Jessica Cyders Archives

April 28, 2015December 19, 2021

Ever Use a Two-Holer?

Curator Jessica and I were exploring a huge abandoned brick school house on a hill overlooking Rendville, Ohio, when a couple said they knew of a building they thought was an old one-room schoolhouse. They’d show it to us if we didn’t mind them tagging along. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Definitely a school

Indeed, the nondescript building could have been just about anything from the outside, but once we looked inside, it was definitely a school. It had the chair rail around the walls that went below the blackboards. A long-gone central stove supplied heat, and there was the remains of an old piano against one wall.

Piano left behind

Time hasn’t been kind to the old piano.

Back before good roads and consolidation, the hills were full of small churches and schools because it was hard to get out of the hills and hollows of Southeast Ohio. On top of that, a lot of the towns were company towns where miners were paid in scrip which could only be redeemed at the company store. That discouraged workers from traveling.

Water came from cistern

Water came from a cistern that was located on the side of the school.

About 50 feet behind the school was a small building that was leaning at about a 45-degree angle.

Two two-holers behind school

Through the open door, we could see that it was a two-holer designed for urgent needs, no waiting. The hole on the right may have rotted away, or it may have been destroyed by wild animals who like the salt that soaks into the wood.

Figuring that unisex facilities probably weren’t common in the era when this school was operating, we looked around. Sure enough, about 50 or 75 feet away was another set of seats. The building was gone, but the seat remained.

April 27, 2015

Vinton County Padiddle

Curator Jessica and I had been roaming around in SE Ohio’s Vinton county looking at iron furnaces, cemeteries, the haunted Moonville Railroad tunnel (I’m getting around to that) and sunsets.

Just as I was pulling up to the main road, my headlights lit up a stop sign, much like one I photographed on Water Street. (Click on the photo to make it larger.)

Padiddle

Just then, I noticed a padiddle – a car with one headlight out – coming around the bend. I know all about padiddles because my Road Warriorette asked me if I had ever played the game after she spotted a one-eyed 18-wheeler on our road trip last fall.

Not being up on what games youngsters are playing, I hit Google for an explanation. I was enlightened by the Urban Dictionary: A game in which you look for cars with headlight or foglight out (padiddle) [also spelled pididdle] or tail light (pedunk) and call it out. When someone correctly calls a padidle or pedunk, all members of the opposite sex present must remove an article of clothing.
Example: Padiddle! You have to take off your shirts.

“Are you getting too sleepy to drive?”

Right after I declared “PADIDDLE” and waited expectantly for something exciting to happen, Miz Jessica said, “Ken, if you are getting sleepy, I can drive us back to Athens.”

“What do you mean ‘if I’m getting sleepy?’ I’m fine.”

“I figured you must be sleeping, because if you expect me to play by Urban Dictionary rules, then you have to be dreaming.”

Well, you can’t blame somebody for trying. I mean, what’s the use of doing research if you can’t put your knowledge to good use?

April 20, 2015

Phillip Sheridan Statue

I drove 590.1 miles from Athens, Ohio, to Cape Girardeau on Sunday. While on the road, I listened to an audio book about World War II submarine warfare.

That was an appropriate topic because, except for about the first 20 miles and the last 75 miles, it felt like I was IN a submarine. The rain varied between light to “Holy Cow! I can’t see.” Then, somewhere around Louisville, the Holy Cow rain mixed in with road spray and fog.

So, what does that have to do with the statue of Civil War General Phillip H. Sheridan’s statue in the Somerset, Ohio, town square?

Did Sheridan die in battle?

To be honest, my brain is fried and I either had to skip a day or post something that didn’t take much research.

Sheridan was a local Somerset boy, and his statue is near where his house was. I asked Curator Jessica if she could remember the “horse code” that says the number of legs in the air indicate the way the rider died. I don’t recall her exact answer, but Snopes set me straight. If the leg count equals death status, it’s more likely to be coincidence than plan.

For example, Somerset’s statue of Sheridan has both front legs off the ground. According to the urban legend, that would indicate that he died in battle. A statue of him on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., has a horse with all four hooves on the ground, which is supposed to signify that he died of other causes. In Sheridan’s case, the Washington statue would be correct. He died of heart failure.

Waiting for the bird to fly

Photography is all about capturing the moment. By the time we finished dinner, it was getting pretty dark, but Jessica wanted to walk up to see the statue up close.

I stood there patiently waiting for two things:

A puff of wind to come along to bring the flag to life
The bird to fly off the horse’s head so I could capture it in midair.

The flag finally moved, but, after several minutes of waiting, I discovered that the “bird” was the horse’s ear, and it wasn’t EVER going to fly away.

April 19, 2015

A Cemetery Mystery

I have to head back to Cape on Sunday morning, so Curator Jessica wanted to do one last ramble around SE Ohio on Saturday. We found some neat stuff I’ll share later, but this tale shows the value of knocking on doors.

We wanted to see if anything was left of a street scene I had shot in the late 1960s in Rendville, Ohio. It was a small town that was predominately black and produced the first black mayor in Ohio, and one of the first black union organizers.

At the top of a hill overlooking the town was a cemetery. What struck us right off was that a wide path had been mowed to a circle in the middle of the graveyard. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

It gets even more curious

In the top of the circle was a small black fence surrounding a freshly-planted tree. A tree so freshly-planted that the ground was still wet where it had been watered.

Next to the fence was a metal post with an upside-down bottle on it. Glued or somehow affixed to it was a small bowl, and in it was a glass with water in it and some fresh flowers. On the ground was a lei made of orchids. Miz Jessica pointed out that they wilt quickly, so they had to have been left recently.

Knock on a door

I said, “There’s a house across the street. Why don’t you go over, knock on the door and ask if they know what this is all about?”

She demurred, so I said I’d do it with her in tow.

Steve, the man who answered the door, said he didn’t live there. He just borrows the house for two weeks a year to go turkey hunting, and he didn’t know what was going on, but we had made him curious.

Scratching our collective heads

We all went back to the circle, walked around a bit tossing out theories, and admitted we were stumped.

“I know the mayor,” Steve said. “I’ll give him a call. If you give me your phone number, I’ll ask him, then let you know.”

I never expected to hear from Steve again, but we were half-way back to Athens after a great dinner in Somerset (just down from a big statue of Civil War General Phillip Sheridan) when my phone rang from an unknown number.

Mother of the town clerk

It was Steve. He said the mother of the town clerk had died and they held the ceremony in the circle and planted the tree in her honor. She must have been cremated because there was very little earth disturbed. So little, in fact, that I thought it might have been excess from when they dug the hole for the tree.

A minute or two after we hung up, my phone rang with Steve’s number showing. I heard him telling the story of the funeral to someone in the background. Evidently he had butt-dialed me.

“We all win”

“We all win,” I told Miz Jessica. “We got our question answered, and he can dine out for a week telling his buddies about this crazy couple who banged on his door with something that sounded like it was out of the Twilight Zone.”

History is all about HIS story and HER story, and I love knocking on doors to capture snippets of history.