NEWCASTLE — Straddling the border between Knox and Coshocton Counties just outside Newcastle, Rabbit Ridge is typical of the Appalachian foothills that wrinkle eastern Ohio.
Perhaps the last thing you’d expect to find there is a stone mansion with a Gothic arch over its front door. But it is there. You can’t see Wolf Pen Spring from the road, but the historic building is tucked away on private property only rarely opened to the public.
The house is also known as the Eli Nichols mansion, after its first owner. Eli Nichols was a prominent figure in Coshocton County’s early history. Born in 1799 to a family of Quakers in Loudon County, Virginia, Eli was brought to the Ohio frontier when he was still a child.
The Nichols family settled in Belmont County. Eli studied law and in time became a highly successful lawyer, later serving as a district representative in the Ohio state legislature.
In the early 1840s, Nichols decided that he ought to have a home fitting his status. He purchased land to make up a 3500-acre farm on Rabbit Ridge near Newcastle. He brought an architect, Mark Spence, from England to design a fine stone house.
To the best of my research findings, I believe that it was only the architect and style of the house that were English, though some modern sources claim that the very stone itself was brought from England. It’s not impossible, though the expense of that would seem beyond even a prominent lawyer/politician/gentleman farmer of the Ohio countryside.
If there’s truth to the story, it would have been a massive undertaking.
On the other hand, Nichols did not shy away from massive undertakings.
During an era when many citizens of this “Copperhead” region were pro-slavery or, at best, neutral on the issue, Eli Nichols was an outspoken abolitionist. And he wasn’t all talk, either.
Many sources refer to Wolf Pen Spring being an important stop on the Underground Railroad, the network which helped escaped slaves pass through the northern states on their way to freedom in Canada.
This was critically important, because although Ohio was a state that had outlawed slavery itself, the state was still subject to federal law of the period, which said that Southern slave owners had a legal right to pursue and capture escaped slaves. That means that being a conductor on the Underground Railroad put Nichols in violation of federal law.
Though he had left the Quaker faith in adulthood, Nichols remained fiercely moral and stood behind his convictions.
The house that Spence built is large, with six chimneys arranged in such a way that there was a working fireplace in all 16 rooms of the mansion. A circular springhouse, shaped like a beehive, was also part of the original building activity, which was complete by around 1846.
From the spring which gives the farm its name, water runs down a cut stone trough into the springhouse. The name, incidentally, almost certainly refers to the bowl-shaped trough the house was built in being used in the early settlement years as a “wolf pen,” a place where dangerous wolves would be trapped and killed.
I had the pleasure of taking a walk to the house once during my years at the Mount Vernon News, when visitors were allowed to see the house, though not enter. The house is as striking as it is surprising: large, built of massive stone, yet very elegant in style and demeanor.
Nichols’ descendants owned the property until just a few decades ago, but it has since had new owners who have kept up the beautiful and historic structure. One hopes visitors will be invited again in the future to glimpse this remarkable and unlikely relic of Ohio’s frontier years.
