You ask all kinds of questions and sometimes you don't know where to find the information to satisfy your curiosity. That's where our feature OKI Wanna Know comes in. This week, we take what sounds like a bumpy ride.
There's a road on the West Side that has a bit of a spooky-sounding name: Devils Backbone
"We used to bike up and down Devils Backbone. I can imagine why people named it that because it's pretty curvy and has a lot of steep hills. But who decided to name it," asks B.A. Klapper lives in College Hill but grew up on the West Side.
Devils Backbone Road has one end in Green Township and the other in Dehli Township. The north end is near the intersection of Werk and South roads, while the south end is near Rapid Run and Neeb roads.
It's winding and steep in places, and was referenced in the 1993 movie "Airborne."
The movie features a roller-skating race called the Devils Backbone. While it was filmed in Cincinnati, none of the scenes were shot on the actual road.
There were real races there, however. The Nov. 17, 1958, edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer tells of a car club that sponsored time trials on the hill alongside Muddy Creek.
Green Township Historical Association Vice President Joe Flickinger says the road was also popular with hiking and biking groups, though it wasn't made with recreation in mind.
"It's been described in several records as an old wagon trail. It was a road that was fairly dangerous, I guess you could say, for some of the wagons that were going up and down it," he says. "We have a couple of articles about some wrecks that people had."
There were more than a couple of attempts to rename the winding road but they obviously failed. In
April 1930, the Enquirer quoted Hamilton County commissioners, saying changing the name would be confusing and expensive.
Not Satanic
Devils Backbone has nothing to do with Satanic anatomy; it's simply a geological feature.
Dylan Ward is a geomorphologist at the University of Cincinnati. He studies how landscapes are changed by erosion. He helped us with another West Side feature: the dent in Dent.
Ward says travel around the country and you'll find a number of features ascribed to Lucifer: Devil's Tower in Wyoming; the Devil's Elbow in Missouri; and Utah's Devil's Slide. Wisconsin has both Devil's Island and the Devil's Punchbowl.
"There's a lot of these and they tend to be jagged ridges that might be impassable terrain. There's a number in the West that were tricky to navigate with a wagon and a team of oxen," he says. "It's a really common name applied to these landforms."
The devil has more than one backbone.
There's one in Indiana just across the Ohio River from Louisville. Loveland, Colorado has one, and Tennessee has a Devil's Backbone State Park. Union forces won the Battle of Devil's Backbone in Arkansas during the Civil War. There are others in Texas, New Mexico, Virginia, and the list goes on.
"They're ... shaped by erosion and that erosion's going to follow patterns of weakness in the rocks or whatever the material is below. That's going to result in some kind of regular spacing of ridges and valleys or knobs," says Ward.
Hamilton County Engineer Eric Beck says he couldn't find who gave the road its name. The first mention of Devils Backbone that he could find was on an 1884 map.
"The previous map before that had it unnamed," he says. "It's consistent with historical roads, specifically on the East Coast, where roads developed from pathways; horse paths and buffalo trails that went along the ridges of hillsides."
The West Side's Devils Backbone is divided, with most of it in Green Township.
Beck says it's dissected at, and by, the Muddy Creek.
"The story is that there was a landslide and part of it slid into Muddy Creek. Hamilton County does have a lot of landslides, especially out there on the West Side," he says. "As the glaciers receded, they left us a lot of clay, and when that gets wet it holds moisture and it doesn't like to hold its slope. It does slide down into the creek and that would make sense for that area."
Joe Flickinger with the Green Township Historical Association confirms that.
"There was a bridge washout at one point, and supposedly they were supposed to rebuild it. I want to say it was sometime in the 1950s or 1960s," he recalls.
Flickinger says their records confirm why the road was named, but not by whom.
"I wish I could say it was anything but... a geographic place name," he says. "Unfortunately, we don't have anybody who named it, any group that named it."
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