Our feature OKI Wanna Know is a chance for you to get an answer to the question that's puzzled you for years. This week, we trace a railroad with a dead end.
Rose Poggioli of College Hill says she's been intrigued by Spring Grove Cemetery ever since she moved here 30 years ago.
"My husband and I were going to visit his parents, who are in that cemetery. He happened to point out there are railroad tracks that travel through a part of the cemetery," she says. "Did the railroad tracks originate, and then they built the cemetery around the tracks, or were the tracks actually put in through the cemetery, and if so, what was the reason?"
The cemetery came first.
It was chartered in 1845, according to Spring Grove's historian Debbie Brandt. And four years later, a local railroad company decided they wanted to put a line down.
"The part down front at that time was swamp, pretty much," Brandt says. "And it was leased to neighboring farms to pasture their cows, so it wasn't actually the part they were using for the cemetery to bury people."
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Brandt says the cemetery board fought the installation, but lost. She says they did win some concessions. "There would be no sidetracks, no water stations or workshops within a quarter-mile of the cemetery."
You can probably see where this is going. Funeral directors would either have to schedule funerals around the railroad's timetable, or risk a procession getting held up, or even divided by a train. But Brandt says there was a solution.
"The railroad built an overpass, which is what you see today when you come in," Brandt says. "That is not the original overpass. That has been redone. But they built the overpass so funerals could proceed on and there would be no interruptions."
There was only one set of train tracks cutting through the cemetery. And just one rail company using them: The Cincinnati Hamilton Dayton Railroad.
Jim Krause is the librarian for the Cincinnati Railroad Club.
"When we moved our library over from the storage warehouse to the third floor of the Museum Center, I was cataloging all the various books," he says. "One of the things I noticed was that there was nothing on the Cincinnati Hamilton Dayton Railroad. I was quite surprised."
So, Krause started writing the book on the CH&D — literally. It should come out in October.
Krause says sitting in the Mill Valley, there was Spring Grove Cemetery to the north; next, some swampy land; then the Mill Creek; and on the south side of the valley, the Miami Erie Canal. So, the tracks had to go through the cemetery's swamp — because it was the path of least resistance.
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"You have to remember, back then locomotives weren't particularly — how should we say — robust," he says. "So you had to have pretty much level land. There were other places they could have went to, but that would have required going over very hilly terrain, or having to dig out tunnels to get to Hamilton. So they took the easy way out."
The Cincinnati Hamilton Dayton Railroad eventually acquired other rail lines in the region. It was owned for a time by noted investment banker J.P. Morgan, until he sold it to the Baltimore and Ohio Company.
"What really did the CH&D in was the 1913 flood in the Great Miami valley. The Baltimore and Ohio had probably overpaid for the road, and now on top of this, they had to rebuild large sections of it."
Krause says the B&O sold off most of the rail lines, and formed a new company with what was left: a line from Cincinnati to Toledo, and Toledo to Ironton.
"In any event, in 1917 pretty much the CH&D — Cincinnati Hamilton and Dayton Railway — disappeared. The Baltimore and Ohio painted the signs over. All of the tickets were changed. You wouldn't see anything that the CH&D ever existed."
Except maybe for some tracks running through a cemetery.
Debbie Brandt says those tracks were used until the late '80s, or maybe even the early '90s. She says a single train would use them about once a week to service a single customer in Winton Place.
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"When that ended, Spring Grove bought the right-of-way back from CSX [railway], who owned it at that time," she says. "They removed the tracks and the track bed and are developing that for future use right now."
Aerial photos from the Ohio Department of Transportation show some of the tracks were still in the ground in 1996. By 1998, they were all gone. Even the crossings at Winton Road and Crawford Road had been paved over.
