GUYSVILLE, ROME TOWNSHIP
Athens County, Ohio

Guysville 1908

A Thanksgiving Postcard from Guysville, circa November 1908

Looking down Mill Street from Main (State Route 329).

The Chapman Brothers' Store is at the left: the storekeeper and his dog are on the porch watching two wagons loaded with (among other items) poultry crates. Mill Street slopes down toward the Baltimore & Ohio Short Line railroad crossing (middleground), curves left as it passes the flour mill and then enters a wooden covered bridge to cross the Hocking River.

The dreamlike quality of this online version of the photo belies its actual details: a crossing sign among the bare trees at the railroad; the sweep of the stairs going up to the telephone office on the second floor of the store; the elaborately patterned upstairs porch palings of the house at foreground right; the electric lines and poles; the whitewashed tree trunks in the yard just beyond the store; and the field arrayed with cornshocks on the other side of the river.

Although the store and the houses in this picture are intact, both the covered bridge and its successor, the steel truss bridge, are long since gone, and so are the flour mill and the railroad.



The photograph is used here by the owner's permission; it is also on the cover of the Guysville Community Cookbook, a collection of community history, stories, recipes, and photos, published in 1996 by our Park Committee. Proceeds from the sale of the cookbook benefit Savannah Park (Savannah being Guysville's original name) which was built by community members on the site of the old railroad depot and stockyard.

This page is by Mary Lautzenheiser, who was also a contributor to (and book designer/typesetter of) the Guysville Community Cookbook.