About

My Grandmother Ethel Elizabeth Ratcliff (née Brown) was a true role model. She was born in 1908 in Vinton County, Ohio and attended a one-room schoolhouse up until eighth grade, around the time her mother died of tuberculosis. Prior to that time, as an only child she had an adventure-filled childhood, playing outside, fishing with her father and friends, and building memories to fuel her active imagination.

When she was 17, she married my Grandfather Howard Sylvanus Ratcliff, from a neighboring farm family. They knew one another well as they were both in the same schoolhouse.

Family History in Ohio

Once the Depression was well underway in the 1930s, a series of bad years resulted in the family’s loss of the farm, which ended up being bought by a distant relative at auction. The farm had been worked by the Browns since the Civil War era. They came to the area, which was settled by the first families of European descent like theirs, including the Ratcliffs, in the early 1800s. 

Richard Ratcliff, the ancestor of both my Grandmother and Grandfather Ratcliff, landed in Maryland in 1682 on The Submission, one of William Penn’s ships. They first settled land in Talbot County Maryland, then moved to North Carolina. The family eventually migrated to the Northwest Territory (which later become Ohio) in wagons and on the New River, with the promise of land.

Given the history of the Ratcliffs and Browns in the Eagle Mills / Londonderry area of Ohio, the loss of the farm was a significant turn of events. Notably, before the farm had to be sold my grandmother’s father, George Brown, and other farmers went to Washington, D.C., on a trip to request loans they would pay back after the rough spell. They had a scheduled appointment with President Hoover, but he had also booked a tennis game, which prevented him from meeting with them. Many of these farmers were Republicans at the start of their trip who mysteriously became Democrats by the end of it, my great-grandfather among them. Can you imagine a tennis game being more important than a farm?

Work and Life

My grandmother and grandfather, by the 1930s having had several children, were focused on taking care of everyone. My grandfather worked, for a time, at the Mead Paper Plant in Chillicothe, but gradually they made their way north to the Columbus area, eventually buying their own home on Thurman Avenue on the South Side of Columbus. They purchased that home due to my Grandfather Howard’s stable income through the first local union for Heat and Frost Asbestos Workers in the city, Local 44. By the time my Grandfather Howard died from a widowmaker in 1964, he had supervised many jobs and had served as the business manager for Local 44. 

Two of my dad’s older brothers stayed in farming, co-owning their own 700-acre farm in the Johnstown area. My father and all of his brothers worked for the union, like their dad. So it’s safe to say that my family continued in the farming tradition, and my dad’s and of course my own circumstances were greatly improved by construction work provided through the union. But none of that would ever have happened if my grandmother hadn’t insisted that the family come north to Columbus for better opportunities.

I think Grandmother had had enough of the farming way of life and the memories associated with the loss of so much history left behind, and she wanted more stability for her children and grandchildren. She was the impetus for the move, which led to me and many of my cousins being first-generation college students—thanks to my grandmother and her eighth-grade education.

My Memories

Growing up, whenever we visited my Grandmother Ratcliff, stories were important. My aunts and uncles told stories about growing up that were funny and rowdy, and my grandmother told her own stories, too. I remember one in particular that became more embellished over the years. It involved her youngest son, Royce, who was in a cradle or bassinet in the back yard of the farmhouse they rented in Reynoldsburg. She was outside doing chores and saw an eagle flying overhead, and it came down by the baby’s bed so close that she feared it would try to steal him away. As she grew older, the bird flew closer, finally coming so low that she could see the yellow on its belly feathers where it had been brooding. We encouraged her to tell the story whenever we visited, because we knew that each time that bird would be flying even closer, and my dad would roll his eyes and give us a dirty look whenever we got her cranked up.

I did not know that my grandmother had documented stories about her growing up until after she passed away in 2003. I knew that Grandmother was highly creative, because I had seen some of her poetry, and she read quite a bit of history and historical fiction. I had been told that she spent many hours compiling the family genealogy, all the way back to Charlemagne, on her own, through many trips up and down the stairs at The Ohio State University’s Thompson Library. This was during a time when there were no digital systems. She would have been searching in card catalogs instead of on Google.  

It was a wonderful surprise to find out that Grandmother had written so much about her life. After her passing, one of my cousins, Greg Ratcliff, gave family members a CD with the digital files of her stories. I also received the hard copy, just shy of 100 pages single-spaced and typed out by my aunts. I discovered that Grandmother had recorded the stories on a cassette recorder in the 1970s, while she was recovering from a surgery.

After she passed, I read through the stories because I was curious about what she had said that could take up nearly 100 pages. In those pages are her memories of growing up, and stories she had heard from her relatives about what it was like in Ohio’s pioneer days. The stories include log cabins, water mills, the family grocery store, Morgan’s Raiders, bed bugs, gypsies, horse traders, a dancing horse, drownings, murders, fishing with bow and arrow (and guns) as well as poles, and many the interesting characters who lived in the Salt Creek Valley.

This Project

In the back of my mind, I always thought it would be a fun project to put the stories into a more consumable order, for the sake of family documentation and to spark the interest of anyone else who likes Ohio history and tall tales. After talking about it with some family members, I am digging into the process of editing, ordering, and curating the stories.

The goal is to publish a book that can at least be used by the family for years to come, and at most, if it strikes the interest of anyone else, could create a way to donate any profits for scholarships to children graduating from Southeastern Local Schools, the district that includes the area where my grandparents grew up in Londonderry, Ohio.

Kimberly Ratcliff, granddaughter of Ethel Ratcliff