Steven outside: "Blown to Atoms!" ... from the junction bridge to Kings Mills

I can remember as a youngster walking across the railroad bridge at the middletown junction. My father, brother, and I walked down the old tracks of the Middletown and Cincinnati railroad from the direction of Hagerman's crossing and crossed the bridge here to mushroom hunt in the old abandoned fields at the junction. I say the Middletown and Cincinnati railroad just because they were the first owner of the line, it was also owned at one time or another by the Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern railway, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pennsy's successor the Penn Central, Conrail, and the Indiana and Ohio. The exact dates and order of all that is not clear enough to me to try and sort out here, all I remember is being a young boy and being afraid to look down between the ties as I walked the bridge. It's now owned by the city of Lebanon and part of the rails to trails program. It's funny but the old bridge still stands and doesn't seem so high now. When the Lebanon Bike Trail was connected to the Little Miami Bike Trail they used the framework of the old bridge to cross the river. But now instead of open ties there is solid blacktop and much less scarey crossing.

The original railroad junction had a triangular shape, to allow trains to travel either direction on the Little Miami Railroad. Now only the leg closest to South Lebanon is paved as bikeway. The other leg of the wye is rapidly being retaken by forest. As is the old river bottom we mushroom hunted in. Long before my time my grandfather farmed corn in this bottom, hauling it back up to his house atop Punkin Brown Hill in South Lebanon in a wagon. Inside the wye is a tangled jungle full of old pieces of rail and iron and stone relics of the railroad. Getting around in here is close to impossible, I've often said this will be my hideout when I've had enough and become an outlaw.

Below the bridge the river twists and turns in the sharpest series of curves on the river downstream of Fishpot Ford creating a series of pools and riffles and runs packed one above the other. This is also the site of the old dam.

I stopped in the wonderful Warren County Historical Society Museum to check some of my facts and the lady that helped me reminisced about swimming at the dam with her husband. Allmost everyone of a certain age that grew up in South Lebanon or Kings Mills it seems has a story about the King's dam. I know it was my father's and his brothers favorite place to fish in their youth.

My father also said that most times when they got there his grandfather and several other older men were out on the dam fishing for suckers. Or rather snaring suckers. The technique was to use a bit of redworm on a tiny hook with one big treble tied right below that. This rig was fished with a big cane pole so that when the sucker nibbled on the worms you could lift straight up with the long pole and hook him. Nowdays right above the ruins of the dam is still one of the deepest spots on the river with a fish holding eddy on each side.

Several times I've slipped a dozen night crawlers in my pack with a rest stop here for lunch in mind. While taking a break from wading and casting I'll usually catch a couple drum and maybe a channel cat here. One of those drum is quite often the best fish of the day. Some guys look down their nose at drum but I'm pretty much of the opinion that any fish that hits both lures and bait so willingly cannot be all bad.

One of the nice things about the fishing here is the fact you might catch any of four or five different species of fish in a morning. This big hole would still be a great place to catch a big flathead If you spent the night here. Nowdays you would have to make the commitment to spend the whole night as the trail down from the bike trail would be simply awful in the dark as the old fields have grown up in an inpenetrable thicket. I've been unable to find out when the dam was built. In 1878 Joseph Warren King and his nephew Ahimaaz King bought the property of a gristmill located here already to construct powder mills along the millrace running through their new purchase. The water in the race was used both to power the mills and to fight the fires from the inevitable explosions. If you look at the photo that shows a closeup of a piece of the old dam you can see that under the concrete is an older layer made up of stones layed side by side on edge. I wonder if this was the old mill dam and was covered in concrete by the powder mills. Up by the bike trail the foundation of the old keg shop where powder kegs were built is slowly disappearing in the undergrowth.

Below the dam the river twists and turns and is a fine place to fish for smallmouth bass. You pretty much can go through the whole tackle box along this stretch as the water is constantly changing from riffle to run to hole to funny looking hybrids of all three. Or just simply tie on one good lure like a grub and fish it all the way thru. My father says in the old days this was a place to bring home a mess of channel cats by fishing chicken liver under a float thru the twists and turns. Though I haven't yet tried it, I imagine it still is.

I don't know if this is an exceptional place for wildlife or if I've just been lucky but it seems like I see a fox or a muskrat or a mink every time I fish here. I know this was one of my fathers favorite places to trap for mink back in the day. Last week I rounded a rock bar here and a big softshell turtle came hurtling down the bank and across the sand, splashing into the river. When I walked up to where she spooked I could see her tracks leading back to where she had dug a hole into the sand and layed a clutch of eggs.

Downstream the river straightens again and you can see the bridge abutments of the powder line bridge used by the Peters Cartridge Company. Here and below in the "Dry House Hole" there is deep water made for catfishing.

The original factory, built in the 186o's, made bullets for the Union Army during the Civil War, and was a target for Morgan's Raiders during their 1863 trip through Ohio though the raiders never made it to the factory.
The company spread much of more dangerous parts of its gunpowder manufacturing operation into smaller buildings up and down the river here after the explosion on July 15, 1890. At 3:50p.m., a train car collided with two cars loaded with 800 kegs of black powder. This set off a chain reaction that exploded another 800 plus kegs of powder and thousands of shells leveling the main factory in a blast that was heard all over the county. Papers all over the country carried the news of what must have been at the time one of the world's biggest explosions. One papers headline read "BLOWN TO ATOMS!" as no traces of several workers were ever found. On a rock bar there is a set of train wheels from this or one of the other numerous explosions that happened over the years. The riffle with the train wheels is named "the Drowning Run" in my mind as I was swept off my feet here wading one fishing trip and was pretty bruised and beat up and half drowned before I made it out.

The factory was rebuilt after the company sued and won a lawsuit for damages against the Little Miami Railroad. The shot tower where the tiny molton lead shotgun pellets were dropped to form round pellets was for decades the tallest structure in the county up until the replica Eiffle Tower was built at Kings Island Amusement Park. Most of the smaller buildings are fading back into the woods now and even the large factory is mostly a giant ruin even though it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Among the graffiti painted all over the ruins are several pentagrams and five sided stars. While most of these were painted by kids, local legend has several satanic rituals taking place in the ruins of the old factory. These stories along with the deaths of workers has the old powder plant being listed high on any list of Ohio's haunted places. Add in the indian burial mounds all up and down the river, the tragedy at Mather's Mill, and the strange lights at Ft Ancient and the Little Miami must be the most haunted river on earth.

In the 1930s during the Depression, Peters sold out to Remington, its competitor and among my most treasured possessions is my grandfathers ring presented to him for twentyfive years of service to the company.