OHIO Researcher finds ghost towns haunting old maps, records

Need to find out where Lickskillet, Ohio, was?
By JAMES HANNAH
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A researcher poring over dusty maps in libraries and county courthouses is helping to bring long-forgotten Ohio towns back to life.
Richard Helwig, owner of the Center of Ghost Town Research in Ohio, said he has uncovered about 6,000 such towns and is still looking.
They were once colorful characters on Ohio's landscape -- communities with names such as Henpeck, Lickskillet, Worstville and even Pee Pee.
"In Ohio, because of our climate and population density, once a town is abandoned it quickly disappears," Helwig said.
Founded in 1974
The research center, in the central Ohio town of Galena near Columbus, was founded in 1974 by Helwig's father.
He was teaching a class in genealogy at a technical college when a student presented him with a letter from an ancestor and couldn't find the location of the Ohio town. The elder Helwig decided to start a research effort and compile a repository.
"Since then, we have been documenting and trying to find the location of as many towns as we can," Richard Helwig said.
Helwig said there are four categories of ghost towns:
UTrue ghost towns: a former town where there is nothing left to show it ever existed.
USemi-ghost towns: towns that are only 10 percent or less than the size they once were.
UOld towns: places that have existed for at least 100 years but changed their names because they were swallowed up by larger cities or could not get a post office name because another town had the same name.
UPaper ghost towns: places that were imagined and sometimes platted and recorded by land developers but never came into being.
Maps dating to the 1850s help Helwig spot ghost towns. They may be ghost towns if they appear on one map, then vanish on a later one. Helwig does his research in libraries, local genealogy societies and county courthouses.
"I'll go through thousands of pages of manuscripts looking for information," said Helwig, adding that sometimes it is like looking for a "needle in a haystack."
Useful information
Helwig said his information is useful to historians doing research, genealogists looking for ancestors or local historical societies trying to preserve the heritage of their areas.
Brian Hackett, executive director of the Montgomery County Historical Society in Dayton, said ghost towns provide a clearer picture of the past and help people understand how much things have changed.
"A lot of these towns were at their time the whole lives of some people," Hackett said. "This is where they lived and breathed and worked and probably did not travel 10 miles outside of that town in their lives."
Helwig said one of the fun things in doing his research is uncovering weird town names.
He said Pee Pee in Ross County was named when Peter Patrick marked off the town by carving his initials on four trees.
Teacup was named when a woman took over a tavern in the town and served drinks in teacups.
Helwig does his research county by county and so far has completed northwest Ohio and much of central Ohio. He estimates it will take him another 30 years to complete the entire state.
Up until November, the center was in an old church building in nearby Sunbury, but the church was demolished to widen the highway. Now, Helwig keeps his maps and other documents at his home.