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A Columbus Grove business that also serves as a wedding venue is expanding their offerings to include a special farm-to-table dinner series. Black Bird Farm, located at  20875 Road 14, is extending an invitation for five monthly dinners with select guest chefs. So you could actually call it a farm-to-farm opportunity.

The setting is a 113-year-old barn that has served as a venue for six years and is owned and operated by mother-daughter team Deb Rhodes of Columbus Grove and Nicki Bybee of Bluffton.

The meals will feature local produce, wineries and breweries, and musicians. Manager Kathy Soper calls it something new: a new place and new experience. The setting in a historical barn is  “Intimate and informal.”

On June 22, Cork and Knife Provisions will serve a “Strawberry Patch” dinner with bread and desserts from The Baking Company of Findlay and wine and beer pairings from Rose Acres and 1820 BrewWerks.

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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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