Recordpub.com - PORTAGE PATHWAYS: Locomotive buried in Ravenna swamp since 1850?

By Roger J. Di Paolo

Record-Courier Editor

Is a locomotive engine with several railroad cars still attached buried somewhere in southwest Ravenna?

If it is, it's been there for nearly 160 years.

At least that's the conclusion that can be drawn from a tale historian E.Y. Lacey shared 75 years ago in the Evening Record.

The story surfaced -- pun intended -- in an account by the veteran newspaperman that detailed the problems that deposits of muckland had posed to developers at numerous locations in Ravenna.

The Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad, the first in Portage County, was completed in March 1851, fulfilling the dream of a group of Ravenna businessmen who had begun efforts to bring a railroad to town 15 years earlier.

Grading for the railroad took place during 1850, which may have been when the incident Lacey describes occurred.

The discovery of muckland was a frequent challenge for construction crews in Ravenna during the early 19th Century, according to Lacey. Unstable soil conditions apparently posed concerns during construction of the railroad, which was located on the community's southwest side.

The railroad contractor had completed his last fill and put down ties for the rails, one of the final stages of construction. A locomotive and rail cars had been moved to the completed tracks in preparation for putting the railroad into service.

They vanished without a trace, according to Lacey.

"Literally like the thief in the night when no one is watching, the treacherous element (muck) reopened its maws and the next morning engine and cars were out of sight," he wrote.

The disappearing act occurred, according to Lacey's account, "just south of the bridge canal in the vicinity of the Annevar Mills." That would be -- in admittedly inexact terms -- somewhere between South Chestnut and South Prospect streets, north of Lake Street.

What Lacey termed "the final coup of the underground enemy" required the contractor to undertake new fills and install new ties and rails before the railroad could be put in service. The first round trip between Ravenna and Cleveland took place on March 13, 1851, when the locomotive "Ravenna" pulled into town on the C & P tracks.

And what of the vanished locomotive? The engine and the cars "remained engulfed to this day," Lacey wrote in 1935.

If Lacey's account is accurate -- and he had a reputation as a scrupulous historian -- and there isn't another explanation for the disappearance, that would mean that there's an interesting find dating to the early 1850s just waiting to be dug up in Ravenna.

The muck that bedeviled the early railroad builders apparently paid later dividends for some enterprising Ravenna residents, Lacey noted. A peat works was established near the site, and peat from the area was sold for fuel for several years.

Problematic soil conditions took a toll on other development efforts in Ravenna, too.

"The muck seemed to be bottomless," Lacey wrote, when the A.C. Williams Co. was constructing its plant in 1893 on Hazen Avenue, near the C & P site. The firm resorted to driving long pilings to stabilize sections of wall erected there.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad, which leased the C & P in 1871, was building a new line around the turn of the 20th Century it encountered "depths of muckland and quicksand that defied further progress" near the Cutler Swamp, two miles northwest of Ravenna.

"Load after trainload of material" was "engulfed almost as fast as they were unloaded," Lacey wrote. "Fill dirt sank into an underground sea of muck."

It took more than two years and thousands of dollars' worth of construction before the road bed was stabilized on a solid foundation beneath the muck, he said.

Downtown Ravenna also had muck deposits, he noted. Before the first section of Main Street was paved in 1898, the road in front of the Riddle and Merts mansions (which were located on the present-day site of Walgreens) "became impassable at places in springtime," Lacey wrote. Fence rails and timbers were driven into the roadway to warn travelers.

The pioneers relied on so-called "corduroy" roads -- logs lashed together -- to provide a primitive paving system. Work crews doing paving work in the early 20th Century frequently unearthed the logs, in perfectly preserved condition, nearly 100 years later.

It would be interesting, to say the least, to see what that vanished locomotive from the early days of the C & P looks like, nearly 160 years later -- assuming that it can be found. And assuming that it really vanished.