“The train has left the station. After all that suffering he endured so stoically, we pray that he’ll have the smoothest, most enjoyable journey to his final destination in Heaven.”

Paul David Butler lost his valiant battle against severe, fast-paced dementia on Saturday, March 16, 2024.

Born to Victor and Dorothy Stein Butler on August 11, 1935, Paul graduated from Holy Rosary High School in 1953 with his cousin and sidekick, Fred Butler. He earned his degree in commerce from The Ohio State University in 1958 and was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960 at Ft. Ord, California, which included a screen appearance in “A Summer Place.”

Paul first expressed his talent for fixing things and his love of lawn care at Cohagan Hardware, becoming the store’s stockboy in 1951 and rising to co-owner in 1960 and then owner. He was recognized for distinguished service by the Ohio Hardware Association and successfully completed a course of study in O.M. Scott & Sons’ lawn school. After closing the store in 1985, he applied his easygoing personality and aptitude for numbers as the law firm of Bricker & Eckler’s accounts receivable and collections manager until his retirement in 2004. From giving tours of the firm’s historic building and editing its employee newsletter to organizing lunchtime euchre games and social gatherings, Paul was the enthusiastic center of a devoted following at the firm.

During the 1970s, Paul served his German Village community as treasurer of the German Village Society and as a lector and altar server at St. Mary Catholic Church. He was a volunteer gardener during AmeriFlora in 1992. He expressed his artistic creativity through his signature recipes, award-winning pumpkin carving, watercolors, Bob Ross paintings, stained glass windows, interior design, gardening, and designing and building dollhouses, picket fences, Chippendale-style planters and a gazebo. 

Paul’s gentle, congenial, humble and generous ways were his hallmark, best expressed in his close bond with his now-deceased parents-in-law, Jim and Jane Born Heinmiller. With his wife of 55 years, Suzanne, and daughter, Betsy, the inseparable Butler trio cherished being together, even when such a cruel disease invaded their home.

Predeceased by his elder brother, Bob, Paul is also survived by his brothers, Roger (Tina) and Tom. His nieces Debbie Zahara and Dodi (Terry) Weirick, and nephew Michael (Julie) Butler, held a particularly special place in his heart.

Friends are invited to pay their respects to Paul on Wednesday, March 20, 2024 from 4:00 to 7:00 pm at Egan-Ryan Northwest Chapel, 4661 Kenny Road, Columbus; Mass of Christian Burial Celebrated by Fr. Michael  Lumpe Thursday, March 21, 2024, at 10 a.m. at St. Michael Church, Worthington, followed by interment at St. Joseph Cemetery, Lockbourne. Those wishing to honor Paul’s memory are encouraged in lieu of flowers to offer Mass intentions for his eternal soul or to contribute to the Paul, Suzanne and Elizabeth Butler Endowment Fund held by the Catholic Foundation. 

Fussing and flapping “caws” for a festival

Ohio is a mecca for migrating birds, producing some memorable birdwatching spectacles. Warblers flock to Magee Marsh during the spring, while crows descend on Mansfield in the fall.

While these big, iridescent beauties are in town, they perch in trees and flock to the warmth of downtown buildings. They particularly fancy making their temporary home in the eight wooded acres surrounding the Mansfield Art Museum.

Thousands of cawing, swooping and diving crows sounds like a deafening invasion to be dreaded, but the museum celebrates the crows’ loyalty in returning each year by holding CrowFest, a crow-themed art show and festival, in their honor.

During 2023’s iteration of this unique event, more than 100 crow-inspired works of art were selected from submissions of oil paintings, mixed media, sculpture and other creations. Here are a few favorites.

A murder of three-dimensionally-printed crows was suspended by a monofilament hanging system in the atrium. Casting shadows in the space, they brought to mind the fussing, flapping murder of crows Sting recalls in “All This Time.”

Underneath them was a painting of St. Casilda of Toledo, who is said to have been able to communicate with animals. Artist Emily Beveridge created this as part of a series of 40 saints she painted to commemorate her 40^th birthday. 

Best of all was Corn Shellers, an extraordinary piece that took Tom Baldwin two years to finish. Completely carved from wood, except for a tiny metal spring and the crow’s feet, it was captivating from all angles.

Beyond CrowFest, the Mansfield Art Museum is worth landing at year-round. Designed by Cleveland architect Don Hisaka, it was built in 1971 as a center for the visual arts. The award-winning, simple yet innovative structure – a work of art in itself – features two floors of spacious galleries, an atrium that complements its natural surroundings, classrooms for a variety of pursuits in the fine and decorative arts, and a shop highlighting handcrafted work by local artists.

“So frank, so joyous, her spirit sheds sunlight all about her.”

A modest Federal-style house in Chillicothe might not look like much, but it’s been on my list of must-sees for some time. It was here that Lucy Ware Webb Hayes, the wife of our 19^th president, was born on August 28, 1831.

Lucy’s father, James Webb, was a physician from Lexington, Kentucky who had moved to Chillicothe to practice medicine. He married Maria Cook in 1826 on the Cook family’s Willow Branch Farm, near Chillicothe. The Webbs rented this four-room, center-hall house built the year before, and it would become their home until 1833, when Dr. Webb contracted cholera while on a business trip to Kentucky and died.

The house was originally located on East Fourth Street and was moved to its current location on West Sixth Street in 1883. The Chillicothe Restoration Foundation saved it from demolition in 1968, and restoration was completed in 1985.

Today, the Lucy Hayes Heritage Center is furnished with period antiques, including a restored piano that once had a dog chained to it on a front porch of a Chillicothe home. A miniature version of the house made by a volunteer helps visitors visualize how the interior might have appeared as the Webbs’ residence. Hayes family artifacts, documents and memorabilia are also on display. Lilies of the valley that Lucy brought from the White House are planted around the house’s foundation.

An appealing book collection at the center prompted additional reading about Lucy and a subsequent field trip to see the next chapter of her story.

The Webbs remained in Chillicothe until 1844, when they moved to Delaware, Ohio so that Lucy’s two brothers could enroll in what is now known as Ohio Wesleyan University. The school was chartered just two years before on the site of a natural sulphur spring that was originally intended to be a resort. Lucy also attended classes in the school’s preparatory department, meeting her friends at the sulphur springs at the end of the school day. That’s where Rutherford Birchard Hayes heard the “merry peal” of 15-year-old Lucy’s laughter and first met the “bright sunny hearted little girl not quite old enough to fall in love with.” Nine years her senior, the future president from Delaware had graduated from Kenyon College and was attending Harvard Law School.

A devout Methodist and a diligent student, with good morals, a well-developed character and a strong sense of civic duty, Lucy was an attractive match for the mild-mannered and serious, but ambitious, Rutherford, so their mothers thought.

 “There is Lucy Webb – who has the finest disposition – with perhaps a few exceptions – that woman was ever blessed with – so frank, so joyous, her spirit sheds sunlight all about her – tolerably good-looking – would be handsome only that she freckles…remarkably intelligent – very much improved in manner,” Rutherford’s sister, Fanny, wrote him.

The Webbs then moved to Cincinnati, where Lucy continued her education at the Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College and graduated with a liberal arts degree in 1850. Her commencement essay was “The Influence on Christianity on National Prosperity.” In time, she would become the first presidential spouse to graduate with a degree from an institution of higher education.

That same year, Rutherford moved to Cincinnati to practice law. He and Lucy were married there on December 30, 1852.

Despite her positive attributes, Lucy was a less-than-enthusiastic letter-writer who would benefit from reading more diverse literature and spending time with more intellectual conversationalists, so her husband thought.

She expressed her concern for the welfare of others by supporting the cause of reforming welfare institutions, creating an orphanage for the children of Civil War veterans, and improving the home life of poor women.

More famously, the first wife of a U.S. president to be known as the First Lady was such a fervent advocate for temperance that she served lemonade instead of alcohol at White House functions. She also began the tradition of the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House.

The sulphur spring where Lucy and Rutherford met is still a gathering place on Ohio Wesleyan’s campus, off S. Henry St., across from Selby Stadium and behind Phillips Hall. Nearby is the site of the first Ohio State University football game, played here on May 3, 1890. Ohio Wesleyan had invited the newly organized team to a contest as part of its May Day Weekend, and Ohio State won, 20-14.

Rutherford’s birthplace was demolished, but the site at 17 East William Street has an historical marker telling its story.  A statue of the president was placed at the corner of William and Sandusky Streets in 2019, in anticipation of his 200^th birthday in 2022.

 “It is another intention of mine, that after I have commenced in life, whatever may be my ability or station, to preserve a reputation for honesty and benevolence; and if ever I am a public man I will never do anything inconsistent with the character of a true friend and good citizen,” Rutherford once wrote in his diary. “To become such a man I shall necessarily have to live in accordance with the precepts of the Bible, which I firmly believe, although I have never made them strictly the ‘rule of my conduct.’”

For more on Lucy Webb Hayes, read First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb Hayes, by Emily Apt Geer and Lucy Webb Hayes: A First Lady by Example, by Russell L. Mahan.

“Probably no other equal portion furnishes so rich and interesting a field for the antiquarian.”

Ohio’s statehood wasn’t the only thing being commemorated in Chillicothe last month. A spectacular concentration of ancient earthworks was also celebrating the centennial of its being proclaimed a national monument by President Warren Harding in 1923.

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park preserves six of the magnificent ancient monuments in the Chillicothe area: Mound City Group, Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group, Spruce Hill Works, and Seip Earthworks.

Mound City Group, three miles north of Chillicothe on State Route 104, was designed and built by Native Americans over many centuries between A.D. 1-400, making it one of the earliest constructed Hopewell earthworks. The only fully restored Hopewell earthwork complex, Mound City Group was likely a social and ceremonial gathering place for these native peoples.

In 1846, a pair of amateur archaeologists from Chillicothe — newspaper editor Ephraim Squier and physician Edwin Davis — mapped the mounds on the then-forest-covered site and documented what they found inside them. They called it “Mound City” to describe its unique concentration of at least two dozen burial mounds, encircled by a low earthen wall in one enclosed area larger than 10 football fields, ringed by eight borrow pits from which earth was likely taken to construct the mounds.

Archeological practice of the day was to name a newly described culture for the place where it is first discovered. Therefore, this remarkable Native American culture was named for Mordecai Hopewell, the Chillicothe farmer who owned the field containing these mounds.

Squier and Davis described the results of their surveys and explorations in a book they called Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The following year, it became the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1891-2, Warren Moorehead partially excavated some of the mounds, finding artifacts made from obsidian, silver, shark teeth and other exotic materials the native people obtained from their extensive trade network. Many of the most famous images of the Hopewell culture are from the objects found at this site. Mica was used to create a bird claw and a hand with elongated fingers stretching upward; a bear claw was fashioned from copper. A selection of items was displayed not only during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, but also in the newly created Field Museum.

As at the other Hopewell earthworks sites, decades of plowing done by farmers gradually lowered and widened the mounds. When the area was included as part of Camp Sherman during World War I, military engineers flattened it to make way for the buildings that were hurriedly constructed to house the troops being trained to fight. Half of the mounds were completely destroyed; the rest were severely degraded.

Fortunately, the level of the ceremonial building floors beneath the mounds was below the level of the ground, so when Camp Sherman was dismantled after the war, archaeologists were able to study the burials below the mounds.  The organization now known as the Ohio History Connection funded the reconstruction of Mound City Group in the 1920s, basing its efforts on the maps Squier and Davis made.  Staff archaeologists Henry Shetrone and William Mills excavated all but one of the mounds so visitors could appreciate the underlying structure of the ceremonial building.

In 1992, four more of Chillicothe’s Hopewell earthwork sites were added to Mound City Group and the name of the park was changed to Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

The site is part of the nine different Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks sites that are being considered for addition to the UNESCO World Heritage list. Nowhere else are there so many of these unique ceremonial complexes so close together, leading many to believe that Ross County may have been the most important cultural center in eastern North America 2,000 years ago.  As Squier and Davis wrote in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, “this section of the Scioto river and Paint creek valleys, of which the city of Chillicothe is the centre, possesses a deserved celebrity for its beauty, unexampled fertility, and the great number, size, and variety of its ancient remains.”

“Trust thyself.”

Yes, Mr. Emerson, after learning and forgetting and learning again and again, Self-Reliance is a wonderful thing.

After sitting at home with the cause for far too long, I ventured to the Ross County Heritage Center on my own steam. Following my own instincts resulted in making a perfectly timed visit to Chillicothe for its celebration of Statehood Day.  

The center’s praises have been sung to me, mostly for its collections and the excellent ways in which they are presented. Verses have included the charms of dioramas, a model railroad, dolls, toys, needlework and early Ohio decorative arts. The refrain always capitalized on displays that would tug at my heartstrings, due to my fondness for three Chillicothe legends: Camp Sherman of World War I training camp fame; librarian Burton Stevenson, whose book, The Girl from Alsace: A Romance of the Great War, calls my name; and Columbus Dispatch editorial cartoonist and “Passing Show” creator Billy Ireland, who also penned Teck Haskins at Ohio State, a tale of the adventures of a youth from Yellowbud in Ross County.

Well, those displays were all captivating, but here’s what I found worth crowing about most.

In 1932, the daughter of the Ross County Historical Society’s first president left the family home to the society for use as a museum; the parlor of this house is now filled with Victorian-era furniture, decorative art and portraiture. Who can resist a cushion with the Great Seal of the State of Ohio and buckeyes rendered so realistically, all in shimmering shades of silk embroidery?

Leaving the parlor, I passed the home’s elegant staircase and entered into exhibit galleries in which artifacts, scale models and maps tell the story of Chillicothe’s early years in the Virginia Military District of the Northwest Territory and as a military headquarters in the War of 1812. It was there that I was transfixed by a black walnut table.

Historical society trustees on hand in full force proudly showed off the table, better known as Ohio’s original Constitution Table. It was playing a supporting role that day as the vehicle for displaying a special exhibit of original Ohio statehood documents, including future Ohio Governor Thomas Worthington’s personal draft of the 1802 Ohio Enabling Act.

From those devoted gentlemen, I learned that in January 1802, Worthington was accompanied by a fellow Chillicothean named Michael Baldwin to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress for statehood. The trip was successful; in April of that year, Congress passed the Enabling Act, which allowed for a constitutional convention and the forming of a state government that November.  After the men discussed and debated the constitution’s provisions, they signed their names on the document that was resting on top of the table made by wheelmaker William Guthrie that year. 

Worthington then carried the signed constitution back to Washington for Congressional approval in January 1803. On February 19 of that year, President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill making Ohio the first state created by the Northwest Territory and the 17^th state to join the Union. The first state legislature convened on March 1 in Chillicothe, which served as the state’s official capitol until the capital moved to Columbus in 1816.  Ever since, Ohioans have celebrated Statehood Day on March 1.

In 1946, the house next door was purchased and given to the society to house a library containing a collection of rare books, archival documents and photographs ready for local historians to delve into. On this occasion, the highlight was a thoughtfully tended display of vintage Valentines.

Outside, military re-enactors were having a grand time in a log house built near Chillicothe during the early 1820s. Disassembled, moved twice, and reconstructed next door, it recreates life in early Ross County. Nearby, an Arts and Crafts home designed by Columbus architect Frank Packard includes beautiful stained-glass windows and period furnishings.

But best of all was being reunited with two long-lost loves in the gift shop: The Fowler Family Gets Dressed: Frontier Paper Dolls of the Old Northwest Territory and The Fowler Family Celebrates Statehood And A Wedding: An Illustrated History With Paper Dolls, both by Mary K. Inman and Louise F. Pence, with paper dolls by Norma Lu Meehan, published by Texas Tech University Press. These out-of-print must-haves tell the story of how Ohio symbolized the American Dream, transforming itself from an outpost on the Western frontier to a place offering abundant land, resources and opportunity. The storytelling medium is an accurate, enticing picture of period dress, based on frontier diaries, newspapers and historic artifacts of clothing.