We Can Stop at Ratsville

 

"Let's take a little drive to Ratsville..." Every once in a while, when I was young, my family would take a drive after dinner to check out the crops and perhaps stop for a treat.  Sometimes the stop would be in Ratsville, now a "ghost town" in Henry County located in Liberty Township. Once, back when I remember in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a store there in a pretty well-worn building where one could pick up very limited groceries or a treat. 

The history of Ratsville was noted in a book on ghost towns in Henry County, now out of print. Walter Shockey, Richard Helwig and Charlie Griffith researched and wrote the story which is still of interest today.

"Cloverleaf (Corners) (Ratsville) Liberty Township, 1886- 1903

Cloverleaf, which is sometimes referred to as 'Ratsville,' was located in the northwest one-quarter of the Northwest one-quarter of Section 21, Liberty Township, Henry County, Ohio. The land on which Cloverleaf or Ratsville stood was owned by the Joseph Hoover family. Later the ownership of the property was transferred to the Fred Silveous family who were descendants of Joseph Hoover.

In 1886, John Silveous built a general store with living quarters located above the store on the southwest corner of the present day intersection of Henry County roads 11 and V. The original store at Cloverleaf Corners was cheaply built and unpainted and covered with red and yellow advertisements for a popular chewing tobacco.

The store received its light from kerosene lamps and was heated by a potbellied stove which was housed on the second floor. The front of the store had a low porch roof across the front with wooden hitching rails near the entrance.

Cloverleaf was never much more than a crossroads with a general store. In the 1800s, there were many such communities in the old Black Swamp region of Northwest Ohio.  The reason these towns prospered was the fact that country roads all over the region were passable only in the summer. Rather than fight the rain, mud, and muck of the swampy roads, farmers would stop at the crossroads general store closest to their farms.

The Cloverleaf store was one of the Black Swamp's finer 'shopping centers.' It contained everything from groceries and hardware to shoestrings, yard goods, drugs and, of course, the old cracker barrel.

Just across the road from the general store in Cloverleaf was located a cheese factory, which was opened in the late 1800s and operated until the early 1900s. This factory faced east in the southwest corner of the crossroads. Farmers from miles around would bring their surplus milk to have it made into cheese. The cheese factory went out of business when Pet Milk in Delta and Van Camp's condensary in Wauseon established regular milk pickup routes in the area.

In addition to John Silveous, other operators of the Cloverleaf store were the Fether and Jewell families, and Carl and Dora Sturdevant Wiles. The Wiles purchased the store in 1903, but three years later, a ravaging blaze destroyed the building.

Today, in 1980, a small cluster of homes dot the site of old Ratsville, while the site of Cloverleaf was turned into farmland."

By the time that I was aware of Ratsville, a "new" store was built about a half mile from the original.  

According to the Henry County History, Volume Two, 1976, Ratsville was named because of a joke, but the name stuck. "...one day the neighbors caught a great number of rats and, as a joke, some boys nailed them to a board and put them on the front of the store. The owner at the time became angry and chased the boys and so they named the store Ratsville.

In the photo above, it looks like a gas pump was available instead of hitching posts. If one were a kid with a little money, candy and gum or a bottle of pop could be purchased. It was a part of our childhood, but the actual building is not there anymore.

Who else remembers Ratsville?