There are questions that can change the course of history. And then there are those that just sit, nibbling at the back of your mind. This week, we tackle some of the latter with a visit to Butler County in our feature OKI Wanna Know, with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
Shirley LaPiana-Martin lives in Sharonville and sent a photo of low walls connected to a pair of ornamental stone pillars.
"Like it should be an entry to a driveway, and then nothing. It looks like it just peters out," she says. "I was simply curious. A friend and I were walking and she said, 'What's back there?' I said, 'I have no idea and I've lived here seven years.' I don't know if there was a house back there at one point in time."
This driveway to nowhere is on Fields Ertel between Reed Hartman and Route 42.
It's on the north side of the road, which places the property behind the pillars in Butler County. In the late 1980s a number of people in the area decided they'd get better services if they were a part of Sharonville, and voted in favor of annexation.
Darrin Upp with the Society of Historic Sharonville says he's familiar with the pillars and the driveway. The land belonged to Dr. Charles Curtis Jones, a medical doctor and surgeon who lived in Norwood, with his wife Kathryn, two sons and two daughters.
According to his obituary, Jones was an ear, nose and throat specialist who, over the course of his career, was on staff at General, Christ and Bethesda hospitals, and taught at his alma mater, UC Medical College.
Around 1918, Dr. Jones founded a dairy near his property. Darrin Upp says the 111-acre Pine Hill Dairy Farm offered pasteurized milk, cream, cheese, butter and eggs. There also is a Pine Hill Spring Water bottle in the society's collection.
The farm was in Hamilton County, but the driveway across the street, behind the pillars is in Butler County, and led to Dr. Jones' one-story log cabin. That may sound simple, but it had a wrap-around porch, and some marble features inside. And as glamorous as that may sound, the Joneses' main residence was still in Norwood.
He died in 1943. The farm property was sold and all the equipment auctioned off in 1953. That property is now the Copperfield housing development. The cabin is gone, but the land is still in the Jones family.
Getting to know Gano
About two miles due west of the old Jones cabin is the site of another question for OKI Wanna Know.
Lauri Harwood wants to know about Gano.
It's a little neighborhood, north of Hauck Road, and east from Reading Road.
The president of the West Chester-Union Township Historical Society says it was originally a retreat for the Gano family, who eventually turned it into a village.
Mary Jo Bicknell says John Stites Gano was working as a surveyor in the area while his family was living in Cincinnati.
"He basically got introduced to the area by John Cleves Symmes. So, we're going way back in the late 1700s. They started sending people out to do the surveying, breaking new ground, going into basically the wilderness, as they would say at that time."
Gano was enamored with the area, and brought his family up from Cincinnati to live.
His grandson, Charles, platted the community.
"A lot of the houses that were initially built are still there," Bicknell says. "It's just a quiet, very quiet area. He likened it to the Glendale area."
Glendale was incorporated in 1855. Gano in 1873.
Bicknell says the community was along a short line railroad, and had a depot.
"When we had the one-room schools there was nowhere for young women or even gentlemen to go on to get their whole 12-year education," she says. "So a lot of them would go down there, catch the train, and go down into Cincinnati, Reading and Lockland and further their education."
Bicknell says today, Gano is considered a neighborhood, but it was a village, like a lot of other places that have been swallowed up by suburban sprawl.
"Old West Chester is a village. We had Pisgah had their plat. Tylersville had their plat. Port Union had a plat," she says. "A lot of them didn't have over 20 lots. Port Union was very small. Pisgah was very small-platted, and so was Tylersville."
Bicknell says there's only one road in and out, underneath a railroad trestle. She says generally speaking, anyone who takes that road either lives in Gano, is visiting someone who does, or is just curious.
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