by Liz Lundberg
Friends, I realize that I drag these little stories out. My reasoning is that you are taking a walk through history, so slow down and savor every piece of it as if you were walking with me. You will never visit this place again, unless you hike it someday yourself, and there is precious little information on it to be found in the whole of Hancock County.

I first heard about it when some friends bought paintball guns and went to play down there. They kept saying, “We’re goin’ to the old zoo to play!”

“Old zoo. Where at?”

“Down in that hollow by the Wells building. You can still see the animal cages!”

Well, I had to see this.

Picture yourself in front of the Wells Building in Newell. Walk one-half block north on Washington Street (state Route 2) and you find yourself on a bridge or short viaduct. Turn and face east, away from the river. You are now looking right into what appears to be a piece of undeveloped woods. Peek through the trees (tough to do in the summertime) fifteen or twenty feet below the bridge and you’ll see a hollow with a brook winding through the bottom. Water runoff from between two mountains keeps the brook flowing on down to the river, although I believe it has been diverted underground. You can also make out a circular stone wall roughly 20-30 feet in diameter.

Now turn west toward the river. This hollow gradually levels off into a field. Toward the end closest the river, there is a mountain of pottery shards. This is a dump for Homer Laughlin China. Turn a few degrees south and there is Clarke Field. The bridge you are standing on was built in 1913. That area that we have just scanned was once Laurel Hollow Park, which for a short time was a hugely popular place.

Now that you have looked both east and west, you have a pretty good idea of the size and breadth of the park. I occasionally the hike path leading downhill into it (on the north side of the Wells building) and have taken numerous photos. Based on the written information I found on Laurel Hollow Park, the path I walk is an old streetcar path.

If you lived in East Liverpool in the early 1900s, you may have traveled to Newell (established in 1905) across the bridge by streetcar. On the West Virginia side the trolley rolled down the main drag to Sixth Street, then turned east and ran round behind the park, crossing the creek by way of a bridge similar to the one you are standing on. This bridge is actually still there, but you won’t see it from where you’re standing. From there, it turned west back to Washington Street, then south down to Ninth Street, where Denny Stapler’s upholstery shop now sits. There was a turnaround there, where the track was actually switched automatically by “pilot wheels” on the front of the streetcar. Then back up Washington Street it would go, once again circumnavigating the park to the east, down the wide road and through town on its way back to the Ohio side. The bridge could only support one car at a time. They were so heavy that the weight strained the cables, causing the track to sag as much as two feet en route.

This place, situated as it is below the level of the street, feels empty and silent, yet somehow animated. Just to the north of the path stands a semicircular wall of stone about eight feet high. This was either the deer or bear enclosure. Nearby sits another very low barrier, which, based upon the few pictures I could find, is where the seals lived and performed. These two structures are all that seems to remain of the “zoo.” Aside from these walls there’s absolutely no evidence that there was ever a zoo or a park here. Had the paintballers not mentioned it, I may never have ventured into the hollow.

Completed in 1907, Laurel Hollow Park was located just south of and on property owned by the Homer Laughlin China Company. At the west (river) end of the park there was an outdoor theatre, where orchestras played and vaudeville shows were staged. Some of the very first silent movies were also shown there. Nearby, the little brook was transformed into a lake upon which folks could float in small craft at their leisure. There was a formal garden and carefully landscaped walking paths. Park benches dotted the paths, and there was a beautiful fountain.

The zoo—at the eastern end where the woods are now—was home to monkeys, deer, seals, birds and two polar bears. During the warm seasons, enormous blocks of ice were brought over from an icehouse in East Liverpool to keep the bears comfortable. During the winter months, the animals were moved by boxcar to the Highland Park Zoo in Pittsburgh—all but the deer. The park covered a total of one hundred acres, including Clarke Field. Who was Clarke?

According to Homer Laughlin history, “This park was the conception of George Washington Clarke, perhaps the greatest salesman in the history of dinnerware.” It was Clarke who supervised its creation and maintenance. The man loved Laurel Hollow Park so much that “he devoted much of his income to beautifying [it].”

Think about living in this town with the beautiful park, where everybody—including famous people from all over the world—would visit. And think of what great jobs for some of the townspeople! Scheduling performances, maintaining the grounds, or, my favorite of course, caring for the bears.

“Tragically,” the historian tells us, “[Clarke] did not live long after the park was built, succumbing to an apparent heart attack in 1911.” And nobody stepped up to replace him. As a result, Laurel Hollow was closed shortly after his death. The lake was drained, and where it was now sits that mountain of broken dishes I spoke of earlier. The streetcars stopped running around 1927, and the bridge from which you have been gazing into the past is now just a byway constructed on tons of landfill created for the purpose of expediting automobile traffic.

It doesn’t take long for our eyes to close on what once was. For all the activity that the park hosted, only one story has survived the ravages of history to be recounted twice. Among my limited sources, I found the story of “The Two Bears.” Sometime during the park’s history, one of the two Laurel Hollow Park polar bears died, and a new mate was procured for the living bear. But the living bear did not accept the situation and fought the perceived intruder to its death. Word of the battle spread fast enough, it was said, to draw a huge crowd of people, including an entire streetcar load from East Liverpool.

I imagine in those days people were not prepared for the disastrous outcome of the bear-pairing experiment. For lack of a mechanism to break up the fight, they had no choice but to watch and wait. I wonder whether someone made an egregious error in sexing the new bear. I mean, given the confines of the bear enclosure, would anybody put two bears of the same sex together? It couldn’t have happened, no way! Surely the grieving old bear simply did not like the new mate.

Whatever the cause, such a drama today would draw national outrage. There would be an investigation into whose incompetence caused the death of an innocent polar bear. Someone would lose their job and the zoo would be in jeopardy. Living as we do in this hyperdrive world of robots with human sensibilities and animals with human intelligence, it seems to me that we have lost our sense of wonder.

A granite marker on Route 2 beside where the park stood was erected as a memorial to George Clarke for his devotion. The brass plaque on the marker disappeared early on, and later the granite marker itself also disappeared. I can’t help but wonder where it went? Did someone who couldn’t afford a monument for a loved one permanently borrow this piece of stone? Did the thief even know what it was?

Only in the mind’s eye can we turn the remaining traces of this park back into the beautiful, vital place it must have been. We surely have changed since then. Can we even begin to appreciate Laurel Hollow Park as our great grandparents did?

I have taken photographs on several occasions and wandered quite a ways up stream—past the old tires, appliances, and ceramic insulators (perhaps a gift from Newell Porcelain) tossed down the south-facing mountainside. I’ve hiked until it becomes scarcely navigable, passing the streetcar bridge on the way, into wilderness and waterfall. It is one of my favorite places to go to dream about the past, to imagine life before two world wars, the incessant political scandals, the social transformation from a gay society to a cynical one.

Here we stand, you and I, at the edge of nowhere, drifting through time on the Ohio River into a past when our Newell and our East Liverpool were teeming with tradition and novelty every single day. This is far more than a place to live. Pieces of the things we built are still there. There and then and now, this is a space to celebrate being marvelously alive.
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Sources: http://www.hlchina.com/historybyJackWelch.htm Thanks to: Mr. Leland Fowler for his colorful verbal depiction of the era (His words are worth a thousand pictures.); the Lynn Murray Memorial Library; and the people at Homer Laughlin China Company.