The Old Topliff and Ely Plant
Elyria, Ohio

By Doug Sheldon

Sherwood Anderson’s desertion of everything Elyrian was the first literary myth I swallowed whole. A counselor and I were walking along the railroad tracks that divided the north and south sides of town and faced a u-bend in the black river that cradled a mostly empty lot scattered with construction debris and discarded rock (now the BASF chemical plant, oddly apropos to Elyria’s industrial past). He asked me if I knew who Anderson was. Being twelve, I had no idea. He proceeded to tell me that Anderson walked these tracks out of town, wound up in Cleveland, then moved to Chicago to become a writer. It engaged me in a swirl of wannabe masculinity that this man had burned down his life, hiked his way along the retreating wilderness of pre-World War One Ohio, and used Cleveland’s cobweb of train tracks to migrate himself to Chicago, where men became writers.

Again, being twelve, I am sure he left out that Anderson’s migration was spurred by a mental breakdown, a wearying due to the drudgery of manufacturing or the singularity of his marriage or any number of other things Anderson was not particularly talented at.

The tracks follow the river then diverge from it as you moved west. In the nineties, when I was walking with my counselor, Elyria’s past lay along them like a graveyard of iron rods and crumbled limestone. The town’s industrial self-sufficiency was long dead by the time I heard of Sherwood Anderson. Years before my birth, it became a bedroom community where people commuted to jobs in Cleveland. We knew many people like Anderson in Elyria. People who desperation broke, and hope couldn’t heal. I didn’t know then I was looking at the bones of a hulking dragon, ghosts of smokestacks that puffed the Ohio sky with a soot and energy that furnished mail-order solutions to leaky roofs.

These products gave the Andersons status, money, and a house to be envied. Years later, his soon-to-be ex-wife told biographer Walter Rideout, “Roof-Fix carried us to Elyria.” He employed many men, like himself, who were new locals, moving to Elyria from the farming hinterlands with promises that it could be as big as Toledo or Cleveland. A 1910 advertisement listed the name of his factory as “The Old Topliff and Ely Plant” — even his business bore the name of the town’s founder. He was Elyria’s property. In the same year he processed paint, roof tar, and a few dozen other products that spilled their run-off through half-buried pipes and sludged their exhaust over the slate piled along the riverbanks.

For two more years shipments were packed into train cars with a monotony that burrowed itself into Anderson. Then came a fugue state, as Anderson’s contemporaries called it. He just couldn’t process his Elyrian life. On a seemingly normal Thanksgiving morning in 1912, Anderson mumbled something about wet feet to his secretary and wandered out of his office, through the doors of the snow-colored castle on the elbow of the Black River. He abandoned his life, choosing a route where no one he knew would look: the railroad tracks. An umbilical cord to his factory, the railroad disseminated Roof-Fix all over northern Ohio and beyond, routes he had likely reviewed dozens of times a year, mapping an unconscious escape route. He was found three days later in Cleveland, shoeless and babbling, half painted with mud. Writing, and possibly some undeclared trauma, carried him out of my hometown and to the Capital of the Midwest. Which it would do to me almost a century later.

Not much lasts a hundred years in my hometown. Any evidence of Anderson’s thriving business in Elyria is buried under layers of soil and time, a palimpsest tinting the successes of this mini metropolis in faded sepia. It was as if the earth took revenge on Elyrians for amassing all that industrial weight and swallowed it out of spite. Elyria’s problem wasn’t that it burned him out, but it dry-rotted him. Even if you were president of the local business collective, as Anderson was, you weren’t insulated from how a life of denied talent cracks the mind.

Progress, when I was abandoning Elyria, was a slang word for replacing unionized manufacturing careers with stock jobs at Walmart, of which we had three. My high school was collapsing under asbestos tiles and a lack of choices. You either went to the community college, worked fast food, or left town. I am sure there were more choices for wealthier kids, going to the top universities in the state or taking over their father’s car dealership, but for a kid who watched the future of his town melt away as we all crawled toward the 2000s, it was enough to make you wonder what that mud on Anderson’s legs felt like. I am not defending a person ditching all responsibilities at the feet of those left behind because you had to live your vision, but, being an Elyrian, I get it.

Doug Sheldon is a teacher, scholar, and writer living in the Midwest. He can be found either in the archives, reading, or doing something lake related.

Image from the Anderson Manufacturing Company catalog, as pictured in Kim Townsend’s biography, Sherwood Anderson (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin

By Kassie Jo Baron

Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.

But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.  

About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”

By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.

It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).

Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.

Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.

These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.

Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”

Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.

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Cow Creek Crossing
Pittsburg, Kansas

By Leslie VonHolten

Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The Government Lake,” a trip to the toy store ends with a discomfiting acceptance of violence. Or the reader of “Awkward Silence,” on her porch, annoyed by helicopters mating overhead. Or how about those late-in-life lovers, mugged by musicians in “The Hostile Philharmonic Orchestra”?

If you think these are strange set-ups, how about this: Tate, a surrealist, absurdist Midwestern poet won the Pulitzer Prize (1992) and the National Book Award (1994) for his odd dreamscapes. What a world.

Tate lived many places that rightfully claim him, but it was as a student in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he learned that he was a poet. This landscape of disturbed prairie, coyote howls, and broad days opened the deep attention he needed to see the absurd in everyday life.

I’m all for the magic carpet ride Tate gives us, but it is “Manna” from his first collection that grounds me. A little sentimental, yes, but its alignment of solitude and connection under the night sky hits me square in the sternum. It is my all-time favorite poem set in Kansas.

Train tracks in Pittsburg have changed since Tate wrote those lines in 1967. Many spurs have been pulled out or paved over, and the depot is now an event center. But you can still find slow, flat and open crossings on the quieter edges of town. Tate’s miraculous provision of the poem likely happened as he walked home along West Hudson Street. Poets and other bohemians were known to drink on the trestle bridge spanning nearby Cow Creek, the setting of another poem in the collection.

Rural Kansas is rarely seen as a gateway to surrealist thought, but look closer and consider. Pittsburg is surrounded by the land-scars of mining, small pits and hills that undulate throughout the county. In the early 20th century, immigrants from all over the world came to southeast Kansas to work in the “gopher hole,” strip, and shaft mines. Many were from Eastern Europe, and the area became known as the Little Balkans. It’s a heritage that echoes still: until the pandemic, you could polka dance at Barto’s Idle Hour in neighboring Frontenac on Saturday nights. Artist-painted fiberglass replicas of coal buckets honor the town’s mining past.

This is also a land of gorillas. They are everywhere. The Pittsburg State University mascot is the proud town identifier — even the trash bins in front of each house are gold and red, and cement silverbacks decorate yards in every neighborhood.

The historical juxtaposition exposes the absurdity: Pitt State students selected the gorilla in 1925, while just three years earlier, the town made international news when 6,000 women and children marched for three days to protest poor labor conditions in the mines. The Kansas National Guard was deployed to establish order; a New York Times reporter dubbed the women the “Amazon Army.” They were lauded as heroes in the mine camps.

It’s a surreal mix, these legacies of college rah-rah comingling with a socialist labor movement. “I sure miss that country; I am really beginning to feel or see the roots I have there,” Tate wrote to his instructor Eugene DeGrusen in 1966. “It takes time and distance I guess to see that kind of thing, but I see it now and I’m proud of it. Not that I write bucolic verse or even use much naturalistic imagery, but I am primitive in a contemporary way, if such a phrase can be allowed.”

… but I am primitive in a contemporary way … Fiberglass coal buckets, Saturday night polka music, and gorillas on the prairie. Seeing a place better after you have left. Hello absurdist poet — we know you well.

Leslie VonHolten writes about the connections between land and culture. A 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow, her art writing has been published in Pitch, Lawrence.com, and Ceramics Art + Perception. Sometimes she also curates a show or makes a zine. She lives in Kansas, where she mostly grew up. Leslie thanks poet Al Ortolani for the Pittsburg map and memory conversations.

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