Backstory: From A to Zoar

This is a story that ran in our August 1989 issue. Small updates to align with AP style have been made to this version of the article.

It was a beautiful day for an auction in the historic village of Zoar. The old houses looked splendid in the winter sunlight, and the narrow streets were crowded with spectators. It’s not every day that an 1830s hotel comes on the block, and this was a very fine specimen — five stories high, if you count the octagonal cupola and eight-windowed tower above it — an eccentric, one-of-a-kind hotel as remarkable as the people who’d built it.

For this was the hotel the Zoarites constructed for those long-ago tourists who came down from the cities to see Ohio’s most famous religious commune, the Society of Separatists of Zoar. When they built their hotel in 1833, their community was already 16 years old and going strong. They wanted tourists to come — to spend their money buying Zoar-made products — because theirs was a communist society with capitalist leanings, and they combined the two quite successfully for most of the 19th century.

The Society endured from 1819 to 1898, far outlasting nearly all the other communistic societies that sprang up on the American Midwest in the 1800s. The Zoarites did not suspect, when they built their hotel, that tourism would be their undoing.

The hotel was successful for a time, even after the Zoarites disbanded, because the little town was still attractive to tourists who came down from the cities. But tourism declined eventually, and the guest rooms were closed. The hotel dining room suffered, the food going from bad to worse, until the diners dwindled to a desperate few. Owners came and went, and the hotel fell into receivership in 1983. That’s what precipitated the excitement that fine winter day in 1984 when the Zoar Hotel was about to be sold at auction.

The townspeople were hopeful that someone would buy and restore it so that Zoar might become once again an inviting place for tourists to stay. Don Wallick, the auctioneer, began his spiel, and the bids commenced, very low at first — the building was in terrible shape — then climbing rapidly as a stranger kept upping the ante. “Who is that man?” people asked one another, but nobody knew.

When Wallick finally banged down the gavel, the stranger had bought the decrepit hotel for $220,000. “That’s crazy,” people said.

Indeed it was. The stranger was discovered to be a recently released patient from a mental asylum, who was bidding money he did not have for a hotel he could not possibly operate. When his circumstances became known, he was bundled off to the hospital again, and all over town, people congratulated themselves on their sagacity. “Didn’t I tell you that was crazy?”

Joan and Don Whitemyer bought the hotel the next year, for $75,000, and endured the inevitable jokes. “Only a lunatic would buy the Zoar Hotel,” their neighbors said, highly amused at their wit, which the Whitemyers have learned to tolerate with considerable grace — although it’s been four years since they bought it, and nothing much has happened.

The Whitemyers had hoped to line up a group of well-heeled investors to finance the restoration and operation as a means of sheltering their tax liabilities. But the next year the federal tax laws were changed so that it no longer made sense to lose money on purpose, which forced them to rewrite the prospectus to emphasize the profit potential instead of the losses.

They still intend to operate the hotel — along with two other Zoar-built houses they own — as a European-style hotel and retreat, primarily for business people. It would be a hotel of impeccable quality and luxurious service—with limousine pickup, computer access, facsimile service, Wall Street Journals in the morning, high tea in the afternoon — but all this is still in the talking stage, with a $5-million price tag attached. So far there have been no investors.

So the Zoar Hotel stands forlorn on Main Street, its yellow paint peeling, its green shutters hanging askew. Meanwhile, a block away, in one of the old Zoarite homes, where the Knutty family lives in the company of dozens of cats, Naomi Knutty considers the misfortunes at the Zoar Hotel, offering the inevitable explanation. “Why, it’s haunted, of course,” she says, and probably cursed as well.

She has her information on good authority, she is certain, for as a minister she has spent nearly 30 years aiding the elderly people in Zoar and listening to their stories, which is an occupational bonus in her line of work.

One of her favorite friends was Hilda Morhart, a descendant of the Zoarites, who wrote a volume of history, which is sold at local bookstores. But, as is often the case with local historians, Mrs. Morhart left out the best parts, and those were the stories she shared with her friend and confidant in her final days.

She told Miss Knutty about the ghostly “man in black,” who mysteriously appears in the hotel hallways late at night, and she spoke of the curse that the unhappy Zoarites invoked at the time of their dissolution because they blamed the hotel — and the tourists it attracted — for the troubles that led to their downfall. According to Miss Knutty’s understanding of it, the curse would apply to all future hotel owners who attempted to profit from the Zoarite’s enterprise.

Miss Knutty, for one, finds the curse quite comforting, since she disapproves of the Whitemyers’ plans, and she cheerfully recounts the suicides, failed marriages and lost fortunes that have haunted previous owners. One hotel keeper was so distraught he attempted an exorcism, and another held séances, hoping to appeal to the spirits directly.

The current owners, the Whitemyers, have been able to appease the secular forces — they secured a zoning variance they needed — but the supernatural forces are not so easily won over, in Miss Knutty’s view. So, while most of her neighbors are hoping for a restored hotel and a resurgence of tourism, Miss Knutty is counting on the ghosts to give them a run for their money.

Many of the Zoarites are buried in unmarked graves — they detested the pomp of marble — in a hillside cemetery above the village. Whether or not their spirits inhabit the town, their architectural legacy is abundantly clear in the surviving buildings, so that a visitor to Zoar is mindful of a certain presence.

***

Zoar is remarkably intact, much as it was when the Zoarites disbanded ninety-one years ago. The effect is quite lovely, a 12-block settlement of log and frame houses on narrow streets framed by white picket fences, in the old German style. There are four large brick buildings that the Zoarites built — the school, the church, the greenhouse and, most impressive of all, the Number One House, two and a half stories high and one block long. It was here that Joseph Bimeler lived, the Zoarites’ visionary leader who inspired their covenant and kept them faithful.

Zoar is a real town with an elected government and 260 residents, 70 in the historic district. The Ohio Historical Society owns eight of the original buildings, but the others are privately owned, primarily by people who live in them, operating small home-based shops and bed-and-breakfast inns. There is no occasional tour bus, but the attractions of Zoar are not well-known to the general public.

The buildings owned by the Historical Society are staffed only in summer and on spring and fall weekends. In season, some of the old Zoarite workshops are open, but staffing is thin, so an escort usually guides a visitor from one locked building to the next. Unlocking the doors and turning on the lights, he gives a short talk then turns out the lights and relocks the door before walking on to the next stop.

At Zoar, there is none of the historical showmanship of costumed craftsmen who extol instant heirlooms — no tinsmiths hammering out candle snuffers, no blacksmiths forging iron doodads. Tourists attempting to buy cookies at the Zoar Bake Shop are disappointed to find that nobody’s baking. People who expect to be entertained complain that there’s nothing to do, and Zoar has not caught on as a major tourist attraction.

Just north of the village limits, on the road that connects Zoar with I-77, there is a commercial strip that has been developed with touristy facsimiles of rural life, in the style so cherished by entrepreneurs. This area of north-central Ohio, anything Amish has instant tourist appeal, while those other German Separatists, the Zoarites, have no great tourist following.

The tour-bus traffic rolls on by, hellbent for Amish country, neglecting Zoar; perhaps it is a side effect of the old Zoarites’ curse.

***

Like the Amish, the Zoarites rose from the religious ferment following the Reformation in 16th-century Germany. Like the Amish, they rejected the liturgy of Rome and structures of the state-sanctioned Lutheran Church. Like the Amish, they were persecuted, and like the Amish, they found refuge in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers took them in, eventually loaning them the money for a down payment on land in Ohio.

But their conversion to communism set them apart, and it is that element that makes the Zoarites most interesting, for they were practical communists who renounced their individual rights, not as an act of faith, but as a means of survival. And, in so doing, they created a society that was — for a time — tantalizingly close to the Utopian dream.

They were not yet communists when they arrived on the banks of the Tuscarawas River in 1817, so for the first two years they struggled, each according to his own lights, and made no headway at all. They had barely enough to eat.

Their debt worried them — they owed $15,000 for the 5,500 acres they’d bought — and they had only 15 years to pay it. In desperation they adopted the articles of association, renouncing their individual rights of ownership and binding themselves together “with utmost zeal and diligence without opposition or grumbling.”

Their leader, Joseph Bimeler, was elected agent general to represent the Society in all its dealings with the outside world, a post he held until the day he died. Bimeler was also the only spiritual leader the Zoarites ever had. He conducted Sunday services that were spartan indeed, for Bimeler found long prayers an abomination and prayer books “injurious” because they led to mere babbling of the mouth. His services were short and to the point. He’d talk a bit, the people would sing a hymn, and that was it; back to work.

Bimeler urged against the Sabbath as a day of rest. Seeds sown on a Sunday grow as well as those sown on a weekday, he said, and since nature made no distinction, neither should man. Bimeler was neither fanatical nor autocratic. He exhorted but did not punish, and never demanded servile obedience. He was flexible where the rules were concerned. He espoused celibacy; in fact, until he was smitten, then relaxed the rule, although he continued to say that virginity was the desired state.

Bimeler was astute in his dealings with the outside, and the Zoarites did a lively business selling apples, grapes, wine, cider, nursery stock, beef, hides, butter, tinware, tile, barrels, lumber, stoves and furniture. The Society maintained two blast furnaces, shipping pig iron and castings as far away as New York, Pittsburgh and Detroit. They operated packet boats on the Ohio and Erie Canal, which passed through their settlement, and named them Economy, Industry and Friendship.

Under Bimeler’s gentle dictatorship slackers were reprimanded publicly, but expulsion was the punishment of last resort, and seldom invoked. Bimeler maintained total control for 34 years, with unquestioned honesty, and no charge of impropriety was ever raised against him.

By the 1830s, the Society was debt-free and largely self-sufficient. They’d earned $21,000 in cash for digging the portion of the canal that passed through their valley; they’d built the stately Number One House for their leader, and they’d worked the bugs out of the communist system. Food was plentiful, the beer excellent, the cider mellow. The people appeared well satisfied.

Everybody worked and shared equally in the fruits of their labor. The Zoar-grown grain was ground into Zoar-milled flour and fashioned into Zoar-baked loaves, which the people picked up each evening.

People took as much as they wanted, no questions asked. Beef was issued on Tuesdays and Thursdays from the butcher shop. Cider and milk were delivered daily to each house. New clothes were available at the sewing house, just for the asking.

It must have been a very pretty village, given the German penchant for neatness. The enormous Zoar garden was tended fastidiously, and the white fences constantly whitewashed. “Scouring and polishing was a daily occupation,” a visitor wrote. “Floors, benches, pavements, tables, animals and children were scrubbed until they shone. Even the trees were scrubbed.”

By 1852 the communal property was worth $1 million, and the population had increased from 300 to 500. The Zoarites didn’t seek converts, but some outsiders sought admission, especially during economic recessions — when a town with free daily bread and beer seemed like a good place to live. Non-Germans rarely were permitted to join. The discrimination was justified on the grounds of preserving a harmonious whole — akin in language and culture. Even at the height of their prosperity, the Zoarites recognized the real danger that outsiders posed. For theirs was a society that depended on conformity, equality — and the willing compliance of like-minded people.

But outsiders were infinitely curious about the Zoarites — much as today’s tourists flock to Amish country to see the plain people in horse-drawn buggies — and while the Zoarites were reluctant at first, they gradually accepted the presence of strangers who’d come to stare at them — and also to buy.

So the Zoarites built the hotel and welcomed the tourists who picnicked in the apple orchards, visited the craft shops and raved about their hotel dinners and the good, strong beer. The tourists tipped the waitresses lavishly, and girls who were tired of the standard-issue dresses spent their money on fancier clothes. Their mothers began selling chickens and eggs to the tourists, too, and keeping the cash, in direct violation of the Society’s rule.

As the Zoarites began competing for the tourists’ favor, jealousies arose between the hotel workers and others with less access to the visitors. It seemed unfair that fieldworkers and dairymen worked from dawn to dusk with nothing to show for it, while waitresses and chambermaids sauntered about town jingling the coins in their pockets.

So long as Joseph Bimeler was alive, the dissension was kept under control — he had a knack for squelching internal rebellions — but when he died, Christian love gave way to grumbling. Bimeler died in 1853, and the effect was immediate. A writer who visited a week after the leader’s death found the people wandering aimlessly about, “like sheep that have lost their shepherd.” The community began to fall apart, both socially and economically.

So long as Bimeler ran things, he insisted on investing the Society’s profits back into the industries to keep them competitive. But after he died, the Zoarites squandered their dividends on risky ventures. They lost thousands on worthless railroad stocks in the 1860s. Rumors of embezzlement swirled about, but the books were such a mess the alleged larceny was impossible to trace. Yet, the seeds of mistrust would take root and flourish as times got worse.

Suddenly, the woolen mill was operating at a loss. Zoar-made products were no longer competitive. It became cheaper for the members to buy ready-made clothes. They had lost all pretensions of self-sufficiency. Morale declined, and idealism suffered.

The old people blamed the young people, of course, for they had never known persecution or poverty; they’d had it too easy, the elders complained, in the age-old refrain. In the woolen mill, the dispirited workers lay about drinking beer instead of working. They left the machines running, so the noise would cover their laziness, but the mill was producing little more than sound and fury.

Angry words disturbed the once-perfect peace: The blacksmith blamed his neighbor for taking it easy while he sweated at the anvil; the dairyman complained that he toiled while others slept; the schoolteacher said the rule of “love thy neighbor” had given way to “slander thy neighbor.”

After Bimeler died, there was no one to lead the worship. For decades Bimeler’s old sermons were read and reread, until his message became an old story, and people stopped going to church altogether. Young people left town, declaring there was no future in Zoar, and the population declined from 500 to 300.

The Society was on its last legs when Cleveland lawyer named Alexander Gunn came to town to deliver the blow that pushed it over the edge. Gunn was a wealthy industrialist who liked Zoar so much he moved in permanently. He made his home at the Zoar Hotel, and built a log cabin as a party house where he entertained his Cleveland cronies and a few of the Zoarite leaders. The parties were long, loud, lavish — and divisive — for the Zoarites who were not invited were jealous of the ones who were.

Most of the members objected to Gunn’s presence. He was not a Society member, of course; he was not even German. But when they pressed for his expulsion, they found their leaders had been subverted by Gunn’s fine wines and rich foods. They refused to act against their generous host. The Gunn incident opened the people’s eyes to their true situation. The members were no longer equal. A favored few were enjoying all the comforts that money could buy while the rest made do with whatever was meted out to them.

Schoolteacher Levi Bimeler began agitating for the Society’s dissolution, arguing that his great-grandfather’s rule had been hopelessly perverted and totally corrupted. He established a monthly newspaper he called Nuggets (anti-gun). He only published three issues — he was threatened with expulsion — but he made his point persuasively, and the people took it to heart.

With some fear and misgiving, the members finally put to a vote in 1898, and the Society of Separatists of Zoar was formally disbanded after 79 years. It was left to three elected commissioners to divide the property among the 222 remaining members, with each receiving an approximate $2,500 in cash and property.

Shortly after the vote of dissolution, E. O. Randall, secretary of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, spent some time in Zoar to chronicle the Society’s final days. He interviewed everyone who would talk although some had grown weary of it — and his affectionate account gives a sympathetic picture of what he found there: “The plucky little Society has run its course and fought the good fight.”

Randall found the Zoarite children bright and well-mannered, the men plump and somewhat indolent, the women noticeably busier, and more anxious about the way their lives would soon change. Only the young men were truly eager for it. “Every man for himself,” they said firmly, and often.

Randall found the old people most apprehensive — they said they had agreed reluctantly to the will of the majority — but they were fearful of going it alone so late in life.

A year later, Dr. Randall returned to Zoar to see how the people were faring under the new order of things. He found many changes: The streets had been named, and some houses had new roofs and new yellow brick chimneys. One man had put in central heating and was eager to show it off. People took a peculiar delight in the possessive pronoun, working it into the conversation wherever they could: my house; my cow; my wagon.

Randall found that a new cobbler had set up shop down the street from the old one, in the first display of direct competition that Zoar had ever seen, and a Zoarite husband had abandoned his wife of long standing, spurring the first divorce in the community’s history.

Dr. Randall stopped at the Zoar Hotel and found it overrun with traveling salesmen who had come to mine the virgin territory, for the Zoarites had cash now, and they were eager to spend it. In the lobby, a newly installed gum-dispensing machine was popular with the younger capitalists who pushed in their pennies and walked away satisfied — chewing their tutti-frutti.

***

In that same hotel lobby today, Joan Whitemyer surveys the possibilities. Over the years the hotel has been sorely abused by fly-by-night operators who breezed into town on a wing and a prayer, promising everything and leaving little. Previous owners covered over most of the building’s natural attributes with awful additions, cheap wallpaper and tacky carpeting, but the Whitemyers are sympathetic to the Zoarites’ construction methods; they have been in town 20 years and have preserved four buildings — including the 1817 log building that houses their ad agency office.

If anyone is capable of treating the Zoar Hotel with the respect it deserves, it’s the Whitemyers. Whether they’ll be able to do it is another matter entirely. So far, they’ve spent a great deal of their own money, and the hoped-for investors have failed to materialize. Mrs. Whitemyer is aware that where great visions are concerned, it’s a fine line between lunacy and genius, yet she can visualize all this as an elegant hotel retreat — although at the moment the lobby is cold and dank, from its many seasons of disuse, and smells powerfully of cat urine. There are ladders and tools scattered about, left by workmen the Whitemyers hired to rip out the old boilers and tear away the offending layers of drywall to reveal the post-and-beam construction and the original lath strips and horsehair plaster.

The Zoarites built their hotel the way they built their barns — with heavy timbers and mortise-and-tenon construction, methods they’d learned in Germany in the 1700s. Mrs. Whitemyer is excited by each new discovery, especially the vast underground spaces — the limestone vaults and massive stone stairways—that had been hidden for years.

She ascends the narrow rickety stairs to enjoy the view from the tower. There is so much to see: the Number One House directly across the street; the levee to the south and the church and school on the hills to the north; the Zoarites’ garden tended by the state and a legion of local volunteers; restored houses on narrow streets, behind white picket fences.

Zoar’s population has changed a great deal in the last 20 years. The number of Society descendants has declined to a handful, and the people who came for cheap housing in the 1930s had mostly died out. The new people tend to be professionals who commute to jobs in Akron and Canton because they like the idea of a quiet little village in a rural setting.

The mayor, Charles Knaack, is typical of the new Zoarites. He and his wife, June, are both art teachers in Tuscarawas County. They have restored their log house to its 1820 condition, and they’ve had a hand in reconstructing several others.

Preservation is a notion that is catching on. On nearly every street one hears the sound of hammer and saw as people rip off siding, seeking the historic structures within. But Zoar has not gentrified; it is still a place with some diversity and considerable tolerance. The mayor insists that nobody objects to the Knuttys with all those cats, or to the many old Zoarite houses that are more tired-looking than quaint. 

Zoar maintains a certain rugged individualism. Until recently there were no zoning regulations at all, and there are still no architectural restrictions; so, when a local florist put up a modern building, people said it looked odd and let it go at that. Still, it’s only a matter of time; once preservation fever hits hard, people tend to lose their taste for diversity.

Zoar is small and relatively poor, with an annual budget of $28,000. Its only resource is its history and its architecture, commodities it has scarcely begun to exploit.

But the boom in Amish-country tourism has not gone unnoticed in Zoar, nor has the proliferation of “historic sites” like Cedar Point and Disney World, with their plasticized replicas of old-time Main Streets. In Zoar, however, the Main Street is the real thing, and the history is unique.

It’s inevitable the tourists will return in great numbers one day, whether the Zoarites’ ghosts like it or not. And Hilda Morhart’s tales of the curse will be told and retold — for the amusement of visitors. 

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