Many Abandoned Towns Dot the Lawrence County Landscape
6 May 1986 – Newspaper Unknown
Hallows hide the remains of dozens of tiny Lawrence County towns, now forgotten except by people with long memories or old maps from decades ago. These towns suffered the same calamity that has befallen their larger counterparts along the river. Their industry or their trade died out.
When the jobs left, the town folded. The list of such towns includes Okie, Ida, Gray, Ceebee, Essex, Oriole, Manhattan, Vermilion, Manker, Sherrits, Ellisonsville, and Cherryville. There’s also Polkadottte, Bartels Station and Superior.
We would have thought long ago Superior would have had a movie theater? Or Polkadottte had a broom factory? Or Bartels Station had a skating rink?
But that’s what people who remember the town or have studied them or live among the remnants recall.
Polkadotte (pronounced pokey dot) is a rusting junked car, an old house, a mobile home, and a red barn, The bleating of distant sheep and the calls of songbirds are the only non-mechanical sounds. The barn is the landmark a traveler uses to recognize the once-thriving community.
“It used to have a broom factory. The operator had three wagons on the road a day he made so many brooms,” said Betty Fowler, who listed her address as Polkadotte Creek. “They had a baloney manufacturing place, there was a coffin place and an undertaker,” she said, explaining she found the information while reading old issues of Ironton newspapers.
“The prosperity was in the late 1800s,” she said. “When the post office left, the town folded,” she added.
“Such economic activity was not limited to Polkadottte,” said local historian John Jones. “Waterloo was a lot the same way a couple of hotels eight or ten businesses,” he said.
“The county’s eastern section developed from a pioneer road linking Guyandotte with Chillicothe,” Jones said. “From Guyandotte, a traveler took the Old Post Road through Scottown , Polkadottte, and Lecta to pick up the Hannah Trace,” he said.
“The Hannah Trace was the early road to Chillicothe. It crossed the Ohio River near the mouth of Swan Creek in Gallia County,” he said.
That Polkadottte has vanished is typical of early settlers of the region,” Jones said. “So many who came from Virginia were squatters or soldiers. Most of the land was not farmed; they had timber and wild game, and that’s what they were looking for. When the timber was cut, and the game was taken, they moved on.” he said.
In Elizabeth Township, there are a cement plant and a union hall. According to maps, a town named Superior was there.
“It used to be quite a little town out there, “local genealogist Phil Thuma said. “It’s hard to believe that they were at one time – streets, sidewalks, and a movie theater.”
“The cement plant was the town’s only industry,” he added. “When that closed about 40 years ago, so did the town. Even the sidewalks were ripped up,” he said.
“The town just died. I don’t know why it died, except there was nothing to keep the people there,” he added.
Thouma remembers working in the 1930s for a company that installed refrigerators. He remembered putting a refrigerator in a house at the end of the street in Superior, but the electrical current was so weak that the motor would not run.
Where Ohio State Route 93 meets the southern end of Ohio 373, there is a group of mobile homes, small houses, and one building that looks an awful lot like a schoolhouse. It’s the old Bartels school
Lucille Withrow, whose family owns the building, said she had been told Bartels once had a grocery store, a post office, and a skating rink.
“There have been old people coming by here and saying they went to school there. They’d be up in their 80s or 90s now,” she said.
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