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From: "Tom Oatney" <>
Subject: [OHMEIGS] Snowville - Meigs County
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 19:45:01 -0500
References: <20031208153058.30986.qmail@web60809.mail.yahoo.com> <001c01c3bdb2$21d79230$a5fea8c0@oemcomputer>


>From Dec 9, 2003 Dayton Daily News, Dayton, OH

Snowville's full of color in Meigs, especially if you go a 'Fur Peace'
By Leigh Allan


SNOWVILLE | Head into either end of Snowville on Ohio 681 and you'd figure
Meigs County's main cash crop is junked cars. Law enforcement officials
would beg to differ, saying Meigs has mostly grown Gold. Meigs Gold, that
is - marijuana with potency enhanced by the heavy local precipitation that
helped give Snowville its name.

Not that the name was always Snowville. Fred Stanley says his
great-grandfather founded the unincorporated town around the Civil War,
setting up a general store with a post office and calling it Snow Hill. The
post office already had a Snow Hill listed, so Snowville was submitted as a
second choice.

Stanley says the store was about the only business Snowville ever had. It
stayed open, mostly run by Stanleys, until 20 years ago. Now it's a welding
shop.

Tacked on the back of the old store is the former one-room Snowville School,
hauled down from a previous hillside perch. Pauline Zeigler was in the last
batch of students, a fifth-grader when the school closed in the mid-'30s,
and recalls having about a dozen schoolmates. There's an old Methodist
church in town, but Zeigler says folks now go "up to town" - Athens - on
Sundays.

The local economy was all agricultural until the 1950s, when strip miners
hit town, denuding forests and carving into hillsides, sometimes mining,
sometimes not. The mines ran only a decade, and since then most residents
have had to head up to Athens or down to Pomeroy for jobs.

Those who had jobs, that is. Meigs County is a perennial Ohio unemployment
leader, with official rates in the midteens. Warren Taylor says the real
rate for Snowville's few dozen residents is more like 30 percent.

Taylor's a relatively new resident, a Columbus native whose parents owned
local land as a retreat. For a decade, he's been designing sanitary
processes for the food industry - with big-time clients such as Safeway and
Ocean Spray - from a garage in the woods, down a series of narrow gravel
roads. He's in the midst of building a creamery.

Taylor's one of several folks who have come to the area to get off the
beaten path, many of his fellow newcomers being artists and artisans. Taylor
says the growing arts community has a lot of connection with Ohio
University, 15 miles up U.S. 33.

Nothing has grown like Fur Peace Ranch, a big spread with a herd of
guitarists, with maybe a few head of pianists and singers. Fur Peace isn't
technically in Snowville, but Snowville's unincorporated, so the boundary's
whatever the beholder wants, and we want to take it across 33, because Fur
Peace is quite a piece of culture shock.

Guitarists aren't unusual in the hills. Bluegrass or country guitarists,
that is. But Fur Peace is the brainchild of Jorma and Vanessa Kaukonen, he
being the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer, ex of Antioch College and Jefferson
Airplane and now of Hot Tuna.

Wend down roads ever more gravelly and narrow - gravel is pretty much what
you get for county roads in Meigs - (or wend down furpeaceranch.com) and you
come upon Fur Peace, 19 two-bed cabins, a communal wash building, dining
hall, library, gift shop, classroom and brand-new concert hall complex that
looks out over 119 acres the Kaukonens got for a song (OK, $40,000) from an
old friend in 1997.

"Really amazing things happened to us here," says Vanessa, who runs the
business end.

Learning about the land was as accidental as bumping into another old
friend, John Hurlbut, on the streets of Athens when they were looking for a
ranch manager, a job Hurlbut still holds.

Four-day guitar camps run weekly April through November, covering the
bluegrass and acoustic styles you'd expect, plus electric blues, lap steel,
swing, bass, dobro, finger-style, even mandolin, fiddle, and voice - with
classes taught by Jorma, fellow Airplane/Tunan Jack Casady and a host of
noted musicians.

Lest cynics suggest Meigs Gold's a draw for ex-psychedelic rockers, Vanessa
says there's a no-tolerance ban on drugs and booze, that at Fur Peace, "It's
all about the music."

The camp's a roaring success, with 2004 two-thirds sold already, and most
students repeaters.

The leader there is Marjorie Thompson, Brown University biology dean and a
17-timer - though respite from her seven children could be a factor.

Saturday night concerts play to full houses, and 2,000 or more attend the
annual Holiday Bazaar local art show, which is coming up this weekend and
had Vanessa and crew busy hanging decorations.

Maybe even if Fur Peace isn't quite in Snowville it can put the town on the
map.

It needs help - I went to the Meigs County Library in Pomeroy to do a little
research, and apparently the northern part of the county doesn't count - not
a single county history book there even mentions Snowville.


Contact Leigh Allan at 225-7317.

[From the Dayton Daily News: 12.09.2003]

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