Lost Ohio - by McNutt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A fascinating look at Ohio's forgotten history

Take a leisurely tour across the Buckeye State with author Randy McNutt to a massive swamp that swallowed pioneers' wagons, a haunted prison, a faded German utopia, a town where they still chase horse thieves, a marriage mecca, a village where Buster the dog voted Republican, and a myriad of abandoned "ghost towns" and small cities.

In Lost Ohio McNutt, who has devoted his career to uncovering forgotten Ohio and its spirited inhabitants, continues his travels around the state in an attempt to discover vanishing traces of our lives--celebrations, motels, road art, drive-in theaters, traditions, inventions, folk tales, battlefields, and forts. His journeys rediscover missing pieces of our past that reflect a state of mind as well as a collection of landscapes. McNutt's vanishing Ohio is a place where rural America converges with small cities and fading history and disappearing culture, lost to burgeoning technology, global economy, technological immediacy, and time. He visits Fizzleville, Sodaville, and Footville; the hollow, metal globe that is the final resting place of Captain John C. Symmes, who theorized that the earth was hollow and access to the core was through the polar caps; the Mansfield Reformatory, Ohio's largest and toughest haunted house; Waynesville, home of the Ohio Sauerkraut Festival; and Harry Dearwester, the "carny" who guesses peoples' weight with 90 percent accuracy.

This serious but offbeat journey around Ohio will appeal to those interested in heritage tourism, Americana, Ohio history and lore, and back roads and smalltown life.

Review Quotes

"Out there on black asphalt ribbons, deep in the heart of nowhere, I watch the images of towns and people grow smaller in my rearview mirror and finally fade to nothing. I feel at one with the speeding tires and the motion of the Jeep.... The movement seems strange yet vaguely familiar, as though it possesses a soul I once met but can't quite remember.... Those slowly disappearing images...and the blurry objects on the side of the highway were not solely optical events. They were fragments of time rushing past me, quickly and almost imperceptibly. I do not know where they went."

About the Author

Randy McNutt is a freelance writer and editor in Ohio. He has written for numerous newspapers and magazines in Ohio and throughout the U.S. His books include Hamilton (2005), Too Hot to Handle: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Recording of the 20th Century (2003), and Guitar Towns: A Journey to the Crossroads of Rock 'n' Roll (2002).