Ohio's Roads

Ohio's earliest rural inhabitants, with a few exceptions, practiced subsistence agriculture, and thus needed no refined road network. Scattered trails, passable by foot, horse, or ox-cart, sufficed. These rudimentary roads — exemplified, perhaps, by Zane's Trace — often supplanted Native American byways or deer trails and followed irregular paths. Others; blazed by the U.S. military, established by state decree, or formed by private companies as toll roads; proceeded linearly. In the Congress Lands, thoroughfares often (though not invariably) follow section lines. In the Virginia Military District, the routes seem, in some cases, truly arbitrary. (See, for instance, Greene County's serpentine State Route 72.)

By mid-century, Ohio's counties — or, at least, its well-populated counties — had largely acquired the ample road systems which survive today. (The frequency with which Greek Revival-era dwellings — even those fronting minor thoroughfares — align with roads is evidence of this.)

Inter-County Highway 124 (now State Route 28), a superlative dirt road. Photo from the ODOT archives. The background home is extant.

Until the twentieth century, the Ohio traveler could expect little in the way of comfort. Indeed, a few wealthier counties had, in the preceding century, gravelled or macadamized their roads, but the balance of the state's routes were, by all accounts, veritable styes. In American Notes, Charles Dickens (yes, that Charles Dickens) quips about an 1842 stagecoach ride from Columbus to Sandusky:

It was well for us, that we were in this humour, for the road we went over that day, was certainly enough to have shaken tempers that were not resolutely at Set Fair, down to some inches below Stormy. At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the bottom of the coach, and at another we were crushing our heads against the roof. Now, one side was down deep in the mire, and we were holding on to the other. Now, the coach was lying on the tails of the two wheelers; and now it was rearing up in the air, in a frantic state, with all four horses standing on the top of an insurmountable eminence, looking coolly back at it . . . (1)

Earth-surfaced (i.e., dirt) roads in Ohio, 1915. Data sourced from Names and Numbers of Inter-County Highways and Main Market Routes, and Highway Statistics of Each County, published by the Ohio Highway Department. The darker the county's coloring, the greater its percentage of dirt roads. (Belmont County is clearly an anomaly.)

Navigational Nomenclature

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the state's county- and township-maintained routes lacked formal names. Open any Victorian-era property atlas, or glance at any prewar county highway map: the local roads are bound to be anonymous. Only after World War II, I suspect, did township and county governments bother to name their vast road networks. (More than likely, this mass-christening coincided with the widespread paving of minor thoroughfares, which had hitherto been largely earth-surfaced.)

A (rather crude) typology of Ohio road name etymologies. The colors designate each county's predominant method of thoroughfare-labeling. A few eastern Ohio counties assign names to only major roads; hence, in Perry County, Wilson Road (County Road 35) intersects Township Road 46, and so on.

Many of Ohio's rural roads bear "connective" names designating the communities which lie at their termini, or else describe the property owners whose tracts sat at their ends. Rosedale-Plain City Road, in northern Madison County, joins unincorporated Rosedale and more metropolitan Plain City, naturally. To the south, Pancake-Selsor Road honors members of the Pancake and Selsor families, prominent in southern Madison County. Rarely do given names appear in road labels. Adams County contains a few exceptions: Starley Gustin Road (which traverses fertile bottomland bordering Ohio Brush Creek), Ira Gustin Road (in Bratton Township), and George C. Biely Road, among others. Many more road names are sourced from natural features, as the repetition of "Hollow," "Valley," and "Run" — in Ohio's Appalachian counties — attests.

All Ohio counties assign numbers to their thoroughfares, but a few (clustered mostly in the state's northwestern quadrant) lack true, or nominal, titles. Williams County, bordering Indiana and Michigan, uses a hybrid numeric-alphabetic system, with its north-to-south-running routes receiving a number (1 through 24), and its east-to-west-traveling roads receiving a letter (A through S). The many routes that deviate by splitting sections combine letters and numbers. Thus, near Montpelier is County Road K-50 (a longitudinal byway situated equidistant from County Road K and County Road L). Logan County's numbering, on the other hand, appears to be inexplicable.

Carroll County's traffic engineers seemingly selected its roads' names by flinging darts at a board or, perhaps, choosing dictionary entries at random. Bacon Road begins at Arrow Road; intersects Glacier, Glory, Jasmine, Buck, Gallo, Fisherman, and Trump; and terminates at a state highway. Elsewhere, Aurora meets Apollo, and Nassau encounters Nature. Confusingly, Lemon Road lies a few miles distant from Lumen Road. Andora Road commemorates — in misspelled form — the tiny Pyrenean nation of Andorra (or Andora, Italy), while Ming Road may memorialize the long-lived Chinese dynasty.

Other oddities surely exist, scattered across Ohio's 44,825 square miles.

1) American Notes for General Circulation, Volume II (1842), 162.

Warren County: A Pulchritudinous Place (Part I)

Warren County's political subdivisions. Map plucked from Wikipedia.

If Ross County is a candy store, Warren County may be the ice cream parlor which occupies the adjoining storefront. Like Ross, Warren comprises some of Ohio's earliest-settled lands, straddles a major north-to-south-running river (in its case, the Little Miami), and occupies a surveying boundary zone. The Little Miami River splits the county, roughly, into two regions: the Virginia Military District (east) and Symmes — or Miami — Purchase (west). A few sections of Congress Lands exist in Franklin Township, at the county's northwestern corner, where the Great Miami River skirts the city of Franklin. Warren County's terrain is, as Howe noted, "gently undulating" (1), though broken by the valleys of Clear Creek, Caesar's Creek, Todd's Fork, and — of course — the Little Miami River.

Warren County's first permanent residents arrived in the 1790s. In November 1795, one William Bedle, a New Jerseyan, purchased Section 28 of modern Turtle Creek Township, where he erected a fortified log house, thereafter known as "Bedle's Station." (This home stood due south of Union Village.) Concurrently, a party of Marylanders — led by William Mounts (1762 – ca. 1808) — selected a spot on the Little Miami River's south bank, and built "Mounts' Station," a collection of log dwellings arranged in such a fashion as to dissuade attack. In 1796, less than a year later, surveyors platted Deerfield (now South Lebanon), Franklin, and Waynesville. By 1803, when it was cleaved from Hamilton, Warren accommodated 854 adult males (2); and, by 1810, nearly 10,000 souls called the county home. The Irish writer Thomas Ashe visited (or claimed to have visited) Warren County in August 1806 and described Lebanon (and its environs) thusly:

The remaining fifteen miles to Lebanon [from the Hamilton County border] were nearly the best I ever viewed, and settled considerably for so new a country. The farms were numerous, well improved, and the houses and barns on them built with great care and industry. 

Lebanon contains about two hundred inhabitants, dwelling in about forty neat log and frame houses. A place of worship and school-house are also erected, and the town in every respect bids fair to prosper and encrease with unprecedented success. Seated in the midst of the finest tract of land in the world, and that tract already thickly settled by a hardy and industrious people, it cannot fail to succeed[.] . . . The inhabitants, though few, are composed of several nations, who unite in forming a character of a laborious and religious cast. Their industry is manifest in the extensive improvements and comfortable abodes; all effected within the space of five years[.] (3)

Hyperbole notwithstanding, Ashe's anecdote is accurate enough. In the nineteenth century's opening decades, Warren County far outpaced its northern and eastern neighbors in prosperity. Yes, portions of Harlan and Washington townships — those marked by level, ill-drained, silty Illinoian till — remained little-populated until mid-century, but the county, in toto, enjoyed a prosperous existence.

I'll end my bloviating here, and save a discussion of Warren County's architecture (and regional history) for the next post.

1) Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, Volume I (1889), 740.

2) This estimate, provided by Beers' 1882 History of Warren County, Ohio, is no doubt inaccurate, and includes residents of Clinton County's western half, which, until 1810, remained within Warren County.

3) Travels in America Performed in 1806, Volume II (1808), 209–211.

Whimsy and Architecture

First, I should define "whimsy":

whimsy : a playful or amusing quality : a sense of humor or playfulness (1)

Now, I'll let Samuel Johnson and Webster's Collegiate Dictionary define "whimsy":

Whi'msey. n.s. [Only another form of the word whim.] A freak; a caprice; an odd fancy; a whim. (2) 

whim'sey, whim'sy (hwīm'zī), n.; pl. . . . A whim; freak; caprice. (3)

Two (or one-and-a-half) definitions separated by 161 years, yet scarcely a change between them. Only during the twentieth century, it seems, did "whimsy" gain its now-standard meaning as a species of humor. For Johnson and the Webster's editors (who seem simply to have borrowed Johnson's definition), absurdity alone constituted whimsy. Indeed, a tragedy could be whimsical, so long as that tragedy involved the inexplicable. Thus, the nineteenth-century man might stumble into whimsy in a way we now cannot (whimsy having since become a form of comedy). Comedy — the art of the absurd — presupposes intention; the accidentally absurd is merely absurd. We may laugh at it, but we needn't dub it comedy.

I'm justified, then, in calling particular structures "whimsical," because I employ the term in its original sense. Plenty of bizarre, fanciful, and arbitrarily designed buildings dot the American countryside. The carpenters who erected these oddities didn't intend to produce humorous works, of course. But they deviated from convention, and they thereby cursed their creations to notoriety.

In Hillsdale, Michigan, stands a frame house adorned with ample Classical Revival ornamentation: cornice brackets, dentils, an attic lunette, two tripartite windows (one Palladian in form), and a grand trabeated entrance. That the dwelling draws inspiration from classical modes is not odd; other Hillsdale homes (such as Frederick Stock's) do, too. Rather, its peculiarity lies in its proportions. The humble "upright-and-wing" form underlying the ornamentation is hardly fitting for neoclassical grandeur. In no way is the result unattractive, but it does tempt passersby to chuckle.

Classical Revival cottage, circa 1900; Hillsdale, Michigan.

The spoked brackets embellishing the Abram Fisk House — which stands near Coldwater, Michigan, about half an hour west of Hillsdale — resemble either flower petals, wagon wheels, or fan blades. (Architectural Rorschach tests are always a delight.)

Abram Fisk House (NRHP-listed), circa 1863; Coldwater Township, Branch County, Michigan.

An Italianate house — nay, mansion — in South Charleston, Ohio, features lintels incised with snowflakes. (How apropos, then, that I happened to photograph it during the winter.)

John Rankin House, 1885; South Charleston, Ohio.

One Bartlow Township, Henry County barn — known locally as the "Chinese barn" for its pagoda-like appearance — fit my definition of "whimsical." Commissioned by George Hyslop in 1910, the building, alas, collapsed in 1984. The September 1, 1916 issue of Hoard's Dairyman published an article (penned by Hyslop himself) about the barn, touting it as "stall-less." Hyslop's tower-adorned home also rose to the level of whimsy, but, like his barn, disappeared in the 1980s.

George Hyslop residence and barn; Bartlow Township, Henry County, Ohio. Sketch by Mrs. Harry Heinzerling, 1979, from the Donald Hutslar collection; used courtesy of Jean Hutslar.

The apogee of American architectural whimsy may be Orson Squire Fowler's octagonal house. Fowler (1809–1887), a phrenologist and reformer by trade, recommended that his countrymen "apply [nature's] forms to houses" (4) and erect octagon-shaped abodes "more consonant with the predominant or governing form of Nature — the spherical" (5). Of Ohio's 55 known (historic) octagonal buildings, the Gregg-Crites House, in Pickaway County, is among the finest.

Gregg-Crites House, 1855 or 1856; Circleville Township, Pickaway County, Ohio.

Such buildings may amuse us. Evidently, the architectural historians of another era reacted similarly. In Early Homes of Ohio, Frary writes:

Along with the fine craftsmanship that exists in so much of Ohio's early architecture are to be found many examples of design in which the attempts of untrained mechanics to interpret half-understood drawings verge closely on the ludicrous or the pathetic. On the other hand these interpretations often command our admiration, revealing as they do rare ingenuity in solving problems of construction, and active imagination in working out details of design with which the builders were unfamiliar.

. . . 

The clumsy attempts at classic pillars, columns, moldings, and cornices often produced curious effects that would scarcely pass muster in a school of architecture or a Beaux-Arts competition. They were crude, the details often painfully misunderstood, yet in them we recognize a sincerity that wins our admiration. Those pioneer builders were creating a vernacular in architecture possessing vitality and spontaneity that is often missing in highly sophisticated creations. We may smile at the clumsy results, but we must admire the simple but direct thinking which they represent. (6)

We, too, smile at those buildings "clumsy" by Greco-Roman standards, but we've lost the ability to recognize them as such. But this is a subject for another post.

1) Merriam-Webster.
2) Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 2,269.

3) Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1916), 1,090.
4) O.S. Fowler, A Home for All; or, the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building (1854), 82.
5) Ibid., 88.
6) I.T. Frary, Early Homes of Ohio (1936), 215.