Celeryville, Ohio: Where the muck still holds the people

HURON COUNTY — The dirt here isn't really dirt. It's muck — black as stove soot, soft as ash, and heavy with memory. Step into it after a rain and you'll sink half a boot. Leave it to dry in the July sun and it can smolder like coal. The farmers of Celeryville still say the word with caution, half-respect, half-warning: the muck. Before the celery, this was swamp. The Willard Marsh stretched five thousand acres across the flat Ohio plain. Every fall it drowned, every summer it cracked. To most, it was useless. But in 1896 a man named Johnson imagined more. He sent for the Dutch, people who had already stolen farmland from the sea in their own country. On March 4 they arrived — wagons, tools, and hope — and the draining began. They cut ditches, coaxed the water away, and planted celery. A name took root along with the crop: Celeryville. When the ground burned The soil gave, but it never stopped reminding people who was in charge. In the summer of 1897, the muck itself caught fire. It burned beneath the surface for days, glowing underfoot. Farmers could sink a spade and find embers where soil should be. They learned then that the muck could feed or destroy. And still, they stayed. They built homes on the field's edge. They built a church and a schoolhouse. They raised children in the celery rows, teaching them that the land was both gift and threat. Families in the fields Celeryville never boomed. It became instead a scattering of families bound to the muck as if it were blood. Among them were the Wiers. Henry Wiers, one of the Dutch settlers, put celery in the black ground and passed it down. By the late 1980s his great-great-grandson, Ben Wiers, was still there, farming the same fields. "From the time we're 10, we're brought up working in the fields," Ben told the Deseret News in 1988. "All the other kids were going swimming, we were working on the farm. It takes a lifetime to learn.… It's a family operation. Has been for 92 years." He looked out over the rows, green stitching across the black soil. "He'll have the same opportunity," he said of his boy. "But there's something about the land. If I went somewhere else, I'd feel like I was missing something." The soil's gift The muck is not ordinary dirt. Rich with peat, it grows vegetables at a faster pace than most Ohio fields. Here, two harvests can be pulled in the time others manage one. Ohio State University set up a small research station in Celeryville to study the soil and how to keep it from wearing out. Drive through in July and you'll see it quilted in greens — celery, lettuce, radishes — stitched across the black ground. Schools and faith The village itself is little more than a cluster of homes and roads at the edge of Willard, but the people built schools and churches to hold themselves together. Children attend Willard schools or Celeryville Christian School, which runs through eighth grade. The church stands beside the fields, a reminder that this has always been more than farming. The muck drew others too. Migrant families bent to the same rows in summer heat, their work just as necessary. The harvest carries all their names, even if the records do not. What remains The 2020 census counted just 222 people in Celeryville. Drive too fast and you'll pass it without knowing. But for those who live here, it isn't a dot on a map. It is home ground, heavy as roots, binding one generation to the next. Celeryville is still what it was at the beginning: swamp wrestled into farmland, soil that can burn if it dries too long, soil that rewards if treated with care. Children still grow up in the fields, the same way their great-grandparents did. Families still measure time not by clocks but by harvests. The muck holds its people. And the people, in turn, hold the muck.