Ever hear of Cannonsburg, Hassan, Webster, Armorsville…
…the story of Bluffton’s neighboring ghost towns
By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com
A Bluffton News item from Oct. 29, 1896, tells that J.S. Jennings of Armorsville received a letter from his cousin, William Jennings Bryan, Democratic candidate for president.
Not quite three years later a Bluffton News legal notice published July 10, 1899, proclaimed Armorsville as “absolutely extinct.” Gone without a trace. J.S. Jennings was once a real person living in a real place called Armorsville.
You could find it just down the county line, north of Ada. Today it’s a ghost town. At the time of its death, or extinction, there existed no mourners, no visitation, no funeral and no final words of comfort.
None of it remains today. Even its cemetery disappeared, to where, no one knows. The graves might still be in place under a farmer’s field.
Armorsville isn’t the only ghost town on our invisible horizon. There are other places, each literally wiped off the map, existing only as spirits that once represented visions, hopes and efforts of pioneers who created them. Scant details remain of these settlements, today mostly crossroads in the country. Most of what is known of these ghost towns is buried in the pages of 1880-era county history books.
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