RICH HILL — On a frigid, blustery March day, Charlie Griffith, clad in insulated Carhartts, led visitors through a snowstorm to the top of Rich Hill ... the actual hill, not the village that bears the same name. Griffith and his wife, Anne, own the hill, and the farm below it.
The Rich Hill cemetery, at the corner of Updike and Bloomfield roads, nestles on the south face of the bottom of the hill. Scott Snider of the Knox County Tax Map Department said the top of the hill is at 1,360 feet, accessible by a 600-foot climb from the back of the cemetery. The grade of the slope is 11 percent.
“That is very significant,” said Snider. “Zero to 3 percent grade is optimal for building construction. That hill is steep.”
Griffith bought the farm in 1983, and the hill a few years later. He grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, so having a steep hill in his backyard makes him feel right at home.
He recalled that long ago, the owners of the hill, Donald and Gertrude (Shipley) Ramey, pastured sheep on Rich Hill.
“It was really pretty back then, all covered with grass,” he said. “It was like a lawn.”
The sheep are long gone and the hill is empty woods now, with occasional visits from Griffith’s cattle. The trees are young and slender, and fallen branches, vines and leaves litter the ground. But through the trees, far below, houses and fields can be seen through the falling snow. The winter wind whistled through the treetops.
Walter Jewell, who lives nearby and whose cousin, Arthur Jewell, once owned Rich Hill, said the sheep kept the vegetation down in those long-ago days.
“Before it was grown up, we used to sled on the hill, in the 1970s,” he said. “It has always been a prominent place around here. It’s a local landmark. It’s fairly flat here, so the hill is pretty prominent.”
“When I was little,” recalled Griffith, “they told me that you could see the top of the LaVeque Tower in downtown Columbus from here. I don’t know. Maybe you could.”
Jewell confirmed that.
“I’ve seen the beacon on top of the LaVeque Tower at night from up there,” he said, “before it was all grown up.”
Donald Ramey is deceased now, and 84-year-old Gertrude lives at Centerburg Court. She was born and raised on the farm.
“My grandfather, Marion Shipley, bought the farm in 1914,” she said. “They moved from Licking County, where they rented a place behind Newton School. They bought this farm up here and they drove their cattle up the road that is Ohio 657 now. They boarded their livestock overnight at a farmer’s place, because they couldn’t drive it all in one day.”
Ramey and Griffith have stories about how the hill got its name.
“I heard that it’s called Rich Hill because the soil is so rich,” said Griffith, “but who knows?”
“We had our own idea about that,” said Ramey. “Usually on top of a hill, the soil is so thin that you can’t raise much on it. On the very top of Rich Hill, the soil is thin, but not far from the top, the soil is very deep, that nurturing soil. Even near the top that soil is as deep as it is at the bottom. That is very unusual. So we figured that the Indians decided to call it the Rich Hill.”
Three round brass U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey benchmarks are placed on the top of the hill, two in concrete, one on a large rock. Griffith brushed snow away and found each one. At the highest point, the marker reads “Rich Hill.” The other two, at lower elevations, are marked No. 1 and No. 2, and have arrows that point toward each other. The date on all the benchmarks is 1933.
The USSGS Web site has a searchable database with historical and engineering information for each of their benchmarks all over the nation. It shows that J.H. McBride owned the hill then, and states that Rich Hill was “on a prominent bare round-topped hill ... about two miles northwest of Centerburg. The hill is the only one in the locality.”
Ramey recalled that Rich Hill used to be a thriving little center because a railroad track went through there.
“And there’s one thing I think is very interesting, and not too many people know,” she said. “At the end of the Revolutionary War, they gave away land to the soldiers. Jonathan Dayton, a co-signer of the U.S. Constitution, was given 640 acres that included Rich Hill. His father wanted him to build his home there, but he didn’t really like the area, so he went elsewhere. I know that to be true because we were in Philadelphia once and saw the original copy of the Constitution and his name is on it.”
Dayton, a native of New Jersey, was a soldier, politician, lawyer and, as a delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, was, at age 26, the youngest signer of the Constitution. The city of Dayton is named for him because of his prominence and because he owned 250,000 acres in Ohio. However, he never visited the city that bears his name.
