HAUNTED TORONTO

THE HANGING HEAD OF CAMP CRUMB

            The name is forgotten, maybe because those who remember simply want to forget.

            But the memory lingers like a child’s nightmare, the repressed one deep in the seat of the subconscious, this one deep in the woods outside Toronto, taking one deep in time, back to Camp Crumb, where time seems to cease and the human psyche surrenders to fear.

            The tale of the Hanging Tree and its vile fruit the Hanging Head has been passed on from generation to generation until now it looms high with other urban legends.  Is it truly legend, a myth worthy of the lunatic with the prosthetic hook, or just another haunted forest yarn to scare schoolboys on pitch dark, campfire nights?

            As the legend goes, a distraught man hanged himself near the cliffs at Camp Crumb sometime during the 1930s.  Camp Crumb is situated a quarter-mile up Sloane’s Run along the northeastern base of Wallace Hill.  During the latter decade of the 19^th century and the first decade of the 20^th, it was a popular site for picnics and other outdoor excursions.  Hundreds of initials tattooed into the bald gray beech trees still attest to this day how popular Camp Crumb once was. 

            These ancient gray trees cast gentle shadows upon a terrace tasseled with ferns and sitting-sized sandstones velveted with moss at a site during the day Zen-like, a setting tranquil enough to meditate.  But after the sun goes down…

“That’s where a man hanged himself,” said Dick Walker, who has lived all his 50-plus years in Toronto.  “My mother and some old-timers told me how the man hanged himself with a chain at Camp Crumb and that he remained missing for two weeks until his dog dragged his hand home.  When the search party finally arrived at Camp Crumb all they found was the man’s head swinging from a chain wrapped around a limb of a beach tree near a cliff.”

His late mother told Walker the hanged man’s name, but he can only remember the gruesome details and that the man worked for Mike Henry probably during the 1930s at the White Front Café.

“I heard too many people talk about the Hanging Tree to pass it off as some campfire tale,” Walker said.  “Besides, something is weird up there at night. Just makes your skin crawl.  Me and five other guys tried camping out there overnight when we were young, but it was just too spooky.  Plenty of other guys have tried sleeping out up Camp Crumb, too, and nobody can claim he made it to daylight.”

“I remember one night like it was yesterday,” said Pat Daughtery about the adventure he shared with Walker at Camp Crumb.  “There were six of us laughing up a storm, telling stories when suddenly we heard a chain clanging high in the beech trees.  We took off so fast we forgot to pick up our beer.”

“We called it the Hanging Tree,” said Joe Nemitt Sr. recalling boyhood excursions predating Walker’s by two decades to the tragic site.  We got scared quickly and didn’t stick around long.”

“I wouldn’t camp out there with 50 guys and two kegs and a bucket of holy water,” added Daughtery, “and I bet no one else would last there more than a couple of hours.”

Exactly where this desperate deed occurred is a matter of speculation these days, says J.L. Minor a former deputy sheriff for Colliers County, Florida, now returned to the Ohio Valley, bringing home his passions that include paranormal arboreal phenomena and crptozoology. 

“You have to remember that trees in a forest tend to grow a few stories high before branching out,” Minor said.  “So the branch from which he hanged himself probably jutted from a tree ten to 15 feet above some kind of platform from which he could have jumped off.  Such a tree would now be around 85 years old today and much too high to determine where a chain or rope once hung.”

The American beech, according to Wikipedia, averages 150 to 200 years of age and can live up to 300 years in ideal habitat.  These trees reach maturity around 40 years of age and can attain heights of around 100 feet.

The beech, also according to another electronic web site, The Masonic Druid, was the most used tree for lynching and ritualistic sacrifices during the 1700s and 1800s in the United States, the limbs valued for their pliability, the tree for its purgative power.

From Google Earth, if one knows where to look, the latitude and longitude coordinates can be found to locate the lost forest camp, on the map, that is, but on foot one’s cell phone service seems to vaporize mysteriously in the mist.

Why the victim chose Camp Crumb as the site for self-destruction is another matter of speculation.  The camp had fallen into disuse for about a quarter-century when he committed the desperate deed.  Perhaps some tragic event predates his hanging and left an evil energy summoning the distraught and the desperate.  And, indeed, there are tales of unholy rituals, whispered, from those who seek the refuge of anonymity, but it is best to leave these tales untold and buried deep beneath the cryptic dark shadows of the forest.

CAMP CRUMB

It’s called Camp Crumb

Because everything falls

Apart like the dude

That hanged himself.

Limb by limb by

Limb fell to fertilize

The forest floor

Until all that remained

Was his head, a trophy

Defying gravity,

Defying the senses until it

Fell to decay, rotting

Into an unholy fruit,

A stagnant weight

upon a rusty chain.

It still holds, sways

In the windless rustic night,

Clangs-clangs like a train

Steaming from Hell,

Pulling up to Scaffold Rock

To offer passage

From a platform

Where everything falls

Apart—your senses, your sanity,

Even your soul.

ORIGINS, GEM CITY

So you think this is your town?

Call it Gem City,

Have been calling it Gem City so long

You don’t even know why

You call it Gem City,

Just take it for granted

Like on the corner of Grant Street

Those little noises, tweaks, bumps-in-the-night

At the old Melhorns building

At times strolling by old Harry Goucher,

Lost, looking for his home, you know,

The one no longer on River Avenue.

He doesn’t feel at home in the grave,

Either, up in Union Cemetery, absent

With a few other absentees

Like Suzanne Daniels, a centenarian

Formerly of the living some 90 years ago

So formal in place-setting her tables,

She’ll rearrange your forks, spoons and sanity

For you with an unexpected appearance

Here and there in her building.

Then there’s that John Doe

You call the Hanging Head of Camp Crumb,

He was distraught, all right,

Found out he married the wrong woman,

Turned out his black-hearted half-sister,

So he took the eternal plunge

Right off Scaffold Rock, keeps

Sentry up there high in the trees

Whistling trespass alarm through

The hollows of his eyes.

These common folks had so much in common,

My descendents who descended

Through my dark side.

Some call me patriarch, some usurper,

Me, who bathed in Chief Logan’s baby’s blood

At Yellow Creek, me, who lived to be 107;

So strange, don’t you think,

Even for strange folks like you,

You whose sires I sired so so long ago,

Me, Auver Michael Myers, the  “great”grandsire

Of you who not esca

pe this caging city—

Cousins, kiss-of-death cousins—

Who shall live a long long time,

If you can call ghosting living;

Such glowing examples of kin you are,

Even for inbred hybrids.

Shine shine shine on,

All my little gems.

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF THE OHIO VALEY 

            September 1781, It was a scene worth of a Hollywood plot:  Andrew Poe and Wyandot Chief Bigfoot combating along the meanering stream of Tomlinson Run with riffles and tomahawks and continuing their struggle into the Ohio River where they were reduced to the savagery of bare-hand combat where the half-foot taller Virginian. Wading waist deep, finally gave the Wyandot subchief a fatal baptism.

            Witnesses stated that before his brother Adam could reach them with his scalping tools, Chief Bigfoot slipped away on the surface, rolled over and howled in pain and hate before the blue-gray currents claimed him and swept him away to his ancestral sky lands.

            Some claim his final utterings were a curse, the dark tone of hatred in any language unmistakable.  Whether the curse theory is merely conjecture, there is some evidence to give credence to truth in it for drownings followed there by an unholy dozen.

            The first recorded drewning occurred April 12, 1912 when four young Port Homer men returning from a prayer meeting across river from Wesely Chapel in a john boat capsized, spilling Harry Brant, 20, and brother Earl, 18, along with Hugh Sproul, 18, and Clifford Howard, 17.  All four drowned.  A fifth passenger, J. Crosley, managed to desperately cling to the upturned craft until rescued.

            According to Crosly, during the boys’ return trip, they were rowing smoothly across the river, reached midstream, when for no apparent reason the boat overturned, spilling the crew of five into the swift spring currents of the Ohio River.

            It should be pointed out the Ohio River was much shallower and less wide at that period and that the navigational structure  Dam Number 9 just south of Empire was currently under construction. 

            The new dam when finished did slow the big blue stream some and widened it and then in 1960 the completion of a yet more modern structure, the New Cumberland Locks and Dam, made the water upstream deeper, almost lake-like, at times current-less, but not less dangerous.  Still the drownings happened at Port Homer, including one of a recreational boater in the chamber itself in the early 1980s and another on april 6, 2009 when 26-year-old Michael Harvey,  a deckhand for Campbell Towing Company, fell off a barge and drowned in harvor of the W.H. Sammis Plant’s harbor at Port Homer.

            The Sammis Plant harbor, incidentally, has also been a collectio point for victims drowning upstream, in colloquial river talk called “floaters,” three of which found their final passage downstream directl across te site of the deadly dunking of Chief Big Foot.

            Perhaps even outside the Ohio River did the Wyandot’s curse carry because in April 1935, a 12-year-old boy fishing in the lake used by Stratton Clay for industrial water slipped in and drowned, the accident occurring less than a mile from BigFoot’s watery grave, and what a quarter-century later would become the site of the New Cumberland Locks and Dam where two workers fell and drowned during its construction.

            Coincidence or curse-induced?  We will never know for sure, but a tally of 11 have found a watery demise within a one-mile distance of one another, and counting the first victim, the Wyandot subchief, a total of an unholy dozen, giving credence to the title “Port Homer—the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio Valley.”

MELHORN'S CORNER

      The Four Tops' "Same Old Song" blared from the jukebox in the corner while the four of us puffed away on Old Golds, blowing smoke so thick you could have cut it with a knife pawned at Richie Wallace's.  We were nursing our bottles of Coke, about 15 cents a bottle and deposit- worthy those days, when suddenly Lou Melhorn swept his arm from his side toward the exit.  "All you boys do is come here to smoke behind your mothers' backs," he cried in that reedy voice of his.  "Now get the Hell out of here."
      Hell was a smokey place we had heard, perhaps not so smokey as the ledge upon which we were now smoking outside Melhorn's overlooking the sidewalk.  We were somewhat critical of Lou's entrepreneurial skills.  How could any T-town businessman risk losing such big and influential spenders to perhaps Happy's up the other side of the block or even to Rudy's near the high school.  Crossing over the north end boundary of Cleveland Street was akin to scaling the Berlin Wall because a few north end toughies always seemed to materialized out of the Ohio Valley pollution and participate in their favorite pastime: rearranging your face simply because they didn't like your looks.
      Me, Tim Maple and the two Jocko twins would take our 27 cents elsewhere and tell Lou where to stick his Popsicle sticks.
      Back then tobacco companies like Lucky Strikes, Marlboro, Winston and Old Gold advertised on television how relaxing, soothing and James Dean cool cigarette smoking was.  The only side affects that we knew of was that smoking stunted your growth.  So whenever a faintly familiar car would approach along Trenton Street, we would deftly cup our mouldering smokes inside the palms of our hands because we did not want the Red Knight coaches thinking the next Don Sutherins and George Deideriches were going to develop into some puny weaklings good for only practice dummies.
       Coming from the direction of Lenny's Sunoco down our side of Trenton was Doughnuts, stooped over as though looking for money, hands folded behind his back.  Occasionally, he stopped inside Melhorn's to drink tea from a saucer.
      A cocker spaniel yapped along the white picket fence two lawns above us.  Doughnuts slipped a hand into a pocket of the baggy hobo jacket he always wore--even in the dog days of summer as was this day--and stuck his hand inside the fence, the dog licking the treat from his hand and Doughnuts's face.
      One of us, probably a Jocko, would have asked Doughnuts how he was doing, but Doughnuts would have most likely told us "None of our God-damned business" as he did the day before.  We watched Doughnuts shuffle down Trenton Street onto the overhead bridge, only seeing his blue ball-capped head appear as he ascended the summit of the bridge.
      We knew any moment Lou would beg us to go back inside to spend the 27 cents remaining amongst us.  Five, six…15 minutes later we were still awaiting the apology when Bill Jaco came lumbering toward us toting a black umbrella with a wooden hook despite the cloudless sky.  Bill was making his early evening rounds and we could tell by the pizza sauce and chocolate on his white sleeveless T-shirt he had already made his stops at Johnny's Pizza and the Dairy Aisle.
      "How's it hanging, Bill?" one of the Jockos asked.  I couldn't tell which Jocko; they both looked the same that day.
      Bill stuck out that footlong pointer finger of his and poked Jocko right in the stomach.  "Whoops!" Bill said.  His voice sounded as though it trumpeted through an elephant trunk.  To us, his shoulders were as broad as an elephant's.
       A white Ford Fairlane rolled to a stop at the corner.  "Ford junk," Bill tooted as though he were reading a fact from the Encyclopedia Britannica.  "Ford junk.  Hit a bump and the seat falls down."
      The driver rolled his window down, asked Bill, "Can you tell me where Clarke's Funeral is?"
      The man was obviously from out of town.  Only out-of-towners got lost in this town of 7,000 residents or stopped for the stop sign at the bottom of the overhead bridge.
      "Up bay," Bill trumpeted, "Up bay."  Toot fix Fords.  Fix junk.  Clarkie's goosey.  Clarkie's full of stiffs."
      Bill was talking talk only T-towners could interpret while the out-of-towner just shook his head from side to side.  Bill must have seen the guy's wife in the car and said, "Man marries woman something loose--something loose."
       Finally, the man poked his head out the window and shouted, "Man, you are completely nuts!"
      Bill merely eyed the man as if adding another nut to a town already full of nuts and then said," "Not lost."
      The man peeled rubber onto Trenton, smoke fountaining from his wheels still crossing Findlay.  Bill philosophically said, "Town's full of nuts" and then lumbered his way toward downtown.
      The four of us figured we would let Lou off easy and returned inside, lit up four Old Golds while we listened to "The Same Old Song."
   

THE BEST THERE NEVER WAS--THE LEGEND OF HAROLD "OINK" COULTER

     When a few old sports veterans get together in the Gem City, the topic of Toronto High School's greatest athlete arises occasionally.  Names such as Chip Coulter, Clark Hinkle, George Deiderich, Don Sutherin and Otis Winston are always mentioned, but one name I always bring up won't be found in any of the record books.
     You see, a classmate of mine, Harold "Oink" Coulter, played basketball only his freshman year.  Had he continued to play--that includes any sport--I am certain he would have been crowned the best.
     Oink possessed the hand-eye coordination of a magician.  He wasn't the tallest, fastest or strongest athlete in our class, although he was gifted in all these attributes.  What he possessed was way above what everybody had and that was coordination.
      Playing Little League for Cattrell's during the early 60s, I had heard all about the legend way before I encountered him  He was rumored to throw the only curve ball in the entire league, and to an 11-year-old batter during those days to face that kind of skill was akin to confronting someone with supernatural powers.
       I recall the fateful day when we were finally going to face Oink on the mound.  We were undefeated, with Oink posing as our last obstacle to remain unblemished for the 20-game season in a league consisting of twelve teams.  Our strategy was to step up in the batter's box when Oink started hurling curves, an approach enabling the hitter a good shot at the slower pitch before it broke.  Oink recognized this plan immediately and reared back and blew his lively fastball by us.  So--we moved back in the box and he curved us simple.  The game was our only loss of the season.
      I recall another time when we were in seventh grade playing pick-up football at S.C. Dennis School.  Oink was passing by on his bicycle and stopped.  I never saw him play football before, or even hold one in his hands for that matter, but he asked for the ball and promptly punted a perfect spiral 45 yards.  "Let's see you do that again," everyone said, knowing football was our rare chance to embarrass Oink.  He duplicated more kicks, all going 40 to 50 yards--all perfect spirals.
      Another time I recall sitting in sixth grade at St. Francis School.  For some reason the public schools were off that day and we weren't.  I was daydreaming out the window when I saw Oink approaching on his bicycle.  At the corner of Grant and Euclid, he popped a wheelie and pedaled right by the sixth grade windows, the seventh grade windows, the eighth grade windows and continued, reared back in the banana seat, hands braced on the handlebars, churning the pedals until  turning the corner on Daniels Street, two blocks away, out of sight.  The first flight by the Wright Brothers could not have covered the same distance.
       Basketball was by far his best game.  He could do anything with a round ball except make it talk.  Oink was the only ball handler I had ever seen being guarded by defenders with their legs crossed.  Nobody wanted embarrassed by having the ball dribbled between their legs by anybody.  And Oink could turn an opponent's face redder than a Red Knights jersey.
      The best way to defend Oink was to stand under the basket and bet him he couldn't make a shot from half court, and maybe his heel would accidentally touch the mid-court line so that you could get him on and over-and-back violation.  Oink was the only kid I knew who practiced shots from half court, and he made a good percentage of them.
      He was the last guy you wanted to challenge in a game of H-O-R-S-E.  Besides being able to rainbow shots from various distances, he could bank a ball off both walls on the northwest corners of the Franklin School building and swish it through the hoop.
      As I mentioned, Oink played only one season at the high school level, most of which was on junior varsity, although everyone in school and in the stands knew Oink was the best player on the varsity.  A few times the coach would put Oink in the varsity game.  I remember one time Oink was dribbling about 20 feet from Toronto's basket, an opponent between him an the hoop, arms raised high, knees bent in defending position.  Oink nonchalantly dribbled behind his own back and then around the defender, a complete 360-degree sweep and then swished the ball through the net.
      This wasn't exactly the type of tactic coaches in those days had in mind regarding fundamental basketball and was probably the main reason Oink spent most of his varsity tenure on the bench.  The coach tried to make Oink play basketball the way the coach thought basketball should be played.  Oink could achieve greatness and lead the Red Knights to the state title someday, only via the way of the head coach.
      But sports was not about titles, the state and the greatest--certainly not about pressure.  If he could not have fun, he wasn't going to play.  He never shot his majestic arching set shot in a Red Knights uniform again.
      Looking back, Oink was right all along.  If anything motivates you in sports other than having fun, you are participating for all the wrong reasons.  Coaches and athletes work themselves to the brink of exhaustion.  Heck, Oink was good at what came natural to him.  He was the best that never was.
 

Harold Coulter, shown on THS 1967 squad, was the only guy who could have wore a name like Oink gracefully

THE MYSTERIOUS INDIAN ROCKS OF BROWNS ISLAND

                                          THE PETROGLYPHS OF THE UPPER OHIO VALLEY

                                    

                                                                   

            The age-old adage regarding art says that every picture tells a story, but regarding the Indian Rock art of the Upper Ohio Valley, every picture portrays a mystery.

            The native American representations are called petroglyphs, which are crude images of wildlife, humans and symbols scratched or pecked into the surface of large flat sandstones lining the shores of the Ohio River and other sites across the country.  Some of the more renowned local petroglyph sites include Smith’s Ferry, Babb’s Island, old Dam Number Eight and the head of Brown’s Island, although evidence suggests, the two-mile mid-water flood plain could have centered four different petroglyph sites.

            “Rock Art chronicles the long histories, the hunting ceremonies, and the religions of diverse native peoples, “wrote James D. Keyser and Michael Klasser in Plains Indian Rock Art.  “They reveal their relationships with the spirit world and record their interaction with traditional enemies and the earliest Europeans.”

            Native Americans considered boulders prominent features of the landscape, and the Ohio, itself a Native American name, meaning river with whitecaps, or just simply beautiful stream, was a major route of transportation and trade centuries before the first Europeans arrived.

            Archaeologists have often calculated the time periods when the Native Americans etched their work in rock, ancient peoples ranging from Hopewell, Adenas, woodland and modern Indians, but often have been left with only educated guesses of the true artists as in the case of the late James L. Swauger of Ohio State University, who studied the local petroglyph sites in 1969.

            “Babb’s Island is the only site investigated in Ohio which holds water bird figures,” Swauger wrote in Petroglyphs of Ohio.  “It’s affinities are with Brown’s Island in W.V. and Smith’s Ferry in Pa.  The generally more sophisticated artistry of the carvings on these sites, as well as their common possession of water bird figures suggest a ‘school’ of petroglyph artists working along this 30-mile stretch of river.”

Swauger also theorized that the local rock art could be attributed to Mongahela Man, also called proto-Shawnees from 1200 a.d. to 1750 a.d.

Work by Charles Whittlesley suggests otherwise.  Or perhaps he knew of a site other than the Brown’s Island one, recorded in the archaeological ledgers as site 46HK8.  Whittlesley noted in the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal that Newburgh founding father Michael Myers “saw from the south shore of the river, opposite the head of Brown’s Island, an Indian at work on the flat rocks.  He shot the Indian, and, getting to the island on a raft, he saw effigies of animals, among them that of a deer which the Indian had partly executed.”

Using the Deer Rock incident as conclusive evidence, Whittlesley went on to write.  “It is nearly demonstrated that they are not the work of the Mound Builders unless that race and the historical Indian are one.”

Indeed, on the last page of Dr. E. R. Giesly’s epic poem about Myers, Stalwart Auver, is a drawing of a boulder with 1797 on top, and below this date are several crude drawn images.  What they represent is indistinguishable because of the poor quality of print.

One petroglyph site overlooked by Swauger was thought by antiquarian James McBride to be situated above the old Half Moon Farm on the West Virginia side.  On July 4, 1838, McBride crossed the river from Cable’s Eddy, present day Pottery Addition.

“We found the rock lying on the Virginia side of the river.  It lies about three feet above low water mark, having a flat surface of about nine feet by seven inclining a little toward water.  It is of hard stone, and all over the surface are various figures cut and sunk into the hard rock.  Amongst these figures are rude representations of the human form, tracks of human feet representing the bare foot and print of toes as if made in soft mud, tracks of horses, turkeys and a rabbit.  Several figures of snakes, a turtle and other figures not understood.”

During that period existed another landmark bearing the title “half moon,” a wing dam opposite the head of present-day Hancock County and perhaps the petroglyph about which McBride wrote sat farther north than the farm on the big bend of the river.

“One (carving) represents a wild turkey and is about life size,” wrote Joseph B. Doyle in History of Jefferson County.  “Stretched across its neck, apparently in flight, is a wild goose with neck extended at full length.  The heart of the goose is indicated by a small circle, with a line extending to the head.”

Other figures carved into this rock included a fox, a bear and some outlines of feet.  Doyle wrote that the rock bearing these figures stood at the upper entrance of Holliday’s Cove, now downtown Weirton.

One of the prominent Indian carvings upon the Brown’s Island site that James L. Swauger had investigated were two sand hill cranes approximately four meters square.  Curiously, like one goose at the Half Moon site, the heart of one crane is represented by a small circle with three lines running to the neck.

Petroglyphs at Smith's Ferry, Pennsylvania.  These flat rocks abounded on shoreline before submerged by modern dams.

Sandhill cranes petroglyph of Brown's island.

Could this petroglyph site and the other three be one and the same or four separate sites?  Perhaps even archaeologists will never know because these sites and the others along this 30-mile stretch of history have probably been permanently submerged with the erection of the modern high-rise dams.

THE NATION'S FIRST WORLD WAR I MONUMENT

                                   TORONTO, OHIO LAYS CLAIM TO THIS DISTINCTION

GUIESSEPPI MORETTI

THE COUNTRY'S FIRST WORLD WAR I MEMORIAL

                                   

                       

            Despite its Canadian name, Toronto, Ohio has always been a city of patriotism and fierce national pride as currently displayed by its array of American flags lining its streets.  But never was Toronto’s patriotism more fervid than when it unveiled the nation’s first monument dedicated to the American soldiers and sailors who had fought in World War I.

            It was November 11, 1919, Armistice Day, one year after hostilities of the great war had ended that as many as an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people amassed in Toronto streets, which were decorated with patriotic colors from one end of the river-edged town to the other.  These spectators watched a parade of 3,000 marchers, led by 250 soldiers, sailors and marines, trailed by the Toronto band, various civic organizations, as well as 800 school children all carrying tiny American flags.

            After the paraded concluded, the soldiers marched to town square where the War Commission awarded the servicemen bronze medals and made a few speeches, and then the honored defenders and public dignitaries crossed Market Street to the First Presbyterian Church where they ate a chicken diner prepared under the direction of Mrs. Mary Hanna and assisted and sponsored by the Daughters of America.

            After diner, the servicemen stepped outside under mild mid-autumn weather across to town square as the shadow of the five-ton statue canted eastward under the two-o’clock sun.  A large white cross now loomed on a platform before the veiled monument and standing before it were eleven girls clad in white, clasping a red rose, each girl representing the ten fallen sons and one fallen daughter of the Toronto area.

            The crowd of 3,000, settled and quiet, watched with eager anticipation a Miss McClean draw the cord encasing the ten-foot high monument that many of them had personally contributed to financially.  As Miss McClean swept her arm toward the glistening bronze statue, the crowd erupted into resounding applause.

            Present at the unveiling was Guiesseppe Moretti, whom the Toronto War Board had commissioned to sculpt the monument, of which the artist stated, “It represents the glorious liberty with the American soldiers and sailors by her side.”

            Moretti, 62 years of age at the ceremonies, was an Italian émigré who had gained fame in America for his public monuments cast in bronze and marble, most notably his work “Vulcan” in Birmingham, Alabama, still the largest cast iron statue in the world.  Other important works of his included the Stephen Collins Foster memorial and the entrance to Highland Park in Pittsburgh, where he had resided much of his life.

            Moretti was known as an eclectic personality who always wore a green tie.  Undoubtedly he was wearing his trademark color as he stepped off the podium, standing before the towering five-ton memorial he had completed in just six months.

            Next United States Congressman Benjamin Frank Murphy took the platform.  Murphy, a Republican representing the district, won election for six successive terms.  He gave a brief speech of welcome to the crowd and servicemen and then introduced keynote speaker William D. Upshaw, recently elected by Georgia voters to Congress.

            A son of a Confederate soldier and a staunch Southern Baptist, Upshaw was a strong supporter of the temperance movement, so much, in fact, he was known as the “driest of drys.”  Prior to his election to Congress, Upshaw served as vice president for the Anti-Saloon League and was instrumental with making prohibition a Georgia law by 1907.

            Upshaw, suffering from a spinal injury that occurred at age 18, and now 52, leaned upon crutches as he addressed the crowd with his passionate deep Southern drawl.  “I congratulate Toronto, Ohio on being the first community in America to erect and dedicate a monument to the glory of the living and the memory of the dead who fought for the safety of America and for the living of the world.”

            After several minutes of continued praise for the town’s patriotism and for its being a role model as an American melting pot, Upshaw segued into sermonizing upon the other war that was threatening the individual’s freedom.  “…in order that America may be kept clean for them—for those who come back to us in buoyant manhood or stagger back to us maimed or blind, reaching out their hands for encouragement from the nation for which they offered their all.  We have learned that if it required a sober citizen to live well and teaching this vital lesson to the nations now new-born in their freedom from autocracy, but still shackled by the slavery of drink, is America’s new mission to the peoples who have been set free.”

            Ironically, Upshaw’s visit to the Gem City failed to influence the citizens’ attitude toward consumption of alcoholic beverages because a little more than 50 years later in 1970, a poll conducted by “Time Magazine” listed Toronto the city consuming the most alcohol per capita in the United States.

            In 1932, Upshaw ran as presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party against Franklin D. Roosevelt, who favored the repeal of prohibition, and was overwhelmingly defeated.

William D. Upshaw

Lamplight Assisted Living Coming to Toronto soon.

            In 2004, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument was restored by the Toronto Beautification Committee and accepted in the National Register of Historic Places.

KAUL FIELD REVISITED

HISTORIC SPORTS VENUE OF TORONTO, OHIO

                  Hallowed is the ground where the glinted steel spikes of summer and autumn once trod in the north end of Toronto.

This small piece of earth, Kaul Field, where the bowling alley currently sits parallel to the 1100 block of Fifth Street, served as home field for some of Toronto’s most revered sports heroes, including Pick Nalley, Gabby Kunzler, Clarke and Gordie Hinkle and Hook Comer.

         Soon after the turn of the Twentieth Century baseball became vogue in the Gem City, with a semi-pro team, the Toronto Athletic Club, dominating most local nines.  At Kaul Field, the TAC hosted other semi-pros from the area and sometimes others of higher caliber.

         “The Pittsburgh Pirates came barnstorming into town along with Honus Wagner,” John Petras said.  “I can’t remember who won, but yes they did play in Toronto.”

         Petras, now resides in Royal Oak, Michigan, is the son of John Petras Sr., who was a member of the TAC before World War I and played alongside Pick Nalley, Wenzel Straka and other founding fathers of baseball in the Gem City.

                At the end of the 1918 Pittsburgh Pirates' season, Bill Mekechnie dropped out of baseball and moved his family to little Toronto where he took up a position of sales for Kaul Clay.  He also set up a grocery in the Daniels Building.  The following year, Mekechnie became player-coach for the Toronto Athletic Club and convinced no retired Pittsburgh Pirates legend Honus Wagner to play games for Toronto on weekends.  Both would eventually be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Honus Wagner

         A wooden fence enclosed Kaul Field then, but sometime around the 1920s the only wooden structure remaining was the grandstand framing the home plate area at the site approximately where the cul-de-sac is today on Fifth Street.

         It was this period that Toronto resident Tom McKelvey remembers well.  “Kaul Field was used for baseball in the summer and football in the fall,” McKelvey said.  “We had church leagues five nights a week, Monday through Friday.  Every church had a team.  The best team was always St. Francis, who we called back then the Mickeys”

         McKelvey also has fond memories of the semi-pro football club, the Toronto Tigers, when professional football was at its infancy and germinating in northeastern Ohio.

         “The Toronto Tigers played their games at home in the fall months in front of good crowds,” McKelvey said.  “The train pulled in across the field and the opposing players and fans stepped off; then walked to the field.”

         According to McKelvey, the Toronto Tigers and their opponents played with fierce competition, locals occasionally being replaced by ringers--college athletes playing for dough under aliases.

         “I heard two Ohio State players came in playing for 100 or 200 dollars.  Fats Henry came in from Washington and Jefferson.  Henry would later play for the Canton Bulldogs and become inducted in the Hall of Fame”

         Some of the Toronto standouts included the Ferris brothers and Hook Comer.  Comer had a short stint at fullback with the Canton Bulldogs alongside Henry and the great Jim Thorpe.

         Toronto High School also staged its football games at Kaul Field prior to 1930.  McKelvey’s father, Tom Sr., took young Tom to watch his first game, a match-up between Toronto and Warwood.

         “There were no lights back then,” McKelvey said.  “The games were held in the afternoon.  There were ropes stretched along the sidelines to keep us from coming onto the field.”

         Kaul Field was used for other endeavors beside sports during that era.  McKelvey said a traditional ox roast was held at the grounds around Thanksgiving Day.

         “I remember the kids from the north end ice skated in the winter there,” Vince Exterovich, a 1942 THS graduated said.  “There was a pond, actually a marshy area that froze over during the winter.  Mostly north end kids skated there.”

         Exterovich resided at Sixth Street back then, considering himself a south ender.  Today, the line separating the two ends of the Gem City runs east to west along Main Street, making the southern end larger in area than the older north.  All of Sixth Street today is located what is considered the north end.

         “The south end wasn’t developed in those days,” McKelvey said.  “It was mostly farms and Sloane’s.”

         During the Forties and the Fifties, with the emergence of Little League at newly built Memorial Park and the development of the south end with its new schools, Kaul Field was reduced to a sandlot until it ceased to exist at all with the construction of Toronto Lanes around 1960.

T-formation from the Toronto High School band on Kaul Field.

1913 Toronto Athletic Club

         “The field was very important,” McKelvey said.  “It was our arena.  Kaul Field was the center of ououtdoor sports for Toronto back then.”

1940s Aerial Photos of Toronto

The former Jeddo, Ohio and Follansbee Steel.  Note the village of Jeddo across from the north of the mill and the farmland before the construction of S. C. Dennis School.  At the lower left of photo are remnants of the dam once as the Dike.  It ran diagonally from the tip of Brown's Island to just downstream from the mouth of Jeddo Run.

South end view of Toronto Power Plant where a town once named Calumet sat.  At top of picture, barely discernible is Dam Number 9.

The former Stratton Clay works sat where the present day Lime operations of the W.H. Sammis Plant are.  Just left of center is Stratton Heights, minus the park.

Overhead few from north of old Toronto Power Plant and old Route Seven.

At lower left just showing is old St. Francis Convent across from new convent built around 1960.  Also, below old overhead bridge are houses standing along Railroad Street and a chemical plant on lot where present fire hall stands.  Prominent along lower Jefferson Street are vacant lots.  Note across the river is East Toronto, still with residencies.