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Somewhere in the hills of southeastern Ohio, there is a stretch of road where snow refuses to stick. Not because of salt trucks, but because underneath that pavement, a fire that started during a labor dispute in 1884 is still burning.
Explore 10 dirt-cheap Ohio ghost towns with rich coal mining histories, unique stories, and homes priced like used cars.
Key Takeaways
- Ohio's coal towns offer extremely affordable housing but come with deep historical and economic challenges.
- Many towns still function with active residents and local institutions despite population decline.
- Labor disputes and industrial changes have left lasting social scars in these communities.
- Unique local histories, including fires, strikes, and racial tensions, shape each town's identity.
- These towns provide a rare glimpse into America's industrial past and its ongoing rural realities.
What the video covers
- The video explores 10 Ohio towns built around coal mining, now with very low home prices but rich histories and ongoing communities.
- Many towns still have residents maintaining local services like gas stations and post offices despite economic decline.
- Corning, a former railroad hub, avoided some collapse due to economic diversification but carries a history of racial curfews and tragedy.
- Btl (formerly Bessemer) experienced violent labor disputes with Pinkerton guards during coal strikes, impacting its long-term growth.
- Trimble is a tiny village with a median home value around $67,000, still maintaining local governance and transit connections.
- Congo was a planned company town that faced labor strikes and mechanization, with a name linked to a respected African American rail worker.
- The video highlights the lasting social and economic scars of coal industry collapse, including poverty and demographic shifts.
- Some towns have unique features like natural springs from old mines and local museums preserving their coal heritage.
- New Straitsville features a coal seam fire burning for over 140 years beneath it, influencing local history and moonshining during Prohibition.
- The video emphasizes that these towns are not abandoned movie sets but real places with affordable homes and complex pasts.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Overview of Ohio Coal Towns
- 01:35Corning: Railroad Hub and Racial History
- 04:35Btl: Labor Strikes and Pinkerton Guards
- 06:21Trimble: Small Village with Low Home Prices
- 09:21Congo: Company Town and Labor Tensions
- 11:18Economic and Social Challenges in Coal Country
- 12:38New Straitsville: The Eternal Coal Fire and Moonshining
- 15:12Conclusion: The Legacy of Ohio’s Coal Towns
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Right now, as you watch this, it has been burning for more than 140 years, and nobody has ever managed to put it out. The town built on top of it is still standing today, houses and all, selling for a fraction of what you would
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pay almost anywhere else in America. That town is coming in at number one. And once you hear the full story, you will understand why it might be the strangest real estate story in the entire state of Ohio. If small forgotten American towns
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with real history and real mystery behind them are your kind of thing, go ahead and hit subscribe before we get started since I put one of these out every week. And I would genuinely love to know where in the world you are
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watching this from tonight. Drop your city or your country down in the comments. I read every one of them. This video covers 10 towns in Ohio where coal built entire cities almost overnight and where the collapse of that industry left
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behind Victorian storefronts, company houses, quiet churches, and empty streets that time simply walked past.
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These are not abandoned in the movie sense. People still live in most of them, running the last gas station, keeping the post office open, mowing lawns around houses their grandparents bought when the mines were still hiring.
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That is exactly what makes this list different from every other ghost town video you have seen. You can genuinely buy a house in these places, some of them for less than the price of a used car, in towns with their own village
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governments, their own history museums, and in some cases, their own festivals that draw people back every single year.
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But every single one of these towns is carrying something heavier than a low price tag. Whether that is a labor war, a disaster, a fire, or a story that never quite made it into the official record. By the time we reach the end of
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this list, you will understand exactly what I mean, and you will probably never look at a cheap listing in rural Ohio the same way again. Let's get into it.
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Number 10 is Corning in Perry County. Corning did not become a coal town by accident. In 1879, a landowner named Joseph Rogers sold off his property to dozens of buyers who all wanted the same thing: proximity to the new Ohio Central
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Railroad line cutting through the area. The gamble paid off almost immediately. By 1880, Corning had 271 residents. Just 10 years later, that number had exploded past 1,500.
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Unlike most towns on this list, Corning became a genuine railroad hub with three separate rail lines eventually converging in town. And when oil was discovered nearby in 1889, the local economy diversified in a way most single-industry coal towns never managed. That
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diversification is a big part of why Corning avoided the sharpest edge of the collapse that hit its neighbors after 1900. But the boom years here carried an uglier undercurrent, too. Regional historians studying Perry County have pointed to old village ledgers found
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decades later in the attic above a long-abandoned fire station that reportedly documented a curfew law restricting black residents around 1898.
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The records were incomplete and poorly preserved, and the full picture has never been fully reconstructed from what survived, but the account has been passed down by historians who specialize in this region's coal town history.
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Corning also holds on to a quieter, more contained tragedy: the candy train wreck of 1921. A fatal accident on North Valley Street still remembered today inside the town's small community museum, alongside photographs of the high school basketball teams that once
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made this town proud. Today, Corning's population sits under 500 people. Its once bustling downtown reduced to a scattering of homes and quiet side streets, where recent estimates put the median home value at right around $66,000.
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It is a town that boomed for understandable reasons and cracked for reasons nobody around here likes to say out loud. And just up the road, another Perry County town cracked in a completely different way, when armed private guards showed up not to protect
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the miners but to protect the men hired to replace them. That town is Btel at number nine. Laid out in 1876 and originally called Bessemer, Btl was built by the Akran Iron Company and later renamed for John Rbuckl, one of
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its representatives. The town existed for one purpose only: coal. And in 1884, when local miners walked off the job over wages, the company's response set the tone for how ugly Ohio's coal wars were about to get across this entire
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region. Instead of negotiating, Bucktell's mine operators brought in Pinkerton guards, private security hired specifically to protect the replacement workers brought in to break the strike.
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It was an early preview of the labor violence that would soon spread across the Hawking Valley. Btl never fully recovered its early boomtown energy, and today its population sits at just over 500 people. One strange, almost pleasant detail still draws locals to the edge of
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town: a natural spring nicknamed the watering trough, bubbling up out of a damned abandoned mineshaft. Water that residents still collect there to this day. Coal built this town. Coal scarred it during that strike. And even now, water filtered through the old mine is
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still what comes up out of the ground. From Buckle, we head a few miles over to a village so small it barely registers on a map, but where the actual numbers tell one of the most striking stories on
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this entire list. That is Trimble. At number eight, Trimble began life under a completely different name: Oxford, platted in the early 1800s, long before coal ever mattered here. It was later renamed in honor of Ohio Governor Alan Trimble, and grew into a coal community
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along Sunday Creek during the late 19th century, just like almost every other town on this list. Here's where the numbers really get interesting.
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According to the 2020 census, Trimble's total population sits at 329 people. And according to recent housing estimates, the median home value in this village comes in at around $67,000.
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That is not a typo. And it is not an exaggerated fixer-upper number picked for the camera. That is the estimated median value of an entire house on an entire lot in an incorporated American village that still has its own post
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office, its own village hall, and its own public transit line connecting it to the city of Athens. Close to a fifth of the town lives below the poverty line, a number that has followed this whole stretch of the Hawking Valley since the
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mines went quiet for good. Trimble is proof that these towns are not exaggerations dressed up for a video.
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The prices really are genuinely that low. But cheap land in Coal Country almost always comes with a history attached to it. And our next stop has one that involves poison drinking water and a company town that was supposed to
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look perfect on paper. Number seven is Congo. Another Perry County town founded in 1891 by the Congo Mining Company. The name has an origin story of its own.
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Locals say it came from a black railroad worker nicknamed Congo Mooney who traveled up from Alabama in the late 1880s and became a respected, outspoken figure among the African American rail crews working the area. The mining company modeled Congo after the industrial
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planned communities popularized by George Pullman in Chicago. An ideal coal town on paper with 40 company-built houses going up almost overnight. It looked for a moment like a genuine model of industrial harmony. Then in 1892, a new operator, the Turney Jones Coal
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Company, took over the mine. And by 1894, most of the original workforce had already been replaced by machines. In the fall of 1895, tensions finally boiled over into a minor strike, triggered in part by a hydrant water system that had become c...
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contamination that reportedly caused several deaths in the community before the crisis was brought under control. A town built to be a showcase for the modern coal industry became within just a few short years a case study in exactly what could go wrong inside one.
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Not far from Congo's quiet half-for-gotten street sits a town whose downtown still looks like a movie set if the movie had been abandoned halfway through filming. That brings us to number six, Glouester. Glouester began life as a town called Sadalia before
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being renamed in 1886. A variation on Gloucester, England. It grew rapidly thanks to its position along the Sunday Creek Coal Seam. And for decades, the Wasel Brick Company operating from roughly 1895 to 1932, shipped structural brick out to construction projects
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across southeastern Ohio. Walk through Gloucester today and you will still see the bones of that boom. A mural downtown honoring its coal mining past, oddly shaped triangular brick buildings wedged onto narrow lots and storefronts that once housed bars, diners, and a
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genuinely bustling main street. Most of them sit empty now. The population has slid from just under 2,000 in the year 2000 to somewhere around $1,500 today.
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The median home value here now estimated at around $83,000 and close to a quarter of Gloucester's residents alongside its neighbor Trimble currently live below the poverty line.
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If you have made it this far into the video, thank you for sticking with us.
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And if you have not subscribed yet, now is a genuinely good time to do it because the next four towns are where this list gets truly dark. Starting with the smallest incorporated village in the entire state of Ohio. Number five is
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Rendville, and its size has almost nothing to do with why it actually matters. With a population of just 28 people according to the most recent census, Renville holds the title of the smallest incorporated village in Ohio and has held that title for years. It
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was founded in 1879 by a Chicago coal industrialist named William P. Rend and Ren did something almost unheard of for the time. He paid black and white miners identical wages, and he refused to fire striking workers or cut pay during the
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Great Hawking Valley coal strike at a moment when other mine owners across the region were actively recruiting strike breakers along racial lines. As a direct result, Renville became the first racially integrated village in Ohio. And in 1888, a man named Isaiah Tuppins was
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elected mayor here, becoming the first AfricanAmerican mayor in the recorded history of the state. At its peak in the 1880s, roughly a thousand people called this tiny town home, black and white miners living, working, and worshiping side by side. Then came a devastating
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1901 fire that destroyed 16 buildings in a single blaze, including the town hall and a Baptist church. and the slow decline of the coal industry finished what that fire started. Today, walking through Rendville means passing vacant homes whose owners have either passed
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away or simply never came back. A two-story city hall with paint peeling off its walls and a single historical marker that is for most visitors the only clue this town exists at all.
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Locals still point to an old tree near that city hall and call it the hanging tree, though no printed historical record has ever confirmed that specific claim. And that gap between local memory and documented fact is something you
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will notice again on this list before we are done. From the smallest incorporated village in Ohio, we moved to a town that once held over 3,000 residents and now survives almost entirely on its own stubbornness.
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That is Shaunie at number four. Founded in 1872, Shaunie exploded during the coal boom of the late 1800s, pulling in thousands of immigrant families from Ireland, Scotland, England, and Italy.
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with each group settling its own corner of town from a section known as Little Italy to a hillside known as New England Hill. At its peak, Shaunie was considered the entertainment capital of Appalachian, Ohio, anchored by the Tecumpsa Theater, which hosted movies,
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stage plays, and even basketball tournaments beneath its tall brick facade. Then the coal ran out in the 1920s, and the town began the long, slow slide it is still on today. Its population has fallen to somewhere between 650 and 700 people, and roughly
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half the buildings along its once famous main street now stand boarded up and silent. What sets Shaunie apart from a simple ghost town is the people who refuse to leave. In 2006, a Save America's Treasures grant funded the
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full exterior restoration of the Tacumza Theater, and locals have spent years trying to rebuild the town as a heritage tourism destination rather than let it quietly disappear. But Shaunie has also had to fight battles the old coal barons
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never imagined, including an opioid crisis that has hit small Appalachian communities across this entire region, especially hard in recent years. Shaunie is Victorian architecture standing guard over a very real, very present-day struggle. And it sets the stage perfectly for the single darkest chapter
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on this list. One morning in 1930 that the state of Ohio has never fully gotten over. Number three is Milfield. And this is the point in the video where I want to slow down because what happened here deserves more than a passing mention. On
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the morning of November 5th, 1930, roughly 230 men were working inside the Sunday Creek Coal Company's Post in mine number six, just outside the village.
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Company President William Titus was there as well, personally leading a group of executives on a tour to inspect newly installed safety equipment, equipment the company was proud enough of to show off in person. At around 11:45 that morning, an electrical arc
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between a fallen trolley wire and the rail ignited a buildup of methane gas deep underground. The resulting explosion killed 82 people, including 73 miners, five company officials, and four visitors, making it the deadliest mining disaster in Ohio's recorded history
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before or since. 19 men were found alive 9 hours later, 3 miles from the main shaft, having survived by barricading themselves behind a partition to block the carbon monoxide from reaching them.
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Rescue crews worked around the clock for days afterward. A storage room, a pool hall, and the company store were all turned into temporary morgs to hold the dead. The disaster made national and international headlines, and it directly led to stronger mine safety regulations
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passed across Ohio in 1931. Changes that almost certainly saved lives in mines across the state for decades afterward. A monument near the site still lists the names of every man who died there. And the old smoke stack from mine number six still stands today,
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visible from the road as a quiet reminder of what happened on that hillside. By one account from the time, the disaster left 59 women widowed and well over a hundred children without a father. Numbers that gutted a community
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this size for a generation. Milfield's population never recovered from that single morning. What remains now is a scattering of homes, a quiet county road, and a piece of Ohio history the state was forced to learn from in the
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hardest way imaginable. If Milfield shows what a single explosion can do to a town in an instant, our next stop shows what happens when an entire community simply gives up and votes itself out of existence on paper. That
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is Santo toy at number two and its story is almost unbelievable even with the documentation sitting right in front of you. Built by the Sunday Creek Coal Company in the early 20th century, Santoy flourished quickly and by 1920
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its population had reached 976 people. Then came the crash. By the time the 1930 census was taken, Santoy's population had collapsed to just 128 people, the single steepest per capita population decline recorded anywhere in the entire United States that decade,
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according to that census data. The mines had failed, the jobs had vanished, and there was simply nothing left in town to keep people there. What happened next sounds like fiction, but it is fully documented. In 1931, the remaining
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registered voters of Santoy held a formal vote on whether to dissolve the village charter altogether. 17 of the 19 people who showed up voted yes. Santoy quietly dissolved itself by ballot because there was no longer a functioning town left to justify keeping
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the paperwork alive. Think about that for a moment. This was not a company pulling out or a government relocating people for a reservoir. The town's own residents looked around at what was left of their community and decided by a
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formal vote that Santoy no longer deserved to legally exist. Today, only around 50 people live scattered across the area that once carried Santoy's name, walking distance from old stone foundations and overgrown roadeds that used to be its main
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streets. Local folklore adds one more layer to the story. A tale passed down for generations about a woman seen walking the old roadway near Santoy at night. Her feet said to hover just above the ground. There is no documentation
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behind that particular story. It survives purely as local legend, the kind whispered at Perry County kitchen tables for over a hundred years. But everything else about Santoy, the population collapse, the vote to dissolve, the near total emptiness that
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remains today is a matter of hard public record. And if a town voting itself out of existence sounds like the strangest thing Coal Country ever produced, wait until you hear about the town where the ground itself has simply refused to stop
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burning for 140 years. Which brings us finally to number one, New Straitsville. Founded in 1870, New Straitsville grew almost impossibly fast, crossing a population of 4,000 people within its very first decade, built entirely around a coal seam reportedly 14 ft thick in
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places, one of the richest deposits in the region. Then in the fall of 1884, during the same brutal Hawking Valley coal strike that shaped so many towns on this list, striking miners loaded coal cars with oil soaked timber, set the
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timber on fire, and pushed the burning cars directly into several of the mines surrounding town. An act of sabotage aimed at a company that had brought in replacement workers. The fire spread down into the coal seam itself, deep
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underground, and it has never gone out since. Not in 1900, not in 1950, not today. As you are watching this, residents at the time reportedly drew hot water directly from their wells to brew coffee. Roses reportedly bloomed in
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the dead of winter, warmed from underneath. At its most intense, the fire reportedly shot flames 100 f feet into the air and could be seen from five miles away. Ground has collapsed under buildings over the decades. Homes have
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been evicted and demolished because the earth beneath them became unstable or unsafe to stand on. Even today, according to local accounts, there are stretches of road between New Straitsville and neighboring Murray City where snow simply will not stick because
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of the heat still radiating up from below the surface. And here is the strangest twist of all. During Prohibition, that same steady smoke and steam rising off the hillsides gave local moonshiners the perfect cover for their operations. The constant haze made
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it nearly impossible for revenue agents to tell a hidden still apart from a natural fire vent. And New Straitsville earned a national reputation as the moonshine capital of America. A legacy the town still celebrates every year with its own moonshine festival and even
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more directly through a legal licensed still now operating downtown in partnership with a local college program. Today, New Straitzville's population sits at around 650 people, down from thousands at its peak. And yes, recent estimates put the median home value here at somewhere between 68
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and $76,000. a fraction of what you would pay almost anywhere else in Ohio. But you are not simply buying a house in New Straitsville. You are buying a home built directly on top of a fire that has now been burning uninterrupted for
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longer than almost any other structure fire in recorded American history. Nobody knows exactly how much coal is left to burn underneath these hills. And nobody knows exactly when or if that fire will ever go out. Long after every
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mine on this list went silent and every company that built these towns disappeared from the map, this one is still quite literally active. 10 towns.
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10 different ways that Cole built something out of nothing and then walked away and quietly left the bill behind for whoever stayed. cheap houses, empty main streets, church bells with nobody left to ring them, and in at least one
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case, a fire that has now outlived every single person who started it. If you want more deep dives into the forgotten corners of America, the kind of places most people drive straight past without ever knowing what actually happened
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there. Subscribe and stick around because there are plenty more towns like these still waiting to be found. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next
Topics:Ohio ghost townscoal townscheap housescoal mining historylabor disputesNew StraitsvilleCorning Ohiocompany townscoal industry collapsereal estate Ohio
