The Land of Tricks and Secrets

When you visit the Lower Lake Valley of Camp Crowell/Hilaka, you see a couple of old buildings around a lake. It's pretty. Then you maybe notice a few wierd things about Kirby House. And you definitly feel something strange while walking across the middle of the Garfield Hall floor. Then you start to wonder what is going on with this place.

Most of the girls hear that Mr. Kirby, who built the house and lived here, was an inventor. He invented Kirby vacuum cleaners. Most hear the legend that he built Garfield Hall on railroad boxcar springs to make it bouncey so that his daughter could have a special dance floor for her 16th birthday party.

Some troops find the the hidden oxbow and the secret waterfall.

But very few Girl Scouts have had time while they are camping to find out more than a couple of the clues to the past. Maybe we will never find them all. But the secrets are beginning to unfold!

Who Was Mr. Kirby?

Jim Kirby grew up in Cleveland in the 1890s.  School was hard for him because he only wanted to learn math and science.  Language class bored him, and he couldn’t pay attention.

One Saturday, he went to a YMCA class called “Electricity and Magic”.  From then on, he began to play wires and motors, gears, and othe rmachine parts to see what he could make.  He built small models of mills and trains that really worked.

He failed high school, and got a couple of jobs.  City street lights at the time were gas lamps.  They had to be lit in the evening by touching a torch to the wick, and they had to be snuffed out every morning.  Kirby was one of the lamplighters.  He also stuffed and delivered newspapers.  Finally, he found a job that he really liked:  making and fixing things at an electrical machine shop.  While there, he devised a telephone answering machine.  The invention was patented – only it was patented under the boss’s name.  Jim decided he’d be better off owning his own company than working for somebody else.  Eventually he did just that.

Kirby’s first shop barely scraped by.  He built and fixed electrical machines.  But what he really began looking for was a way to eliminate “household drudgery”.  He hated seeing his mom, his aunts and other women working so hard to keep their houses clean when so many new inventions were making men's lives easier.  “We ride in automobiles, we can talk thousands of miles by telephone, we can sew and iron, and work the ice cream freezer and churn the butter by electricity.  Why shouldn’t we sweep with electricity?”  He began working on plans.

His first vacuum cleaner was heavy and clunky.  It was only practical for hotels and other large buildings.  But it worked.  And it earned him enough money to keep working on new designs.  In 1910 he had a design for a vacuum cleaner small and light enough for the average home.  He began manufacturing them and made a fortune. He was 25 years old. 

He could have left well enough alone, but he had an inventor’s spirit.  He loved solving problems.  He never stopped making improvements on his vacuum cleaner. He also designed and patented improvements for washing mashines, dishwashers, irons, radiators,  radios and fishing rods.  Eventually he held over 200 patents.

The Inventor's Playground

With the money from Jim’s inventions, he and his wife decided to buy a farm out in the country where they could live surrounded by nature.  They could afford just about anything they wanted, and they chose the the old Oviatt property in Richfield.  It had a beautiful wild valley and fertile, rolling meadows.  It wasn’t far from business and society in Cleveland.  The only thing it didn’t have was electricity. 

James Kirby at work in his workshop, now the Mill Museum

None of the houses in Richfield in 1919 had electricity.  Families got along as they always had - working with the sun when possible; using candles and oil lamps when they had to.  But Jim had to have electricity to power his workshop.  Some of his inventions needed it.  Sometimes he even needed to make the parts using electric machinery.  He and Nellie could have kept looking.  But this land was so right!  They thought about it, talked it over, and thought some more.  They decided that if this place was perfect except for the lack of power, then they could make their own electricity.  Click here to see how they did it.

Jim designed the house, then hired people to cut down trees on the land to make lumber for it, and then to build the house.  He was always thinking about how to make things work better.  When he designed his house, he tried out some of his ideas.  Some worked and some didn't.

Jim wanted a lake for swimming and boating and fishing.  He decided to block up the creek with a dam so water would start building up behind it.  But Jim didn't like mud on the bottom of lakes where he swam.  So he designed tunnels hidden under the lake.  Upstream, dams would let clear water through, but storm water with mud in it would go into drains that led to the tunnels.  The tunnels were big enough that a person could slide down inside on a special sled to clear out mud or repair cracks.

Most of the girls who stay at Kirby House are curious about it.  Many think that because it's old and unusual, it must be haunted.  But the truth is that they weren't perfect, but the Kirbys had a pretty happy life here.  As far as anyone knows, no one died there.

James Kirby playing in the woods

Pioneers, Prospectors and Abolitionists

Way before the Kirbys lived on the land, the Oviatt family had a farm here. They raised sheep, cattle, and pigs.  They operated a sawmill on the creek. 

Mason and Fanny Oviatt lived in the house just outside the fence on the west side of camp with their ten children.

Before Fanny was married, she was a teacher. She also had a little business spinning yarn. She took her spinning wheel with her everywhere she went - even to school! With the extra money she earned, she was able to buy a pair of oxen that her father needed.

Mason helped slaves escape to Canada where they could be free. One time, he had a plan to help sneak several slaves past the slave catchers. People in town were used to seeing him hauling cheese, hay, and other things his family made out to faraway markets. This time, he took some boards and laid them across the floor of the wagon, leaving a twelve inch gap between the boards and the bottom of the wagon. That made a secret compartment where slaves could hide. Then he pitched a load of hay over the false floor, hitched up his horses to the wagon and drove to the house of his friend, John Brown.  Once night came, John brought the slaves out from where they had been hiding. Mason unloaded the hay and packed some of it between the floors of the wagon. Then the escaping slaves climbed in and Mason replaced the false floor and drove to the town of Oberlin where the slaves would be safe.

In 1849, gold was discovered in California.  Thousands of people rushed west to try to find gold for themselves.  In 1850, Mason Oviatt and a group of his neighbors joined the rush.  He died before returning home.  His body was brought back, and he was buried in a nearby cemetery.

Did Mason help other slaves escape?  Did any of the slaves ever hide in the in the woods at camp?  We don't know.  Helping slaves escape was against the law of the time, so when people did it, they kept it secret.  Some people had permanent secret hiding places built into their houses and barns, but sometimes a hiding places changed to fool slave catchers who would keep watch on the old spots. People could hide in an ordinary room or in something in plain sight like a haystack or a pile of leaves.

Fanny told Mason's story to her grandchildren only after it was safe to let them know about it: after the Civil War . Maybe it was the only time they helped. Maybe it was the only time that Fanny knew about. Or maybe it was the favorite family story.  So much in the past is a secret.

And what happened when Mason went west?  How did he die?  Did he find gold?  Someone must have paid a lot of money for his body to be brought back to Richfield.  That's another secret in the past. 

John Brown was a famous abolitionist who lived in Richfield for a few years.  When John’s children were sick with diphtheria, Fanny helped take care of them.  Diphtheria can spread, and at first Mason didn’t want Fanny to go to John’s house in case she caught the disease or brought it home to their children.  But she told him to think what it would be like if their family were sick, and what if no one came to help them?  So she went and took care of the sick family.  Before she went back home, she burnt the clothes she wore and scrubbed herself down with lye soap and put on clean clothes she had left for herself in the woodshed.  None of her children caught the disease.

Check back soon for more!