Rich Hill trees were harvested for rich customers in 1873

CENTERBURG — I found an interesting little report in the March 26, 1873 issue of a Cleveland newspaper known as The Evening Post.

It quotes a special report to a Columbus paper (the original of which I could not find) stating in that year more than 300 railcars of black walnut logs were slated to be cut and shipped for eventual destinations on the East Coast and overseas.

The unnamed correspondent noted the logs were believed to have come from Rich Hill, a small hamlet north of Centerburg.

The steep-sided hill was not a likely location for black walnut trees, which require very rich soil to thrive. That is the very reason, though, that it was named Rich Hill, because unlike most steep hills, it had soil of the richness to sustain a thriving population of black walnut trees.

I remember a number of years back, when I was living on the grounds of Malabar Farm State Park running the hostel, I had a very fun — if messy — fall one year by harvesting black walnuts from the multiple trees in the hostel yard.

I felt very moved to do this because where I grew up in Crawford County, near the village of West Liberty, we had a black walnut tree, so the strangely tart smell of the walnut casings is a strong childhood memory. 

I gather that many who did not grow up with that scent find it off-putting, but I love it and always will.

On the farm we lived at on Loss Creek Road, my brothers and I would line up black walnuts on the road so that the school bus would run over the stubborn outer hulls of the nuts, which would help remove them.

After drying the inner hulls for a time, you could start to work cracking and/or hammering the nuts to get to the sweet kernels inside. At least I had a vague memory of using a hammer on them.

I remembered all that adventure and sought to repeat it in my adult years.

So, I got some empty five-gallon buckets from my dad, and strolled out into the yard, accompanied by my two assistants, Sir Thomas and Lady Jane, who managed to offer a great deal of hindrance as I gathered freshly fallen black walnuts from the ground and picked others from low-hanging branches.

After numerous breaks to pet the kitty cats, I finally filled a couple of buckets.

Turns out I hadn’t remembered how stubborn those outer hulls were. I tried prying some off, cutting some off, and cussing and swearing and tearing them off.

After all that effort, I discovered that my hands had become stained a vivid yellow from the hulls, which was about the time that I remembered reading somewhere that back in the old days, this was exactly how people dyed cloth to get a long-lasting yellow color.

Hmm. I went to the kitchen sink and gave my hands a thorough scrubbing, then rinsed them, to find that they were now … exactly the same shade of yellow they had been before washing.

In fact, I went for about a week with yellow hands requiring an explanation to everyone I met before the persistent pigment rubbed off my top layer of skin, gradually returning to normal. Still, I kept a trace of yellow about my fingernails for a month.

From that point on, I handled the recalcitrant nuts with gloves. Of course, after that, I remember why we left the things out to get run over by the school bus instead of trying to remove the casings ourselves.

Since I lived on a hill by a bridge over a creek on a paved road, there were several thousand reasons why it would have been a bad idea to put the black walnuts out on my road for vehicles to run over. 

So, I ended up lining up about half a bucketload of the things across the driveway and spent several days working on them as I came and went before they finally started to yield.

After that, I removed the husks the rest of the way — this time wearing gloves — and dried out the inner shells in the sun. I thought my memory of their toughness must be exaggerated, and grabbed a nutcracker to have at them.

My memory was not exaggerated.

A few moments later found me sitting on my front porch steps, using a hammer to crack the little beasts against the front sidewalk. Even then, I had to use one of those curved, metal nut picks to draw the kernels out of the fragmented shells. 

But when I finally was able to get a large kernel out and taste it, the flavor blasted me right back to my childhood on Loss Creek Road. Those who don’t grow up with the flavor would probably find it overly strong, but I love it.

In retrospect, was it worth the tremendous effort it took to get the things open?

Hell, no.

That’s why I never bothered to do it again, and I gave the bucket and a half of harvested walnuts remaining to my dad, who didn’t mind spending his off hours in the garage slowly hammering the things open.

I made a cake that used them, and dad made brownies with the black walnuts a few times, which was good.

Yet I also discovered that strong flavor was also rough on the stomach. You can only eat so many black walnuts at one sitting before they upset the stomach.

But Dad loved the black walnuts even more than I did, and intended to use them regularly for brownies. Unfortunately, his plan was sabotaged. 

He called me one day the following spring, mad as a hornet when he discovered that squirrels had been sneaking into his garage all winter and stealing black walnuts after he hulled them out.

He went to check his bucket that spring and found it empty. Man, those squirrels had an awesome winter that year.

At any rate, black walnut trees are something else. If the wood is as sturdy as its fruit, it’s no wonder that rich people from far away were eager to pay good money for Knox County black walnut trees.

I’m sure it’s the same reason one will still see signs occasionally in the country from people looking for both black walnuts and the wood from the trees. It’s a tree with a stubborn distinction.

The newspaper commentator talked about Rich Hill in 1873:

“This is a most remarkable hill. Its sides are quite steep, and its summit must be between 200 and 300 feet above its base. Yet it was, a few years since, completely covered with as fine black walnut trees as eyes ever rested upon. 

“As it requires the richest of soil for black walnut, and as hills do not general afford such soil, ‘Rich Hill’ was quite famous; but there were few persons in that section, a few years ago, who supposed that those trees would be carried to New York and Europe to be manufactured into furniture for the adornment of the palaces of the merchant princes of our own county and the nobility of Europe.”

It’s a shame that there’s no way to know now where those logs went.

One can imagine some of them ended up as deluxe furniture in the homes of people with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller, and that some of them ended up as furniture in the homes of European royal families. 

One could only imagine where those stout Knox County trees ended up, all over the world.