Historic Georgetown, Ohio

[Music] hello and welcome to another edition of history in your own backyard I'm Scott borders and I'm coming to you from Georgetown Ohio joining me is Ned Lodwick and Ned we find ourselves standing right in front of this beautiful statue of Ulysses Grant tell me a little bit about his history as it has to do with Georgetown yes of course Ulysses was born in Point Pleasant Clermont County but they moved here when he was about fourteen fifteen months old and he lived here till he went off to West Point so about 16 years longer than any place else that he lived in any in the rest of his life and because you know when being in the Army they moved around a lot and then being president they moved around a lot and so this was his hometown and his memoirs he says this place remained my home and so he he enjoyed growing up in Georgetown a lot of his characteristics developed here in Georgetown as a boy and after his family moved while he was in West Point he came back several times to visit visit friends and he kept up correspondence with people in Georgetown look at the statue just incredible detail done by the artist it really is something to see right here in the town square in Georgetown so tell me about that and maybe some of the historic buildings here well the statue came about after about 12 or 13 years of working on trying to figure out how to get a statue and it was done in cooperation between the u.s. grant homestead Association and the village and we tried to purchase a statue initially and and didn't get that done and just move it here so we decided to commissioned one and we commissioned this one out of Vermont and it came he came here in 2008 and we think it's the best grant statue in the United States and we also say that this is the only village there's only two places the United States you can find two full-sized two choose of ulysses s grant in one is in washington DC inside and outside the capital and here in georgetown ohio because there's a there's a bronze statue at our veterans home you walk around georgetown there's just a lot of great architecture and older buildings tell me about some of the buildings that are around here we can see in georgetown well the the main street here on the east side or the west side they call that commercial row and those buildings were here from the 1830s and on and some of them were one-story buildings and are now two-story buildings but that entire block has been around for over a hundred years on almost 150 years now and of course the businesses have changed they've come and gone but they've done pretty well at keeping most of them full I think there's only I don't think there's any empty buildings right now I think everything has a has a business in it so that's pretty good for a small town this the corner building here was called Dunn corner and it was a early pharmacy and for years and years and years it was a pharmacy up until just about five years ago it had been been pharmacies in town and one of the buildings here that I really like to talk to this story when I have kids around as you can see there's a building down there next to Donohue's pharmacy that says gifts and cards and it's part of Donohue pharmacy and that was a dry goods store when General Grant was here and afterwards and when he came back to visit after he was president and after he had travelled the world that he was considered the most famous man in the world okay he he would he traveled the world and constantly was getting 40,000 50,000 people coming out to see him and so when he get came back he came across the United States and when he came to Georgetown he brought with him one of his friends Dan Amon who grew up in Georgetown on the other side of the square and he they came back together Amon at that time was a retired Rear Admiral and they came back to visit and one of the people they wanted to visit was a lady called aunt Beth they everybody called aunt Betsy Betsy King and so they had gone down to see the old house grants old house down the hill and then it came up come up to the square and as they're walking down the street and Betsy comes out of that store and she's got a gallon of coal oil in one hand and a broom in the other hand and she sees these two boys that she knows of course ones the next president and in general of the army and the other is a Rear Admiral and she looks at these boys and says Ulysses you take the coal oil and Dan you take the broom and she turned and headed down the street and says I have pies for you at the house and so I tell that to kids because I say if you think you're gonna go away and become famous and come back and impress anybody it's probably not going to happen I always remember you as a kid as how at home now I've heard a lot about Morgan's Raiders in something about gold and it has to do with Georgetown also tell me a little about that well the the Raiders when they came into town it was about 200 of them and it was the 14th Kentucky cavalry under the command of Richard Morgan who was a the brother younger brother of John hunt the rumor around had been that Lexington thought they were the ones that were gonna get raided because nobody expected Morgan to cross the Ohio River including his commanding general but he broke the rules and came across outside Louisville and I came all the way across so the rumor they had heard was that Lexington had banks had sent money up here so so it would be safe until the raid was over so there was supposedly 60 or 70 thousand dollars here maybe more so the Raiders came in 13th of July 1863 about 10 o'clock in the morning and they tied their horses up around the courthouse right here still here I tied that up the horses they're on an iron rail around the courthouse and began to go house to house asking for food barn to barn trying to take horses but they sent a group of guys down to the King Philip's Bank south of town where the gold was supposed to be so the interesting part of that it was not King Phillip's after the king of France it was mr. King and mr. Philips ok so anyhow they show up and but the Raiders knew that the gold was may be here but the townspeople knew the Raiders were coming so the bank president mr. Philips decided he would take the gold his gold what he had and that was about sixty thousand dollars in gold coin give it to his janitor and let him take it out and bury it in the woods and so he did that well when the Raiders came of course they went to the bank and they looked around and there was no gold and his he said well you know there's there wasn't he there's no gold we're a new bank and we just don't have had many assets he said but I can offer you lunch so he took him to the house and had a line his wife prepared them a lunch and later on they wrote how nice a lunch it was in one of the Diaries and when the Raiders left a couple hours later the bank people were waiting for the money to come back and it didn't come back by evening and they well he's just being safe didn't come back in the morning and has turned out and never came back and so the gold was gone well people dug and dug and dug and dug in the woods south of town trying to find this gold forever nobody ever could find it and then about five years after the war was over a young couple came into Georgetown on what they called the Omnibus but not a stagecoach like then and came in about a hotel room but didn't seem to have much money about five days later they left town and after they left town people got talking comparing notes and here they had paid their hotel bell with gold coin they had bought the finest carriage and the finest pair of horses in town with gold coin and had ridden out of town and then somebody said well I think the last name was the same as that janitor so the gold was gone forever at that at that point you and I going out in the woods and looking for it would probably be no use now dad one more thing around here that you hear a lot about is this Klosterman mill so tell me a little bit about klostermann million originally the mill was was called the Thompson mill it was built by the Thompson family down on White Oak Creek which is just outside of town and there's quite a lot of drop on White Oak Creek so it's perfect for mills and of course the early in the early days in the 1830s when the mill was built you had to have your corn ground you know you had to have it done somewhere so mills were very important you also had to have your lumber cut mills did that also so they were very important so the Thompson family built three mills and three sets of houses because there was three sons and they each had a mill well two of the sons are gone or the two of the mills are gone and one of the houses does remain and one mill remains and that mill and that became the Schuster mill it became some people called the tunnel mill because the water to the mill at that section of White Oak Creek there's a big Oxbow there and so they dammed up the creek and then ran the water through a tunnel that gets to be 35 40 foot deep to the mill for that drop okay and then put it through the mill wheel and workers deal and it was dug by Italian immigrants it's lined in stone and they did that well the mill about ten years ago was about ready to collapse and ken Klosterman bought the mill in the house up on the hill from it and tried to decide what to do with it and eventually he decided that they would repair it so I don't know how much it cost them but they had to put in one entire wall in a brick there was no mill wheel there so they had to have that mill wheel done and all the info and all the structures that are involved with a mill it's a six story building and it's just about a half mile out of Georgetown down on the creek and at this point it's it's an outside thing to look unless you call and try to get in the point get an appointment it's not open to the public right now but it's a beautiful beautiful mill to look at you know just to go down and see and I think at some time we're gonna have that well that will be open it is a time so we have it open and our Christmas home tour a lot of times people can see it now there's sort of an interesting story out there relating to Ulysses Grant about stone tell me a little about that because it takes place not far from here the Ulysses hated working in his father's business the tannery he hated to count carcasses he hated to smell but he knew he had to work his father had this work ethic and his he knew in jealousies knew he had to get a job so when he was about nine years old he convinced his father to buy him a team of horses in a wagon and he can he became a teamster and so he traveled everywhere to Maysville to Toledo to Cincinnati to Louisville but a lot most of his stuff was here in town well one of the family friends dr. Buckner wanted to build a new house so he found a lot and started constructing this house one of his favorite hobbies was to sit on the front porch and discuss politics and current events so he won't he built a wraparound porch so that anytime of the day they could be out of the Sun and they could talk because of that he wanted a grand step that he could get on and you know people on the porch on so they went down to the white oak creek and they cut a stone out of limestone and it is about nine and a half foot long about four and a half foot wide and about six to eight inches thick and one of my friends who does monument said it weighs probably 3,500 to 3800 pounds and so none of the Teamsters in town could get it on their wagon to bring it up they couldn't pick it up and get it on the wagon and so one day Ulysses went down he knew everybody failed and he went to dr. Buckner and he said I think I can bring the stone up to you and so I'll get you some help me so I don't think I'm gonna need any help so this 12-year old boy and Ulysses when he entered West Point was five foot four and weighed about a hundred and ten pounds and that would have been five years later so he goes down to the white oak creek with his wagon and horses when does is he digs trenches on either side of the stone so that he can back over the stone with his wagon and he digs the trenches deeper on the far end then on to come so an incline then he digs two tunnels under the stone and passes chains under those then he backs his horses down on either side of the stone he chains it to his axles and when he goes forward the wagon picks up the stone and he brings it up the hill under his wagon when he gets up here he reverses the situation and puts the stone down takes our chains out from under him and it does it all in one day and so it shows his Bulldog Adnan which they called him a bulldog and his ingenuity he did not necessarily think like everybody else he had a different brain pattern and he could think things through once he had mine and if people want to see the stone it's down in here and Georgetown and it's down behind the grant boyhood home with a plaque on it so they can walk up to it and take a look at it well I want to thank Ned Lodwick for all this wonderful history he's given us about Georgetown Ohio this has been Scott border saying so long from Georgetown and thank you for tuning into yet another edition of history in your own backyard remember travel slowly sob often [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: History in Your Own Backyard

Views: 4,813

Rating: 4.7922077 out of 5

Keywords: Ohio, Brown County, Georgetown, Ulysess Grant, Morgan, Civil War, Courthouse, History, Historic, Mill

Id: rw90RuYRfAY

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018