Meanwhile, the video store, gift shop, antique store, furniture store, and a restaurant and carry out are the only businesses along Main Street. Hannah Brothers Furniture and Appliances own seven buildings on Main Street; six of them are used to show furniture.
Of the six, Hannah says only three, which are masonry, are structurally sound, while the three wooden ones are unsound.
“They need a lot of work,” Hannah says. “I don’t even know if you’re ever going to get them back the way they should be.”
Though several of the buildings sit vacant, Winnenberg says he doesn’t
consider Shawnee a ghost town.
“Frankly, there’s a part of me that’s pretty optimistic about the future of
Shawnee,” he says. “It’s not, you know, a micro flash. It’ll take a while,
but I think that we’re doing some things here that lay the groundwork
for gradual change.”
Part of that groundwork is an image makeover for the town that focuses
on tourism growth, with a reinvention of Shawnee as a “gateway
community” to the forest.
In the meantime, most residents said they stay
not for the economic situation, but for family, the beauty of the
surrounding Wayne National Forest, the strong sense of community
and the history.
“Whenever we have our homecoming, everyone that used to live here
comes back and they’re glad that we’re here, they’re glad that we stayed,”
Roberts says. “’You made the right choice,’ that’ what they say to me.”
“It’s always been a caring community. If there’s a death, within a half
an hour you have food on your table from someone. It’s always been
that way,” Roberts
says.
When her husband had a five-way bypass in
2006, she received over 200 cards from residents, $600 from the local
high school and hotel expenses paid for by her church. When her
husband returned to the hospital because of a chest infection three years
later, Roberts
said the response was similar.
Younger residents feel the pull of history and family.
“I want to stay around here; my roots are here,” says Megan
Cochran, 22, a senior at Ohio University in nearby Athens, Ohio.
Cochran said she wanted to leave when in high school, but now appreciates
the sense of history.
“I think you have this vision of what you want for your life when
you’re living at home but then once you’re on your own, you realize
that what you had was something rare,” she says, but added that she’d like
to see Main Street return to its peak 100 years ago.
Ironically, Shawnee’s decline is what preserved the town, if the lack of
tearing down and rebuilding can be called preservation, Cheryl Blosser,
of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds explains.
The old mining company store, the theater and the original balconies
thatoverlooked the bars on Main Street still exist because they had no value,
due to the area’s depressed economy.
“The reason all these buildings are still here is that the people never had
a reason to tear them down,” Blosser says.
Instead, community groups are
finding reasons to build the town back up.
“I feel that with a little luck and continued attraction we could become a
rather special destination for people to visit and to live,” Winnenberg says.
“I haven’t given up on that.”
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