We’ve all taken a detour that delayed our arrival back home in Springfield by three hours for a 15-minute visit to Riverside, Iowa (pop. 1,008), “the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk,” to get our picture taken next to a fiberglass replica of a Constitution-class Starfleet starship that’s roughly the size of a Mini Cooper.
Um.
I still owe my wife a dinner out for that one.
But we’ve got plenty of the bizarre in our own backyard.
Here, then, is your unofficial guide to a few things you never knew existed — or maybe things you’ve always wondered about.
Hartman Rock Garden
1905 Russell Ave., Springfield; free admission seven days a week
Where else will you find concrete replicas of the White House and Independence Hall or a castle built with 100,000 little rocks, all surrounded by a white picket fence made of concrete?
Ben Hartman was pushing 50 in 1932 when he lost his job as an iron molder during the Depression.
He’d spend the last 12 years of his life turning his yard into a concrete shrine to God, country and Mae West (she’s represented as one of umpteen lawn ornaments Hartman made of 1930s pop-culture figures, religious icons and storybook characters).
The site recently underwent a restoration — the lawn ornaments now only come out on special occasions.
The Hartman family always insisted that Walt Disney got the idea for Disneyland after an associate visited the local rock garden.
Not likely.
But, hey, in the realm of the weird, anything’s possible.
Pennsylvania House
1311 W. Main St., Springfield; tours available from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at a cost of $5 for adults, $2 students
Here, in this building that was, at one time or another, a National Road tavern, a Victorian-era sanatorium and a 1930s flophouse inhabited by such well-known local prostitutes as “Three-Way Katie” (seriously), you’ll find “one of America’s finest button collections” — more than 100,000 of ’em — courtesy of the Lagonda Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
“This is one of the big draws for Pennsylvania House,” explained local DAR member Marilyn Vaglia.
“Even men are into them,” verified DAR member Lois Wittke.
The oldest is from 1736.
The rarest is one from 1799 commemorating the death of George Washington that reads, “Long Live the President.” (It’s one of only five known to exist, Vaglia said.)
And the coolest?
Quite surprisingly, there are many — but the two buttons shaped like human skulls made from walrus ivory are pretty sweet.
Johnny Appleseed Museum
Bailey Hall, Urbana University; free admission 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays
“People say, ‘He was a real person?’ I get that a lot,” confessed Ardrita Mast, a volunteer at Urbana University’s Johnny Appleseed Museum.
To some, the thought of a one-room shrine to folk hero Johnny Appleseed would seem to be about as goofy as a museum dedicated to Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan.
But John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) was a real guy — a missionary for the Swedenborgian Church (the founders of Urbana U) who planted apple trees in the area in the early 1800s.
OK, cool, but did he really wear a metal pot on his head?
“And the answer’s yes,” Mast said.
For $25, you can even buy your own metal pot/hat here.
The Westcott House birdhouse
1340 E. High St., Springfield
Frank Lloyd Wright was a visionary architect — but for his only Prairie Style house in Ohio, he designed a birdhouse so avant-garde that birds don’t even know it’s a birdhouse.
Resting atop a wall near the main door, nobody’s ever seen a bird near this thing.
“It’s definitely one of the strangest pieces of woodworking I’ve ever done,” said Terry Van Auker, a local furniture designer who built the birdhouse from Wright’s own drawing for Westcott’s 2005 restoration. “I’m not a birder, but I know enough about birds. No martin would ever make a home in that thing.”
So what gives?
“I’ve never seen anybody make square holes on a birdhouse,” snickered Doug Overacker of the Clark County Audubon Society.
The George W. and Vinna M. Harper mausoleum
Cedarville North Cemetery, Ohio 72
“He had more money than taste,” observed Catherine Wilson, executive director of the Greene County Historical Society.
Yeah, but nobody else in Cedarville has, count ’em, two granite sphinxes guarding their giant, Egyptian-themed resting place.
Mr. Harper was a Clark County native — and apparently a reincarnated pharaoh — who became a bank president in Cedarville and one of Ohio’s largest landowners before he died in 1908.
Freshwater Farms of Ohio
2624 N. U.S. 68, Urbana
Here, at Ohio’s largest indoor fish hatchery, you can buy all the largemouth bass and channel catfish you want for stocking ponds.
But who else has a sturgeon petting zoo?
“We make it special,” said Dick Smith, the patriarch of the family operation. “Kids can get up close and personal to the sturgeon.”
Go ahead. They might be almost 5 feet long, but they don’t bite. In fact, they don’t even have teeth.
The star of the bunch has been nicknamed Flipper.
“If you get him excited,” Smith said, “he’ll practically dance on his tail.”
Harry Toulmin statue
Across from the Bushnell Building, Springfield
Unveiled in 2006, this 8-foot-tall bronze likeness of Mr. Toulmin might very well be the only 8-foot-tall bronze likeness of a lawyer anywhere.
Toulmin practiced in the Bushnell Building and in 1906 helped the Wright brothers draft the patent for their “flying machine” — otherwise known as U.S. Patent No. 821,393.
Maybe one day in the future, we’ll see a statue made of Dyer, Garofalo, Mann and/or Schultz.
Bellefontaine
(Pretty much the whole place)
It’s the highest point in Ohio. It has the youngest mayor in Ohio (a 2003 grad of Bellefontaine High).
And it also has the oldest concrete street in America — and the world’s shortest street.
It wasn’t NYC or Philly or Chicago that was first to pave a street with this magical new stuff called “artificial stone.”
’Twas Bellefontaine in 1891.
Back then, the paving of Court Avenue with cement was an engineering marvel.
So much so that Bellefontaine has erected a statue to George Bartholomew, the father of cement ... in the Midwest.
He didn’t invent cement. He just brought it to the Midwest and sold Bellefontaine on the idea of paving a street with it.
“It’s much different than today’s concrete, but it worked,” said Jim Holycross, the city’s service director. “I’ve got a chunk of it sitting in my office. There’s a lot more rock to it.”
Still more than half of Court Avenue is the original concrete from 1891.
And then there’s McKinley Street — all 20 feet of it — which locals claim is the “world’s shortest street.”
It was named for President William McKinley of Ohio, whose life was cut, uh, short when he was shot in 1901.
Cave for stashing bodies
The side of a cliff, Ferncliff Cemetery, Springfield
Maybe you’ve driven by this now-sealed cave in Ferncliff with the inscription “Machpelah” above it and thought to yourself, “Surely, that’s where they trapped the Frankenstein monster or some other unearthly demon that once terrorized the good people of the Champion City.”
Turns out, the cave dates to 1864, and was used as a place to store the bodies of people who died in the winter.
That’s all.
And that’s still kinda creepy.
A really big loaf of bread
At the American Pan Co., 417 E. Water St., Urbana
“Our founder and owner is a fan of all things baking,” said Wendi Ebbing, marketing manager for Urbana-based American Pan Co., the world leader in manufacturing pans for the baking industry. “Thus the big loaf of bread.”
Situated back by the loading docks, this huge, fiberglass loaf of Colonial Bread was rescued years ago from a bakery out East that closed.
They don’t know where else to store it, Ebbing said.
“We can’t stop anybody from coming back on a Saturday,” she said, “but it’s not meant to be a tourist attraction.”
Well, you can at least see it from the street.
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