright or a McBride, who deserves credit as the original tenant may never be known, but the hard work of clearing the land was accomplished by hired help. Belli speculated in lands and town lots from Alexandria at the Mouth of the Scioto to Washington, down river, at the Mouth of Ohio Brush Creek. In 1798, Belli offered 50 acres of land on Turkey Creek to the Adams County Commissioners for a new county seat. When Manchester was selected and Scioto split off from Adams County, Major Belli would champion Alexandria for the new county's seat of government. As the fates would have it, Portsmouth, on the east side of the Scioto, where higher ground guarded against flood waters, would win out in the county-seat fight in 1805.

In 1800, Major Belli married Cynthia Harrison, a cousin of future President William Henry Harrison. She was one of Robert Harrison's two daughters (Cynthia and Anna) for whom Cynthiana, Kentucky, was named. According to Nelson W. Evans, after having initially lived in Alexandria, the Bellis ultimately settled on Turkey Creek, on his original homestead. There, they had constructed a two-story framed house, fronting the Ohio River, and named it "Belvidere."

In Reuben Gold Thwaites' account of the Major, he describes him as "a cosmopolitan, his father being French, his mother Dutch, and he himself born (1760) and educated in England. He inherited estates in Holland, but having become imbued with republican principles, emigrated to America, bearing letters of recommendation from John Jay. Belli landed at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1783 and remained there nine years, forming a personal acquaintance with Washington, Knox, and other public men."

Belli was known for his aristocratic demeanor and dress. Until his death, he could be seen in public sporting a tri-corner hat, long after such headwear had passed from pioneer fashion. Evans noted that Belli "adapted himself well to Pioneer Society but he would not during his life in the west wear the homespun pioneer dress. He always dressed in continental style and never wore a hunting shirt or the hunter's leggins."

John Belli died young in 1809, at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind a young family and a very capable widow, Cynthia Belli. She served as executor of her late husband's estate and raised five children, remarrying in 1812 to Philip Moore. In 1826, Major Belli's daughter, Eliza, married Moses Gregory, who served as Scioto County Sheriff in the late 1820s and then as Portsmouth City Auditor in 1831 and Mayor in 1834.

Today, the Ohio River Campground of Shawnee State Park, is located below the Mouth of Turkey Creek, not far from Belli's Belvidere and what some believe to be the first permanent American settlement in what became Scioto County. Whether that honor belongs to others at the Mouth of the Scioto or further up at the Mouth of the Little Scioto, Belli was most definitely the first owner of the land to take up residence on Turkey Creek and what would become the Village of Friendship.

No traces of Belvidere remain today (it was destroyed by fire in 1838) and the Major's bones, which were originally interred beneath a transplanted Weeping Willow, on the banks of the Ohio, have been moved twice. First, in March of 1865, after a major flood had eroded the river bank and exposed his remains, Belli was exhumed and re-interred in the Friendship Methodist Church cemetery. Then, again in 1909, thanks to the efforts of Nelson W. Evans, Belli's bones were again dug up and moved, this time to what may be his final resting place in Greenlawn Cemetery in Portsmouth, Ohio.

Sources:

Nelson W. Evans and Emmons Buchanon Stivers, A History of Adams County, Ohio: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1900): 524.

Nelson W. Evans, A History of Scioto County, Ohio, Together with a Pioneer Record of Southern Ohio (Portsmouth, Ohio, 1902): 652-656.

James Keyes, Pioneers of Scioto County: Being a Short Biographical Sketch of Some of the First Settlers of Scioto County, Ohio (Portsmouth, Ohio, 1880).

"Re-Interment of Major John Belli," Old Northwest Genealogical Quarterly 12 (October 1909): 176-84.

Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, Early Western Travels, 1748-1846. Vol. 4. Cuming's Tour to the West (1904): 162-163.

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According to Harry Knighton, noted mycologist and founder of the Shawnee Nature Club, a crew of CCC Boys in the mid-1930s found the bones of a murdered pedlar when they were constructing Forest Road 2 in the Shawnee State Forest. The remains had been shoved up underneath a rock overhang many decades before, sometime in the mid-1800s. Reportedly, items that may have been part of the dead tinkerer's stock and trade were found nearby.

"The story," as Knighton tells it, "is that the man was a pack peddler who walked the ridges and valleys carrying pots and pans, tincups and needles, etc., to sell to the remote settlers who could not reach stores. These men often drummed on a tin pan with a stick or spoon and thus were called drummers by the natives. This man was killed and robbed of his money and his body placed under a small cliff-like outcropping where they were found more than a century later by the CCC workers. The bones were removed in the 1930s but pieces of combs and tinware were found in the area for some years later."

Knighton's account explains that the bones were removed, but by whom and to where is unclear. Some local lore that may be more speculation than fact claims the Dead Man was killed by the husband of an area woman after he had returned home unexpectedly to discover his wife in bed with the traveling salesman. Other stories suggest the Dead Man was murdered for interfering with the business of an area moonshiner during the Prohibition Era.

Whatever the origins of this hollow's name, over the years various signs have been erected to mark this historical spot, which is deep in the forest, but they have a tendency to disappear. Locals speak of ghosts and inexplicable screams and howls in the night. One "old timer," according to Knighton, "was using a draw knife to make hoops of hickory for wagon wheels when he heard the scream and cut his left leg badly with the draw knife, loosing much blood."

Sources:

Harry Knighton, "Shawnee Forest," undated typescript, Digital History Lab Collection, Clark Memorial Library, Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Ohio.

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Zane's Trace, the first Federally funded road through frontier Ohio, ran from Wheeling, in modern-day West Virginia, across the Hocking, Muskingum, and Scioto Valleys, to Limestone, (now Maysville), Kentucky on the Ohio River. Authorized by Congress in 1796, Zane's Trace was first just a tomahawk blazed trail, accessible to foot and horse traffic. After statehood in 1803, the road would be widened and improved so that by 1804 it was a twenty-foot wide wagon road, upon which thousands of pioneer families headed west. By then Zane's Trace was dotted with taverns, or inns, about every six miles or so, where travelers could put a roof over their heads, feed and shoe their horses, and enjoy a dinner or breakfast.

Trace historian Norris F. Schneider estimated, "that in the half century before the first railroads steamed across Ohio in the 1850's, approximately three hundred taverns accommodated travelers on the Zane's Trace route." Few of these remain today. But back in the 1830s, when stage coach operations carried passengers through the Scioto Valley, Zane's Trace resembled a pioneer version of a modern-day interstate highway, one that connected Kentucky and Ohio with the broader Atlantic World.

Native son, Judge Albion Z. Blair, the noted Progressive Era reformer who gained national fame for ending corrupt election practices in Adams County, once explained the significance of Zane's Trace in the development of the region's political life. "In those early pioneer days," explained Blair, "the great political leaders from the South and West went to and from the National Capital in attending the session of Congress by stage coach, traveling through Adams County by Zane's Trace. There was located along this trace certain taverns or inns at which these noted men would stop and spend the night when on their journey. One of these, Treber's Tavern, still standing, was located down in Adams County, and was famous, made so from the fact that Mrs. Treber, the landlady, was a famous biscuit baker. The fame of her baking was known to the travelers using this route to the National Capital, and they all sought to make it a point to so arrange their starting that they would stay over night at Treber's Tavern. The country folks knew of the times when these great men would be at this hostelry, and they would gather in for miles around and have a great political rally."

Judge Blair recalled that his "father and other men used to tell us boys about these rallies; about the speeches of Tom Benton, Henry Clay, and other like worthies. Men and boys who had been born amidst poverty and privations, who had gone through the school of hard knocks, at these great political rallies would hear the story of the struggle of political leaders in early life and the efforts they had put forth to attain the places that they held in public life. These men and boys went home from these meetings instilled with an ambition that the younger men of that country should attain something in life. The boys saw these men, saw they looked just like other men, and learned from them the story of their lives; that their attainments had been accomplished by labor, and resolved that they, too, would do something and be something as men."

In addition to Clay and Benton, other accounts of famous visitors to Treber Inn include General Andrew Jackson and his entourage, who made a stop in 1828, while on their way to Washington for Jackson's first presidential inauguration.

According to Judge Blair, the frequent visits of such men helped instill the people of Adams County with a faith in the "Self-Made Man," a term that Henry Clay is generally credited with popularizing in 1832, during a speech in support of a protective tariff. In the words of historian Richard Hofstadter, "Denying that the tariff would give rise to a hereditary industrial aristocracy, Clay maintained, to the contrary, that nothing could be more democratic; it would give further opportunities for men to rise from obscurity to affluence." On the Senate floor, he told the American people: "In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.'"

The porch and yard of Treber Inn became a stage upon which America's self-proclaimed, "Self-Made Men," championed the principles and legislative agendas of the two major political parties of the antebellum years, the Democrat and Whig Parties. Historian Robert Remini once noted that "The 'rags to riches' notion that Americans have enjoyed ever since the early nineteenth century was studiously cultivated by Clay and his early biographers in the belief that such a myth added to his stature and attractiveness." When speaking before crowds gathered at Treber Inn there is little doubt that Clay attempted to cast himself in such light, and, according to Judge Blair, it is a myth that inspired the young boys and men of Adams County to work hard and make something of themselves.

William Firestone, author of "Grandeur & Grace: Building America from the Ground Up, 1784-1860," has written the most recent account of Treber's Inn, and, as he tells it, "Gunsmith John Treber was born in Maryland in about 1754. In 1796 he built a log cabin on Lick Fork of Ohio Brush Creek in what would soon be Adams County, Ohio. Two years later he erected the two-story log structure, later known as the Treber Inn, on the west bank of Lick Fork, about five miles northeast of West Union, the county seat. .... The two-story section of the inn was built of handhewn logs which were later covered by clapboards. The single-story kitchen and dining room wing at the rear is of stone from a nearby quarry. Soon after the inn opened for business, a sign swinging from a tall post along the road announced "Traveler’s Entertainment."

John Treber retired in 1825 to a nearby farm, whereupon his son, Jacob Treber, took over the inn and ran it with his wife, Jane Thoroman Treber, the famous biscuit baker, who was also noted for brewing a "most excellent coffee."

Visit Treber Inn on the Old Zane's Trace, modern-day Ohio State Route 41, in the heart of historic Adams County. Consider the legend of the Self-Made Man and its role in the history of American politics. Check out the Treber Family cemetery, located nearby, where the pioneer family of John Treber is buried.

Sources:

"Corrupt Election Practices in Adams County, Ohio: Address Delivered before the Conference of the National Popular Government League, held at Washington, D. C., on January 5 and 6, 1917, by Judge A. Z. Blair," 64th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Document No. 723 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917).

Nelson W. Evans and Emmons Buchanon Stivers, A History of Adams County, Ohio: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1900).

William Firestone, Grandeur & Grace: Building America from the Ground Up, 1784-1860 (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Red Eft Media, 2009).

Richard Hoftsadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Random House Digital, Inc., 2012).

Robert Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

Norris F. Schneider, "Taverns on Zane's Trace," Third Annual Zane's Trace Commemoration, Official Souvenir Booklet (Zanesville, Ohio, 1975).

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The Olde Wayside Inn in West Union, Adams County, has gone by many names over its two-hundred plus years of existence. Originally known as Bradford's Tavern, for a while in the 1870s and 80s, area residents and visitors would have called it the Crawford House for its proprietor John Crawford, who had paid for an engraving of the inn to be included in J. A. Caldwell's "Illustrated Historical Atlas of Adams County" in 1880. Other proprietor names include Moore, Marlatt, Lafferty, Lawler, Haas, Mowery, and Hall.

While all of the owners of this Inn played their part in its history and preservation, it will forever be most associated with not only Gen. David Bradford, its original proprietor, but also with Joe Logan, a runaway slave from North Carolina who worked as the tavern' hostler in the 1820s.

David Bradford first came to Ohio in 1798, settling in the Village of Washington, at the mouth of Ohio Brush Creek, where the Adams County seat was briefly located. There, he opened his first tavern. However, the village failed when the county seat was relocated, ultimately to West Union. In 1804, Bradford purchased lot 66 on West Union's new Main Street and built a fine, two story log structure, designed for use as a public house and inn.

Bradford was a man of wealth and influence, who also served his fellow man in local government. He received his title of "General" from his appointment as the Quartermaster General of the Second Division of the Ohio Militia. Bradford served a term as an Adams Common Pleas Court Judge, and as County Treasurer from 1800 to 1832. In addition to his tavern, Bradford operated a stage coach business, which ran between Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River and Chillicothe, to the northeast, along the Old Zane's Trace.

Gen. Bradford was also an early supporter of the abolition of slavery and played his part in the creation of the Underground Railroad, which ran through Adams County, with West Union serving as a major hub for the northbound traffic. Bradford belonged to the nearby West Union Presbyterian Church, where he attended the sermons of the Rev. William Williamson, a fellow abolitionist.

Sometime about the year 1822, Gen. Bradford hired Joe Logan, a known runaway slave, to work as a hostler at his Inn. Logan's wife, Jemima had recently been freed by the Williamson family. Jane Williamson, the Reverend's daughter, had come into a $300 inheritance, which she used to purchase the freedom of three slaves then living in North Carolina - a young woman and her two children. They would be emancipated and brought to a new life of freedom in Adams County, Ohio. Unfortunately, Jemima's husband and the father of her children, the said Joe Logan of our story, was owned by another master, who refused to part with his slave property.

As Emmons Stivers tells the story in his history of Adams County, Joe Logan made his escape, and after many dramatic encounters with slave hunters and their dogs, he eventually found his way to the Williamson's farm located in nearby Bentonville, where he was reunited with Jemima and his family.

After finding work with Gen. Bradford, Joe and Jemima acquired land on the north side of West Union, on what has long since been known as Logan's Lane, where they built a log cabin and operated a station of the Underground Railroad.

Joe Logan had enemies in and about West Union, who would write letters to his owner in North Carolina, offering to capture him and return him to slavery. On numerous occasions, however, Logan made it clear “that if any attempt were made to recapture him, he would kill as many of his captors as he could, and would die himself, before he would be retaken.” To further deter any such capture, according to Stivers telling, Logan “was in the habit of carrying a great club with him wherever he went, and it was well known that he would use it on dogs or men, as [the] occasion required.”

Joe and Jemima began telling people that they had purchased Joe's freedom for $200, one-hundred of their own and one-hundred raised by his friends in Ohio. Whether true or not, the story would certainly have dissuaded slave hunters from trying to re-enslave a legal, free resident of Ohio.

That Joe Logan stayed in Adams County, found work in Adams County, and purchased land in Adams County, suggests that fugitive slaves could establish a life of relative freedom in southern Ohio. Yet, a clear determination to fend off any attempt at capture and the protective patronage of influential white friends, such as a Gen. Bradford or a Rev. Williamson, may have been a necessity.

Visit Bradford's Olde Wayside Inn in West Union where Joe Logan fed and shoed the weary horses that made their way along Old Zane's Trace. Learn about the Underground Railroad in West Union, where antislavery whites and blacks worked together to help runaway slaves find freedom.

Sources:

Nelson W. Evans and Emmons B. Stivers, A History of Adams County, Ohio: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1900).

Andrew Lee Feight, "Joe & Jemima Logan: An Amazing Story from the Early Underground Railroad in Southern Ohio," The Twelfth Ohio Underground Railroad Summit, Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Ohio (20 October 2007).

Andrew Lee Feight, "'The Good and the Just': Slavery and the Development of Evangelical Protestantism in the American South, 1700-1830," Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Kentucky, 2001).

Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

Stephen Kelley, "Bradford filled many roles in county," in Lore, Legends & Landmarks of Old Adams, The People's Defender (West Union, Ohio).

Carleta Weyrich, "Olde West Union landmark under new management," The People's Defender (28 March 2012).

Williamson Family Papers, Adams County Genealogical Society, West Union, Ohio.

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The City of Portsmouth, located at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, has a history of public murals, from those painted in the 1930s by Clarence Carter in the lobby of the Post Office on Gay Street to those in the Law Library at the County Court House by Herman Henry Wessel. Yet, Robert Dafford's work on the city's Flood Walls is truly epic and has helped define modern-day Portsmouth.

In the 1990s as residents of Portsmouth struggled with the global forces of deindustrialization that had shut down factories throughout the Scioto and Ohio valleys, community leaders launched an ambitious historical murals project and hired Robbert Dafford to complete the work. Some 2,000 years of history would come to be painted on 2000 feet of flood wall, helping generate much needed tourism as well as a sense of community and identity for a great and historic city, a place that had seen the rise and fall of previous civilizations, including the Adena, Ohio Hopewell, and Fort Ancient Cultures, and the rise and fall of the American steel, shoe, and nuclear industries.

Dafford's work can be found throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to Portsmouth, Ohio, and down to Maysville, Covington, and Paducah, Kentucky, and to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. By the 2013, Dafford had completed over 350 large-scale public works throughout the United States, as well as in France, Belgium, England, and Canada.

In retrospect, Portsmouth's choice of Dafford appears inspired, as it is due to his artistic vision that the city's flood wall has been transformed into a magnificent work of public history, one that attracts thousands of visitors every month of the year.

A native of Lafayette, Louisiana, Robert Dafford briefly studied art at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, until he was drafted into the US Navy during the Vietnam War. He served as an illustrator and draftsman aboard the U.S.S. Independence in the Mediterranean, spending his free time in Rome, Athens, and Paris, where he studied the master painters of Europe. Dafford also points to Norman Rockwell and the Pre-Raphaelites as important influences on his style, which he has described as "hyper-realism on a large-scale."

In recognition of his contribution to public art and local history, Shawnee State University awarded Dafford a Doctorate of Humane Letters in October 2003.

While working on the Portsmouth murals, Dafford hired Herb Roe, a young native of Scioto County, to assist on the project. Roe went onto to work with Dafford for fifteen years, before embarking upon his own successful independent career. Roe's original mural work now appears on the walls of the Portsmouth High School Athletic Complex, and some of his smaller canvas work, including a portrait of Dafford painting the Branch Rickey mural, first appeared in the Scioto Historical app, beginning in the summer of 2013.

Dafford once explained the significance of his work by pointing to its transformative effect on the residents of Portsmouth. The flood wall defenses, what Dafford compared to “a medieval prison wall,” had become “a piece of art that has something to do with the people who live there. It’s their art. It’s their history. It’s their ancestry. And it changes their feeling about where they live."

For visitors to Portsmouth, the murals help orient them to the history of the city and the larger Scioto Valley; it leaves them with a new appreciation for the significance of this old river town.

Sources:

Philip Eil, Interview with Robert Dafford, Point Pleasant West Virginia (4 August 2010), Shawnee State University's Digital History Lab, Clark Memorial Library, Portsmouth, Ohio.

Robert L. Morton, “Portsmouth Murals - A Tourist Attraction - How It All Began - Part One,” AAA Today Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 1996): 4-7.

Robert L. Morton, “The Floodwall Murals: How it All Began - Part Two,” AAA Today Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 4-7.

www.portsmouthohiomurals.com

www.robertdaffordmurals.com.

Liana Voia, "Interview: Robert Dafford's Murals and Fine Art" (18 January 2013). http://www.blogtalkradio.com/multiplearts/2013/01/18/robert-daffords-murals-and-fine-art

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Explore the history of the sole-surviving remnant of Portsmouth, Ohio's once mighty shoe industry, Mitchellace, Inc. This "narrow fabrics" company emerged from the Panic and Great Recession of 2008 with new ownership and a new name - Sole Choice, Inc., marketing itself as "the SOLE choice for your shoe care and foot care needs."

Sole Choice now occupies what was originally the Excelsior Shoe Factory and its history is intimately tied to that of Sole Choice. Excelsior began in 1889 under the visionary leadership of Portsmouth native, John E. Williams, who had worked as a laster in the Drew-Selby Shoe Company from 1882 until 1888. In May 1914, Excelsior moved into their newly built factory on Murray Street, where they specialized in the manufacture of men’s and boy’s shoes, particularly their popular line of “Boy Scout” boots. At the time, the factory employed more than one-thousand workers. Today, the Excelsior origins of the factory can be seen emblazoned in the brick smoke stack of the facility's original dedicated power station.

In the 1922, Forest L. Williams, Sr. and his brothers, A. Graves Williams and Paul Grant Williams - three nephews of John Edwards Williams, the founder of Excelsior - reorganized the company, which would later be known as Williams Manufacturing, Inc. During the Depression, Williams’ business would actually grow, as they produced cheap shoes for children and adults. Over the 1930s and 40s, the company saw substantial growth, while Selby Shoes, the city's other large (and older) shoe manufacturer, went into decline. Selby's management found their high end lines of women shoes losing marketshare, and the once thriving company fell victim to a hostile takeover in 1957. While the exodus of Drew Shoes in 1937, following that year's devastating flood, marks the start of the industry's decline, the closure of Selby, in retrospect, now clearly heralded doom for the area shoe workers. Selby's machines were unbolted and relocated, the former factory used as a warehouse before its demolition in the early 1990s.

But, back in 1950, at what could be argued was the height of the city's shoe industry, 16% of the Portsmouth work force was in shoes – 1,900 at Selby and 2,000 at Williams. By the mid-1970s, all that remained was the shoelace company that the Selbys and Williams had first set up in 1902 as Mitchell Manufacturing.

This company's roots can be traced back to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where A. E. Hume, one of Selby's traveling salesmen, made a stop at a retail store owned by Charles Mitchell. As it turned out, Mitchell had recently designed and installed a dispensing machine for dispensing shoe-laces. "Put a nickel in, pull a nob, and a shoe lace fell out," is how Kerry Keating, the former company president, once explained its operation. Struck by the business potential, the Hume convinced Charlie Mitchell to visit Portsmouth and discuss his invention with George Selby, the leading manufacturer of shoes in the city.

Thanks to Selby, an invitation to meet with Mitchell was also extended to John E. Williams and W. G. Williams of Excelsior. These four men struck a deal and formed a new entity, the Mitchell Manufacturing Company. Mitchell then set up a factory to produce shoelace dispensing machines, which the company planned to stock with their own manufactured shoe laces. The laces were first bought by Excelsior and Selby, and other local factories, and were later marketed and sold to other shoe makers around the nation. In 1912, Mitchell moved their operations

In 1921, Charles Mitchell retired from the company and his younger brother D. D., or "Dave," Mitchell became superintendent of the factory, while Mark W. Selby, George Selby’s son, became its president. The company was reorganized in the depths of the Great Depression and rechristened Mitchellace, Inc. In the 1950s, Mitchellace began selling laces on a large scale to the retail market, or what is known as the self-service trade. This shift in operations away from the shoe factory business coincided with the overall decline in the American shoe industry, enabling Mitchellace to grow at a time when the rest of Portsmouth's shoe makers went under.

The key to Mitchellace's success in the 60s and 70s was their development of the blister pack for marketing laces in the mass retail shoe and variety store markets. Sylvan Orloff of Des Moines, Iowa, is credited with the concept of putting one-to-three pairs of laces into a blister pack for sale and distribution. In 1959, Orloff pitched the concept to D. D. Mitchell and he embraced it, forming a partnership with Orloff's Tye-Rite, Inc. Orloff and Mitchell then tasked Neville Trimble, a longtime machinist at Mitchellace to put the concept into practice. It was Trimble who designed and built the original blister shoelace packing machines. Mitchellace shoestrings would then be marketed under the brand name, "Tye-Rite Laces." D. D. Mitchell would run the business until his death in 1962, when the presidency passed to Kerry Keating, the twenty-six year old husband of D. D. Mitchell's grand-daughter, Vicky.

Keating formed a partnership with Orloff and by 1970, they had acquired control of the company through Keating's purchase of the Selby and Williams families' stock, whose issuing dated back to the earliest days of the company. Keating succeeded in buying back all but six shares, which were kept for sentimental purposes by two descendants of the Williams.

In the words of Dennis Breen, who wrote a piece on the company in 1999, "Under Keatings management, Tye-Rite and Mitchellace went on a buying spree, purchasing competitors in Los Angeles and Tarpon Springs, Fla., then moving their equipment and manufacturing capacity to Portsmouth."

In 1976, Williams shut down and the last Portsmouth shoe factory fell silent. Two years later, Kerry Keating moved Mitchellace from its 8th Street factory north one block, thus bringing life back to the old floors of the Excelsior and Williams factory. A "booming national market in jogging and running shoes" in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought on "a corresponding surge in the demand for laces." Yet competition for market share was stiff, as the factory trade for laces in the United States plummeted in 1980.

Orloff was fond of telling people, "We call them laces and say our competitors make shoestrings." Call them what you will, product demand was all that really mattered. "About a year after the company moved to the larger facility," noted Breen, "the bottom nearly dropped out from under Mitchellace. Shoe companies throughout the United States rapidly began moving production overseas, mainly to developing East Asian countries with cheaper labor. The industry's sudden shift caused wild fluctuations in shoelace sales throughout the 80s. 'Lets put it this way,' Keating says, '85 percent of all shoes sold in the United States are imported, a reversal of the way it used to be.' Mitchellace lost 700 to 800 customers (U.S. shoe manufacturers) in the process."

"In the early Eighties, that's when it all changed. People started sourcing overseas - Far East," explained Keating. "There was a big adjustment for us because our customer-base was eroding. .... The Chinese came into the picture. They just take something, duplicate it for you, and ship you the product at their cheap prices." According to Keating, "It snowballed in the 80s. Certain people became very adept in going over there, making the contacts, importing the shoes and American shoe manufacturers began dropping off like flies because they weren't competitive."

Keating bought out Sylvan Orloff in 1985 and took full ownership of Mitchellace. In 1991, he began to diversify its lines, introducing Shine Rite Shoe Polish and other shoe care products. Then, in 1997, Mitchellace acquired property in Honduras, where the company built a 37,000 square foot shoelace factory at Zip Bufalo, an Export Processing Zone (EPZ), or free trade industrial park. Located in Villanueva, Zip Bufalo markets itself and nearby Port Cortes as "the main gateway to the Atlantic side of Central America." Its significance, their website points out, shown by the "permanent US Customs office" that has operated there "since the beginning of 2006."

Eventually, Mitchellace would transfer most of their production to Honduras, with the Portsmouth factory focusing on packaging a portion of their Zip Bufalo-made laces. Thus, in one of those odd twists of modern international trade, the Honduran factory began shipping tipped and paired laces back to Murray Street, in Portsmouth, Ohio, where Neville Trimble's machines blister-packed the shoestrings for sale in what remained of Mitchellace's US market.

In further illustration of the globalization of the shoe industry, Mitchellace also began shipping laces manufactured at Zip Bufalo to China, where old American shoe companies, like Field & Flint of Brockton, Massachusetts (doing business as FootJoy) had outsourced their production. Before the economic crisis of 2008, FootJoy golf shoes, with Honduran-made Mitchellace shoestrings, were shipped across the Pacific and sold into the US market.

Mitchellace, like FootJoy, was a survivor. These two companies, whose origins can be traced back to the earliest days of America's shoe industry, help tell the tale of deindustrialization. Their recent international business dealings in Honduras and China illustrates the perfect storm of the 1970s and 80s that wiped out American shoe manufacturing. Cheaper labor and production costs in Central America and Asia, fast and inexpensive shipping of product to ports on the Pacific, Gulf, and Atlantic coasts of North America, combined with low tariff barriers and, perhaps, the occasional bad management decision to wipe out thousands of good paying jobs in towns like Portsmouth.

The depiction of the city's shoe industry in the murals of Robert Dafford and Clarence Carter capture the local factories at their zenith, when thousands of shoes and millions of shoelaces were manufactured monthly for shipment across the United States and abroad. Today, like a sun dial, the old Excelsior brick smokestack casts its shadow on a largely empty Sole Choice factory building, marking the time of day and the decline of American manufacturing.

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