on the edge of Appalachia

Millfield Coal Mine Disaster

Important details are on the sign. Sunday Creek Coal Company Poston Mine #6  was considered the safest mine in the Hocking Valley. Two hundred and fifty some miners were working that day. The mine was known to be gassy. An electrical line arced, and the explosion came. Nearly all those died were choked by a non-explosive gas, carbon monoxide. Most of the men who escaped, climbed ventilation shafts. The nineteen that were found alive, only two were conscious. That group had walled themselves off from the gas by an ersatz wall they made from mud, burlap, scrap wood. This was Ohio's deadliest mining incident. The mine continued until 1945. Not until the 1970s was there some interest in marking the lives, and the event. 

 

I heard a professor of geography say, that the mid-West began in Lancaster and ended in Denver. East Millfield is in Athens County, which is wholly in Appalachia; and as Joe Burrow realised growing up, the area has much poverty. Lancaster is midway between the state capital and Athens. If one were to drive south on 33, you will see the flat ground approaching a rising wall of trees. Those hills of trees commence to Appalachia. While the Middle West is agricultural land of fecundity, Appalachia is one of rock. There is clay for pottery, pipes, and bricks. There is coal. Coal mining is dirty and deadly. When the coal has been tapped out, poverty remains. Ohio is not a coal mining state anymore.

Not very far from Millfield and Chauncey is Morristown Holiness Church. This was part of their campus. This is a Pentecostal sect.

basketball hoop on the porch of a rental unit 

The big engine of money generation in the county is the first college in the Middle West (the old North West), Ohio University. The county seat is there too in Athens' County, the biggest of the county's two towns, and in most decades the only town.  The government's definition of a town is 5,000 people. Each county has a county seat. In south east Ohio, several county seats are villages. One of the money makers in Athens is renting to college students. And, each year new bodies with fresh dollars in many old shabby abodes.

Black vultures high atop the old Athens Lunatic Asylum. 

The main building had a administrative core, with one wing for female residents, and one wing for male residents. There is a big stone on the building, 1868. The first patients came in 1874. Seeing the building's date alone, it would have been the great war to save the Union against insurrectionists, and secessionists. I have not seen the records, i would have guessed a number of war veterans might have been there. I did see a note, that many epileptics were sent there. Epilepsy was considered a form of lunacy. The name of the hospital was changed many times, and the patients were not all mad. Tuberculosis victims stayed there.

The place had many buildings. It was also a working farm, and some trade shops operated there. Physical labor was considered therapeutic, and it help sustain the enterprise. At one time, it was the largest employer in the county. It was like a village. In 1993 it was no longer a hospital, Ohio University absorbed it. 

 

Ohio University's oldest buildings are on what is called the College Green. In the 1950s & 60s the campus expanded with dormitories on the new East, West, and South Greens. The State Asylum was called the North Green unofficially by the students. Now the university is calling the class room buildings near College Green, "North Green".

In recent years, an interest has developed over the three cemeteries, WOUB-TV did at least one documentary. Also as a place where many lobotomies were performed, has made it a further interest to medical history.

Between the outdoor steps of a classroom under an arch, is this Jonah? 

James Edward Leonard Eldridge *1930, 2018 was a Michigan Wolverine footballer, who became a navy pilot. In 1958 was an art professor at Ohio University, and became Æthelred Eldridge. He was an avant-garde painter in black and white, and an eccentric enthused by William Blake. In 1967 he painted a very large mural on the arch connecting two parts of Seigfried Hall. The powers that were, were not amused. He painted it over in white, with two little hands trying to break through from behind the whitewash. For years it remained that way. I read that it was brought back in 2015. Eldridge lived in Millfield on a place he called Golgonooza (Blake's city of imagination).

Keith Wilde. Release. 2018. This is where Carpenter becomes Stimson. I took a snap on another day [click].

Ombrellino, there are seven of these in Ohio. This is the newest one. Saint Mary in Lancaster has been raised to a minor basilica. The dedication was on the Assumption of Mary, also a name of the parish, on its feast day on August 15th. Papal colors are scarlet and gold, the umbrella is kept half open, if the pope comes it becomes fully open. A tintinnabula (bell) is also given. Both are meant to be used in procession.