Waynesville, Ohio

We continued to have problems securing reservations for a place to park our home through out the rest of this past week.  And no wonder, on Saturday in the small town of Bainbridge we drove right through the middle of their Fall Leaves Festival, and when we stopped for gas earlier we encountered people dressed for a Renaissance Festival.  Fortunately Waynesville had their Ohio Saurerkraut Festival last week-end,  there we did find a place to stay for a couple of nights.  Our sister-in-law Mary Jo drove down from Dayton and joined us for lunch in Waynesville on Friday.  There is certainly plenty to do in this small town, it has about 13 antique shops and around 30 specialty shops.  We also discovered that it has many fine eating establishments, as the Hammel Inn Restaurant and B and B.  It may have been used for a tavern as early as 1800.  The town, founded in 1797, held its first election here in 1803.

We picked up a walking tour and map of Waynesville at one of the stores, which helped us find the historic homes and also filled us in on some of its history.  A room in the basement of the Hammel House could have been part of the Underground Railroad, and there is also another house in the town, the Seth Haines House,
which has parts of a tunnel used to bring slaves up from the river.  Quaker Seth Haines was Waynesville's first millionaire.  The original brick house, built in 1854, was covered with stucco in 1909.

Quakers moved into Waynesville from four eastern states in the early 1800s as a protest to slavery.  There are several Quaker historic buildings still in town, as well as the Friends Burying Ground.  The White Brick Meeting house was completed in 1811, it is the oldest regularly attended religious building west of the Allegeheny Mountains.

 

David and Rachel Evans were the first couple to be married in the meeting house in 1813.  Their son, Dr.John Evans, was the founder and first president of Northwestern University as well the founder of the University of Denver.  He was also the first governor of the Colorado Territory.  We visited Mt.Evans in Colorado last year, and now learned that the mountain was named after him, as is Evansville Illinois.  It is interesting for us to sometimes discover connections between places that we visit, from one part of our nation to another.   The Evan's home, built in 1836, is pictured below.

 

Just for the season of Halloween I will close with a picture of a Gothic styled barn.  It was not on the list of historic buildings, but I am sure it has its interesting own story to tell.