the late 1890s, my grandfather and his half-brother, Sam Kirkpatrick, bought the north edge of Darrtown. They remodeled the house and finished it in 1901. They operated five farms with tenants. My dad, his particular generation, what he inherited, he more or less spent and barely held on to it, until my brother and I inherited it.

The Smith family worked for my parents as day hands for thirty-two years. Kurt Smith did all of the stone work at the big house about 1920. He could do anything. At the time, he worked for a dollar a day. Louise Smith kept the purse strings. She did washing and ironing and cleaning. And they accumulated several pieces of property in Darrtown which my father owned, because when times got bad in the Depression, he couldn't afford to pay them. We were land poor. So, periodically the old man would deed over a piece of property to the Smiths.

Walter Alston's uncle was the tenant on our lower farm, just south of the Darrtown square. And Walter, we called him Smokey; he spent a lot of his time visiting his uncle. Smokey and I were the same age. Well, I was from September to December older than he was. But we grew up as kids together.

We used to play baseball morning, afternoon, and night. After a time, we'd quit playing baseball and go down to the creek on our bicycles and go swimming about three times a day. So it was just a life, very repetitious. We did the same things day in and day out. But, then, on in high school years, Smokey stayed in Darrtown and I come to McGuffey. My brother was a freshman and I was in sixth grade. Every other year, they would have the high school in Darrtown, and the other year in Collinsville. So my folks decided they'd put us in McGuffey. Smokey stayed in Darrtown. But, we were always good friends. But, we were never on the same baseball or basketball team. Course, they didn't have football in Darrtown and McGuffey did.

Doc Alston, who was Smokey's uncle, pitched in the first baseball game between Darrtown and Hooven's in the late summer of 1920. Doc's wife just died a couple days ago out here in the rest home, and she was up in her nineties.

Darrtown's team was considered one of the best in the country. They claimed to be the best. Back in those days, a lot of the industrial shops in Hamilton had their own teams. Hooven's was one of the best. So we challenged them to a three-game series. I was there, selling cold pops from Jack Wendel's grocery store out of a galvanized bucket for a nickel a bottle. The games were down near my lower farm on 177, which was a gravel road at the time. In the first game, the score was two to two until the late innings. But, Charlie Root finished for Hooven's and won it ten to two. The second game, Hod Eller, he was a shine-ball pitcher (and it was getting really vicious now), threw for Darrtown. So, Hod Eller, who pitched for the Cincinnati Reds, went against Charlie Root, of the Chicago Cubs. Darrtown won, one to nothing. Legs Weilman pitched for Hooven's in the final game. He played for the St. Louis Browns. Hooven's won thirteen to three.

Those games drew over three thousand paid admissions. Sunday baseball was the big thing in these small communities at that time. So, in 1921, Darrtown joined the KIO league, which was Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. The first game there, Potter's Tramps, which was a shoe company, beat Darrtown. The league was short-lived because of financial problems.

Later on, Smokey Alston managed the Brooklyn Dodgers. He played a lot of minor league baseball but got into one big league game when he was with the Cardinals. Smokey got up to bat one time and it was Charlie Root who struck him out. After the game, Dizzy Dean said to Smokey, ‘Don't let that worry you. Charlie Root's struck out many better men than you.'"

Comment of author, Jon Jeffrey Patton: Luther McVicker still insists that Charlie Root, who was scheduled to pitch again for Darrtown, was paid by Hooven's to miss the rubber game. Nevertheless, Darrtowners consider the loss to Hooven's just another piece of bad luck. Many times, Darrtown has been slighted or even cheated. Kirk (Mee), for example, remembers the proposed Darrtown railroad that never materialized.

“We never got a courthouse in Darrtown, either. The big square in Darrtown was laid out for the county seat. In the meantime, somebody built a firehouse over there, several years back. But that's where the Butler County courthouse was supposed to sit.

That reminds me of the old Darr Gas and Oil Company. In 1921, Frank Sloat, he was a Hamilton resident, got interested in the gas that was seeping up through Four Mile Creek. You could see these bubbles coming up. Frank, he would take a five gallon can, cut the bottom out of it, light the gas, and the flames would rise two or three feet high. So the Darr Gas and Oil Company was formed with local money out of Hamilton. It incorporated, by subscription, for $100,000.

My father was one of the directors and contributed a little money towards it. They employed a driller from Kentucky. He had a portable rig, powered by a steam boiler. The first well was drilled in 1922 on one of our farms across the road from the Darrtown cemetery. They found gas at about four hundred feet. They used the gas from this well, instead of a coal-fired boiler, and moved to well number two, which was about fifty feet north and drilled about fourteen hundred feet. They used the gas from the shallow well for the boiler to propel the rig for the second well. They found a lot of low-pressure gas.

Then, they moved about two thousand feet north, up on more or less rolling ground, still on one of our farms, and went down about 750 feet. When they brought the well in, they usually hired somebody else to spring the well in. Not the local drillers; and the guy that brought the well in used twenty-five quarts of nitroglycerin, which was way too much. It just blew up the casing and ruined the well. They always figured that guy was paid off to put the company out of business.

But in 1925, the first two wells were connected together. They had all this casing left over that was piled up for several years. So my father went out to Terre Haute, Indiana to some gas supply company and made a deal where he traded them this eight-inch casing for two-inch pipe. It's about two miles from this well down to the big house. And the house was piped for gas. We used that, until my dad died in 1948. The gas was piped into the furnaces, four fireplaces and the burners in each of the bedrooms upstairs.

Periodically, we would have the water bailed out of those wells, because it was low-pressure. We had to put a compressor in one of the buildings there to bring the gas in. It wasn't very dependable. In the winter time, I would come home and mother would say the gas was off. I would have to take a couple of pipe wrenches and start running the line back. The gas line was on the surface of the ground and at every contour of the ground there would be a drain plug at the lowest level. The gas wasn't strong enough to push through the water and the moisture would collect and then if that damn thing would freeze, you didn't know when you'd have gas again. I could always tell where the problem was because I could hear the flow of gas. Sometimes I would have to walk the complete line and sometimes I would get by and only have to walk half. It seemed like, in the spring of the year, when the farmers would start plowing and open up the soil, the gas would get low until we would get a good rain. Then it would seal the ground and we would have more pressure then."

[Webmaster Note: Kirk's recollections [in the preceding five paragraphs] about the Darr Gas Company and the presence of natural gas in the Darrtown area relate to a similar enterprise that was undertaken some 20 years earlier, when local entrepreneurs attempted to harness the resource. See Recollections / Community / 1901_1 - Drilling for Gas Begins at Darrtown.]

"When I was a kid, Franklin Roosevelt came to the big house when he was Secretary of the Navy. It wasn't such a big deal. He was on a political campaign. They'd stopped in Oxford. On the way to Hamilton, they stopped at the big house. I have a friend, Don Murray, he's out in California now, and he remembers the whole thing. He says it was a big affair. He's trying to elaborate, really making something of it. But, hell, he wasn't even there, because I didn't even know this kid, at the time, because I was too small myself. It was later that I went to high school with him. But, Don had heard the story so many times; he thought he was involved in it too; something really big.

After the Depression, it took the old man until the late Thirties or early Forties before he got back on his feet again. And, he did that in politics. He was Sergeant of Arms, up in the State Senate. And, Charlie Roberts was a contractor north of Hamilton. They put in a big bridge there across the river, the Third Street extension. During that time, they had one of these floods that come in and washed everything that he had done out and lost it. So, it was through my father, knowing some of the Senators in Columbus, that got a sundry claims for Charlie Roberts, who was a friend.

Roberts, and my father and mother went to Ohio Northern University up at Ada. Charlie became a contractor, and had this job down there. And through the sundry claims, Charlie was reimbursed quite a few thousand dollars on that Miami River flood damage that washed him out. So, it was a favor, then, that my father got through the Senate.

I was there at the Neale House in Columbus, and now we're in the Thirties. Charlie Roberts came in there and opened up a satchel and spilled out this cash on the bed that he gave the old man. We were land-poor and the old man had to mortgage all the farms. And, that's how my father got the money to pay off the mortgage to First National Bank, which I later became director of, down in Hamilton.

See, this whole thing has a weird taste to it; because, to get my dad out from under his obligation to the bank, the President of the bank, First National in Hamilton, wanted him to burn the big house to get the insurance money, so he could collect and pay off the mortgage. But the old man wouldn't do that. He was too proud of the house. But, another incident that I can recall in Hamilton (I don't want to mention any names on it right now) that so happened. He had to burn his home to satisfy the bank.

Many years later, well, I still am Director Emeritus of the big First National Bank down in Hamilton. I was on the Board of the Oxford National Bank. And, First National took over the Oxford National Bank. They had to accept three members of the First Board taken from the old Oxford National Board. I was one of the three. So, it was me, a retired farmer, sitting around the table with fourteen or fifteen millionaires. They retired me a couple years ago.

When I was in high school, we had Model T's. The old man had a Lincoln and a Cadillac Coupe. Whatever car would be running that particular day, we'd come to school in. It was an interesting situation. We're talking about Prohibition now. Hamilton used to be called 'Little Chicago.' It was quite a gangster hangout; a lot of bootlegging and whiskey-running back in those days. And, these cars would be stolen out of Chicago and they'd make a run to Hamilton with bootleg whiskey, or vice versa. That's how the old man got his Cadillac and his Lincoln. After they'd make the run, they would hide the car. When I was a kid, they would be in the barn; maybe for a period of a month or so. The old man paid two thousand dollars for the Lincoln and five hundred for the Cadillac. They were practically new cars. I don't know how they managed to change the title, so he could get tags; but, there were ways.

Darrtown was, more or less, what we call a bedroom district for Hamilton. Hamilton has always been an industrial type of town; lots of shops in Hamilton-not nearly as many today as there were back in the Thirties and Forties. When the Ford Company came there, in the Twenties, that's when Henry Ford offered people five dollars a day. That drained a lot of the other shops and foundries, like Champion Paper Company, because they were only paying about three dollars a day. When Henry Ford put his plant in there, a lot of people in Darrtown started working for him. Five dollars a day; minimum, that was big money.

It was damn tough on my parents during the Depression. They just didn't have the money to keep both kids in school, so I dropped out and went to work in Columbus in the State Highway Department. My dad was up there at the time and he was Sergeant of Arms in the Senate. It was no problem for him to get me a political job. I started to work about 1933. I made good money in Columbus during the Depression. Fourteen hundred dollars a year salary, plus an expense account. By staying in cheap hotels, I could make money on my expense account, too. The Depression was my best time.”

Comment of author, Jon Jeffrey Patton: Kirk was transferred by the Highway Department to Middletown, where he worked for awhile before returning to Darrtown. After a childhood of recreation and good fortune during the early Thirties, Kirk had to run the farm.

“When I took over, some of the tenants were dairying and milking. Everything was on a fifty-fifty basis between landlord and tenant. When we divided the stock up; I ended up with quite a few milk cows. So, for a short time I milked; sold cream. I bought a separator from Eddie Thome to separate cream from milk. Fortunately, it had an electric motor on it. Every Saturday night, they would take your cream to the cream station up at Oxford to Herschel Charles. They would weigh it and check the butterfat. Maybe, a three-gallon can of cream would buy me a whole week's supply of groceries. It was a seven day a week job and I never begrudged anybody for any dime they made milking, because you're there morning and night, twice a day. I was doing it by hand; I wasn't big enough to have milking equipment. That didn't suit me too well, so I disposed of the milk cows.

I black-marketed back in those days. See, meat was rationed during the war. There was always a demand for meat. Slaughterhouses weren't delivering, because there just wasn't that much around. But I had a couple of connections in Hamilton; just a couple of neighborhood stores. Every Sunday, I would butcher a beef or two down on the lower farm and the guys would come and take it to the butcher shop. It wasn't government inspected; but, it was good beef.

I wasn't making any money on it, though. I was getting rid of my dairy stuff and took that money and reinvested it in beef cattle. I bought registered Hereford cattle. I'd go down there and talk to those cows on a first name basis. They're just like people. I'd rub their backs and walk through the herd just like family. You got close to them. I got to the place where, I would buy eighty to a hundred feeders in the fall of the year, grain-feed them during the winter time, and fatten them, and sell them in the spring. After you're with those cattle day and night, you get acquainted with them. You can tell when one is feeling bad or not, by association. But you can't get to the place where you can't sell them and have them slaughtered. You can't be that personal. But, it's a joy to raise and fatten cattle.

When I was farming, I always thought I was losing half a day, if I didn't get to the field by seven o'clock. I had to get up and get that damn milking done and feeding done, so I could get to the field and start working. And, you were always looking west, over your shoulder, to see if the clouds were forming or not to see whether it's going to rain. My barometer was that I would listen to the radio at St. Louis. What St. Louis had that day, we usually had tomorrow.

Prior to 1913, when we had the big flood in the Miami Valley, the farmers in the area brought milk to Edward Teckman, and he delivered it every other day to Hamilton by horse and wagon. Around 1920, he bought two Federal trucks. Federal was the name of the truck; not government trucks. His sons, Harry and Louis, took over the trucking business. Harry bought Louis out and he got a big old chain-drive Kissell truck. He used it as a stock truck to haul livestock to Cincinnati. He applied and received one of the very first PUCO, that's Public Utility Commission of Ohio, licenses to truck. He carried on this trucking operation until he died in 1970 or so.”

Comment of author, Jon Jeffrey Patton: The Teckman sons took over their father's trucking company just as the last Darrtown Darr was reaching old age. Johnny Darr, the youngest of Hiram and Harriet Darr's twelve children, was born on March 22, 1852. He was twenty-four years younger than his oldest sibling, Abraham.

“Johnny Darr was an old bachelor. When he died, my father was the administrator of the estate. He got Harry Teckman to buy that property. Darr lived in an old shack. When I was a kid, I was scared to go through there; because, the weeds were as high as the ceiling. He had a buggy top in there that he slept under to keep the rain off his bed. When he wanted to go anywhere, he just started out across country. He wouldn't follow the roads. At one time, I think he was one of the assessors for the township. He was the one who played the trombone in the Darrtown cornet band. They had uniforms and everything.

On Decoration Day, they always formed down there in the middle of town and walked to the cemetery. Well, one year, Johnny Darr was all involved in his music and instead of making the turn there at Shollenbarger Road; he walked straight on down the pike. When I was a kid, there used to be about three or four instruments from that band left in an old building. We'd go up there and blow those horns and make a noise. That's all we were doing, just making noise.

Darrtown used to be called the oasis of the county. At one time, there were five saloons in Darrtown. There were a lot of distilleries over there over the years, too. You'd think that was a thriving little town over there, with all the businesses that were there, back in the 1800s. A lot of traffic went through Darrtown on the toll road between Hamilton and Richmond. There were toll gates that people would pass through there in the early days. Taverns all the way up the line.

We used to go into The Hitching Post every night. When Red Huber came in there, he got it from George Lynch. George Lynch sold it to Red Huber and went down to Hamilton and started a saloon.

There's nothing in Darrtown, except farmers that lived in adjacent areas. Every night we would go uptown. We'd have to quit farming early to get a seat at the card table to play for checks. If you won, you got so many tokens, which were redeemable at the bar for whatever you wanted to redeem them for. Saturday was the poker crowd. They had a slot on the table where the game was cut. I just played hearts and pitch, or ‘Shoot the Moon,’ on weeknights.

After a few years, Red cut the card games out. He used to sell these numbers out of jars. There would be a big jar full of numbers that you would pay a quarter apiece for. There would be a few winning numbers; but, the big cut went to the house. Maybe, twenty percent were winners. They had to put them under the counter, because it was against the law. And, Red was afraid he was going to get caught; so he cut out the gambling and the card games.

For some of the people that worked in Oxford, it was a daily trip over there to The Hitching Post. I'm not talking about a high percentage of them. But, for a low percentage of them, it was damn near a hundred percent. When I was farming, I could set my watch by the time they started to come to Darrtown to the Hitching Post.

The Union Gas and Electric Company, UG&E, out of Cincinnati first brought electricity out to Darrtown in 1927. Subscribers along the line paid so much to have the line brought out. The line extended up to the first farm north of the crossroads of 73 and 177. As soon as they got enough money to establish a line by subscription (I remember my father paying his share), they threw the damn thing open to everybody to get in for nothing just by tying into the line. There were a lot of people that just didn't like the way they operated their system on that.

Just two miles west of Darrtown, off Shollenbarger Road is Chaw Raw Hill. It's said that Captain Sam Beeler, with his sons and their families, came there to make the first settlement in Four Mile Valley. They immigrated from Kentucky about 1802 and left the Miami River by Hamilton and followed Four Mile Creek (or Talawanda Creek, the Indian name, which means Winding Waters) until it was dark.

While the sons were making camp, Captain Sam spied a wild turkey going to roost. No rifle fire could be risked for fear of attracting the Indians. So, Sam used a club to kill the turkey. He pulled the feathers off and the sons argued that they couldn't build a fire to cook the bird, because the smoke would betray them. Old Sam was hungry, so he pulled off a leg and ate it raw. That's why it's called Chaw Raw Hill.

Captain Beeler died in 1824. He was buried close to Chaw Raw. And his son-in-law was Joe Collins, the first settler and Indian scout in the Oxford area. He later had a powder mill below Oxford on what's now called Collins Run, which used to be called Bull's Run. Just down from Chaw Raw is Lane's Mill. At the corner of Wallace and Shollenbarger Roads was a mill, first occupied in 1816. The present site was completed in 1848, by William Elliott to process Indian corn. It's named for William Lane, who owned it until 1898.

On the corner of the bend on Shollenbarger road is the old Huston Kyger Farm. Butch Green owns it now. It's probably one of Butler County's oldest log cabins. It was built in 1803. Huston Kyger came here from Hampshire County, Virginia.

The Kyger boys out here at the Chrysler dealership in Oxford are descendants of that family. The old Kygers had the race track off Scott Road, where Kit Kurry, Darrtown's" most famous race horse, used to race.

Now, the old Kyger Farm is nothing, but rubble. At one time, the Kyger boys wanted to buy that acre of ground, but the Greens wouldn't let loose of it. It's just rotted away. You can see the mound there. There were still some pretty good timbers in there. Since I moved to Oxford, I was always going over and I had permission to get a piece. I've got a fireplace here in the rec-room and I thought it would be nice to get one of those logs and make a mantle for the fireplace.

I used to raise English bulldogs, along with Dwight Miller, for a few years during the Forties. We didn't sell too many, but we raised them and showed them. I had an international champion that I bought up in Bellfountaine; female. Got a male out in Indiana. We raised quite a few. This international champion had a black pup. We took the stud and the pup to a dog show down in Cincinnati. We were really proud of that pup. We paraded it around on a leash down there. And, some guy got a hold of us and said, "We usually kill them, because black is an undesirable color in English bulldogs." Talk about something that would break your heart. I never heard of that; but, it was true. And, this one come out of an international champion.

You educate your kids, when they go to college and the chances are they are going elsewhere for employment or work. Those who go to high school and then go to work stay in the area. In Darrtown, that's the majority. Now, there are several college graduates from Darrtown, but the vast majority stay in the community and are employed in Hamilton and locally.”

Comment of author, Jon Jeffrey Patton: Back in the 1950s, Kirk started cutting out newspaper clippings about Darrtown. He spoke with some of the "older residenters" like Luther McVicker, who is, he says, "the only person that knows more about Darrtown than I do." Until John F. Mee, a former faculty member at Indiana University and author of “The Mee Saga” (the family history), died, Kirk had hoped his brother would help him write a history of Darrtown.

“I envy a lot of those people over at Darrtown; because, they can have a family reunion every Sunday. We're unfortunate. We don't see ours too often. The happiest time, that I recall, is when we are home here and the kids are under one roof. Not necessarily their families, because their families don't come that often. But when the three kids come in and sit down at the table and I can see them, those are my happiest hours.

I don't get back to Darrtown very often; no place to go. I drive through it occasionally, when I go back and forth from Hamilton. I go over and see my friend Warren Hansel. But I don't go back as much as I should. I go to the cemetery. It's funny, that's all the real estate I own in Milford Township. After having quite a few acres in Darrtown, now I'm down to talking about plots.”

[End of interview]