It’s an “All aboard!” theme designed to be informative and educational, said Katie Hux, park district administrative assistant.
“We put a lot of time and effort into making a GeoTrail people can enjoy, while getting them behind the fact that there’s a rich history to our railroads in Knox County, and how these towns came to develop around them,” Hux said. “We think this can help bring tourism into the area as well.”
Hux noted that many participants completing the trail so far are out-of-area visitors. Included was a married couple who rented a hotel room locally to do so.
The GeoTrail is similar to a treasure hunt. It is completed in sequence with GPS tracking, which takes participants to 11 stops from Centerburg to Brinkhaven. What each treasure hunter is after is finding one of 11 small, cleverly hidden boxes at each stop — called geocaches — to complete the challenge. Participants write their name onto a log entry, and then access a QR code to read about the rail history at their stop. They can also leave a memento, known as “swag,” in the geocache before they place it back if they wish. The history they read also includes coupon buttons that can be clicked on to find treats, like ice cream, offered through a partnership with local businesses.
The free app, called Geocaching, is available for download at one’s app store. GPS codes, which direct handheld GPS devices to the 11 hidden geocaches, can be found by visiting knoxcountyparks.org, locating the “activities” tab, and then “cache our parks.”
After completing the last geocache find in Brinkhaven, a quiz must be completed and a high score attained for a Geocoin to be mailed to the participant. The Geocoin has “Knox County Park District” on one side, and the names of four trails on the flip side — the Kokosing Gap Trail, Mohican Valley Trail, Heart of Ohio Trail and Ohio to Erie Trail. The coins are provided through a partnership with United Way of Knox County and Get Healthy Knox County.
The sequence of 11 geocache finds are as follows: 1 in Centerburg, 1 in Mount Liberty, 3 in Mount Vernon, 2 in Gambier, 1 in Howard, 1 in Danville, and 2 in Brinkhaven. The nice thing about geocaching is proceeding at your own pace, Hux said. If you want to complete just a few on a hot summer’s day, that’s fine, but if you are the gung-ho type who wants to do it all in one day, that’s all good, too. Hux said there is no deadline for completion but only the first 200 people to do so receive a Geocoin.
Hux was able to partner with entities including the city of Mount Vernon to place geocaches in choice spots. The CA & C Depot in Mount Vernon is near one of the geocache locations, appropriate enough given the restored depot there. Two more Mount Vernon stops take participants to Riverview Park and Phillips Park — where required reading discusses Henry B. Curtis, one of Mount Vernon’s most prominent early citizens and a lawyer and banker who owned Curtis Mansion, known as Round Hill. He was instrumental in the selection of the site for Kenyon College, joining college founder Philander Chase in that effort.
As geocache treasure finders will learn on the GeoTrail, sometimes tragedy strikes railways. That was certainly the case in Brinkhaven, when statewide flooding — 8 to 12 inches over four days in late March 1913 — resulted in multiple deaths and more than 30 houses floating away downstream. The CA & C bridge in Brinkhaven was badly damaged after collapsing.
Tragedy also struck on the CA & C involving a Kenyon College student, Stuart Pierson, who came from a prominent Cincinnati family. He disappeared for a time until his body was recovered in late October 1905 on a CA & C railroad bridge located over the Kokosing River. Reports swirled around the region that he had been victim to a fraternity hazing incident gone horribly wrong. He had been struck by a locomotive.
As Hux observed in researching Pierson, “As one newspaper noted, the incident was the talk of the United States for weeks.”
