Chapter 16

Wednesday morning Dad and I got an early start to drive down to Morgan County, Ohio. It would take us almost five hours to get there. We left home at 6:30 hoping to get there before lunch. Mum had packed us a lunch to save time.

We took Route 33 to Columbus then went out Broad Street which is Route 40. We saw the new interstate highway between Kirkersville and Gratiot, but it wasn’t open yet so we stayed with 40 to Zanesville and went south on Route 60 to McConnelsville. From there nameless back roads to a point out in the middle of a National Forest.

At about twelve-thirty, we stopped at a small crossroads. Dad looked around,

“Here is where I grew up and our ancestors came from.”

There was nothing there just trees.

During the ride down Dad had told me the story of San Toy.

The Federal Government had bought the entire area in 1935 and created a National Forest. They had the WPA come in and tear down every building in the area. The town of San Toy was gone by then.

At the end of World War I the government ended subsidies to keep marginal coal mines open. Peabody Coal had one of those mines at San Toy. Since it was no longer profitable they ordered the Mine Superintendent to shut off the pumps and let the mine flood. This way they could take the tax write off.

The Superintendent at the time was John Campsey. He was my grandfather Ross’s uncle. This would make him my great-great-uncle. He personally went to the pump house and turned them off. He had armed guards with him because they were afraid of a riot among the workers. There was no riot. Everyone was packing and leaving.

San Toy has two sections, the main living area for the two hundred employees and their families. Company-owned houses, the company store, and a company owned church building along with the jail were in the main area.

In what they called Over the Hill, which was on the other side of a nearby hill were several bars and brothels. They had multiple bars and brothels so that various ethnic groups wouldn’t have to mingle. This wasn’t a black-white issue, more like English and Welsh or any other European mixture that could be named.

The day the pumps were turned off this all came to an end. Within hours no one was in that town or lived there since. The buildings are long gone. You can see the remains of some foundations. The town property still belongs to Peabody Coal so the federal government didn’t come in to remove any evidence of occupation.

This crushed my dreams of a western ghost town as seen in the movies. This sounded more like a vacant field with bricks in it. The only building that still stands is the jail. It is only four walls and an inside division with four cells. The cells have bars on the windows but the inside cell doors are gone. The walls are cast concrete so they will stand for many years as mute evidence of this abandoned village.

What we are looking for is a box that is supposedly buried twenty-five feet northwest of the corner of the San Toy jailhouse. In his letter, Ross had said it was about four feet down.

We had brought shovels, picks, an ax, and a bow saw. It had been many years since the box was buried. There might be a tree on that spot now. If there was we had to hope there wouldn’t be a deep root system or we would never get it out without dynamite, which would probably destroy the box.

We shouldered the gear and walked back into the woods about half a mile. As Dad had remembered the town of San Toy lay before us. Or at least where it had been. Standing on a small hilltop we looked down on an area of about fifty acres which had fewer trees than the rest of the area. You could see the pattern formed by the roads, both of them.

The town had been so small that there were only two intersecting roads. Apparently, the roads had never been paved but formed using tailings from the mine. Nothing would grow on them so the roads remained free of growth.

This would not always be as leaves and debris were covering sections, and weeds had sprouted where surrounding trees didn’t shade them out. The trees were not as thick in the former town as the rest of the area. My guess is within another fifty years you would never know anything was here.

At the intersection of the former roads was the only building with portions standing, the old jail. The roof was long gone leaving the four walls. Dad pointed out what he remembered as a kid. The old mine face in the side of a hill.

The adit had railroad ties closing it off. He told me that further in there was a cement plug. If they got past all that they would die from drowning or methane gas. Not a place to go.

We walked over to the jail and to survey the situation. Dad started laughing.

“Which way is North?”

It was so dark and gloomy from trees overhead that the sun would be no help. There was moss on all sides of everything I could see, including the jail walls.