photo: the Ordovician sea

by Rick Forrester and Janet Slater

We are so enamored with the “bike” trail, we sometimes forget about the Park areas that aren’t manmade. If you meander off the asphalt/berm and head down into one of the stream crossings, you will find a variety of historical adventures awaiting you in the rocks.

Southwest Ohio’s surface rocks are the oldest in the state. Most of the rock you see in Warren County is from the Ordovician (440-500 million years ago) period of the Paleozoic Era. Older Cambrian rock (mostly sandstone) lies deep below it, but no “modern” rock strata for the Mesozoic Era (65-225 million years ago) or Cenozoic era (2-65 million years ago) are present as they have all been abraded and weathered away. Our Ordovician strata are mostly limestone and shale, rocks that form on the earth’s crust. But this bedrock was far from here when it was formed, because what is now Ohio was about 20 degrees south of the equator at that time.

What is now southwest Ohio was once a vast but shallow saltwater sea, and our Ordovician rocks were formed from minerals, older rock sediment and shell fragments settling to the bottom. The tropical climate was ideal for marine life, so we now find a wide variety of fossils in this part of Ohio. Trilobites, our official state fossil, were some of the first animals with complex exoskeletons (outer shell-like skeletons). Sponges, jellyfish, and brachiopods (similar to clams) were abundant. The Caesar Creek area is an excellent area to hunt for fossils, especially the spillway area of the dam.

Take some time and check out the stream beds, and travel back to an ancient time with tropical temperatures and a saltwater sea. You never know what ancient history awaits you.

Photos above: Trilobite, brachiopods
Below: Geologic map of Ohio and Geologic Time Column, from Ohio’s Natural Heritage, Ohio Academy of Science

It’s a foggy night on the Little Miami trail, and you’ve just crossed the bridge across the river at Miamiville, heading north. Something’s moving ahead—a human shape, fuzzy in the swirling mist. A light swings at his side. And then he’s gone.

On the morning of July 14, 1863, a passenger train transporting 115 new Union Army recruits to Camp Dennison, heads south toward Miamiville. Suddenly shots blast through the countryside, and the train picks up speed, entering a section of track called the Dangerous Curve. No one on the train sees what is around the bend: Two thousand Confederate Morgan’s Raiders, crouching in a cornfield, watching to see the results of their early morning handiwork.

Rounding the curve at full speed, the train roars into a blockade of railroad ties the Raiders had wedged into a cattle gap on the tracks. The locomotive derails, and a coupler breaks, leaving the passenger cars on the track. The Confederate soldiers rush in, taking the passengers hostage and setting the train on fire. None of the new recruits is seriously hurt, but the locomotive engineer is badly injured, and one man—Cornelius Conway, the train’s fireman—is dead.

A boy walking home along the tracks on a foggy night in 1905 sees a man walking about 20 yards ahead, swinging a lantern. “It’s the ghost of Cornelius Conway,” says his father, when the boy tells of the mysterious figure. “He’s warning travelers of the fog that hinders their view ahead.” In 1932, the engineer on a late-night train out of Cincinnati sees someone walking the tracks, blows the whistle and stops the train. But he finds no one there. In later years, people fishing the river on foggy nights report seeing a figure on the trail holding a lantern as though to warn them of something.

This Halloween season, if you encounter a ghostly figure near Miamiville on a foggy evening, you need not fear. It’s only Cornelius Conway, holding a light so you won’t run into trouble.

Information for this article comes from the Miamiville Historical Marker along the trail just north of Beechmont Avenue; Richard Crawford, both on the Clermont County Historical Society website and in "The Trainman's Ghost Still Walks the Line" from his booklet Uneasy Spirits. Top photo from the Miamiville Historical Marker. Photo at left from Uneasy Spirits.

Article by Janet Slater
October 2023

With the days growing shorter, walking your dog early or late in the day, in darkness or semi-darkness, poses safety risks for both you and your dog. A prior Safe Trails article explains how products including headlamps, reflective clothing, and LED reflecting bands can allow humans to see and be seen in the dark, but what about our four-legged friends? Fortunately, inexpensive but effective solutions for dogs are readily available. Equipping your dog with an LED collar and/or leash will ensure that not even the Wicked Witch of the West will “get you my pretty, and your little dog too!”

(Note that pets on the Little Miami Scenic Trail—which is only 10 feet wide—must always be on a leash no longer than 6 feet and under control. Please remove all pet waste.)

Article by Erich Wikum
Photo: Amazon

October 2023