Both Harkless’ father and grandfather worked at the Haydenville brick plant. She remembers growing up in a safe town, one with many local employers.

“You could ride your bicycle for hours and your parents didn’t have to worry about you, which was nice,” Harkless says.

The town, then known as Hocking Furnace, was settled in the 1830s. By the 1840s it had been linked to nearby Nelsonville via canal, and by the 1860s, Peter Hayden, a wealthy industrialist from Columbus, Ohio, bought the settlement and it was renamed in his honor.

Using the area’s readily available clay resources, Hayden built up a town entirely constructed of his company’s bricks, blocks and tiles, turning Haydenville into a life-size catalog. A catalog that he owned. That is, until 1961, when the last brick plant closed, and “Ohio’s Last Company Town” was parceled out to individuals. After the company town sold out, community buildings deteriorated and were torn down. The company store was one of the first to go, followed by the schoolhouse. Those that remain –the railroad depot and hotel –are dilapidated. Despite these structural losses, many of the company houses still stand tall and proud, and Haydenville’s overall physical
appearance has changed little in the last hundred years. The town was placed on
the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Yet the demise of businesses in Haydenville and a decreasing population has
created change, if slowly. The only two employers in the town are Shelly & Sands,
a gravel and tar operation at the back of town, and Saw Miller Inc, a sawmill
located along Haydenville Road. After Harkless’ brother, Ron, graduated from
high school, he had a brief stint at college before taking a job at Shelly & Sands. He
was the first employee hired, and in the winter he is the only one working.

This means most residents have to go elsewhere for work. After working at the
Logan Daily for two years, Harkless took a job at Smead Manufacturing, in nearby
Logan, and has been there ever since. She moved away from Haydenville for 12
years, but returned 11 years ago with her husband. The couple renovated their
150-year-old house; it used to be adjoined to the old hotel on Haydenville Street.
Coincidentally, Harkless lived in the second story of the hotel during her first
marriage, just one of many indications of how interlinked and intricately connected
people and places are in this small town.

Upon her return, Harkless found the town very different than she had left it.

“It had changed tremendously. At one period of time, people didn’t take pride in their homes. They didn’t care what it looked like,” Harkless says. “Haydenville had a bad name. Everybody always called it the ‘welfare town.’ But then they started a preservation committee and people started getting involved and started taking care of their property, picking things up and taking better pride in their homes.”

Rob Patterson, a lifelong resident of Haydenville, also recalls the 70s as a more lawless time, when cars would race up and down the streets and teenagers robbed the church’s food supply that was kept in an adjacent fellowship hall for weekly community lunches.

“Now that group of kids is gone and there’s a better bunch,” Harkless says. “I take pride in Haydenville more than I used to."

Patterson, like Harkless, grew up in Haydenville, but had a very different childhood. While Harkless and the other Haydneville children went to elementary school at Greene School, Patterson was sent
to Union Furnace to attend
a handicapped class. Patterson was born with Hallerman Stryth Syndrome,
a health condition so rare that there are only 150 documented cases in medical
literature. Although the syndrome affects his hearing, vision and appearance,
making him look much older than his 40 years, the syndrome does not affect
him cognitively.

“They didn’t really teach us anything. I was in this class for four years [even
though] I am mentally okay,” Patterson says. “Basically what they would have us
do is color and trace shapes--stuff they should have a three year old do.”

When Patterson started kindergarten at age 7, the syndrome had stunted his growth
so that he was only as big as a two-year-old. Likewise, the classes at Union
Furnace stunted his learning.