BELLVILLE — History is full of dramatic, historic gold rushes that drew participants from all over the world, resulting in hard work, occasional sudden riches, claim jumping, and much more.
And then there’s the less impressive story of Abe Steltz’s gold rush, just south of Bellville, near the Richland-Knox County line.
Abram Steltz was a big, fiery man, part of the hearty frontier stock that first populated the central highlands of Ohio. He had many friends, but also many enemies, as people shifted from one category to the other based on whether or not they were getting into an argument with Steltz at the time.
When the arguments were verbal, it often ended up in court. When non-verbal, it could turn physical, which often wasn’t good for Steltz’s opponents, as his fists were described as being like sledgehammers.
It’s not clear whether Steltz’s volatility came from his drinking, or vice versa, but the farmer was known to put away prodigious amounts of liquor, despite his wife Catherine’s effort to reform him.
It was just such a drinking jag one day in the early 1850s, that resulted in the short-lived Steltz Run gold rush. It should be explained that there was, in fact, a general exploration of the streams around Bellville in 1852, when gold was discovered on Dead Man Run, just north of Bellville, as detailed in an earlier Richland Source article by Timothy Brian McKee.
Trace amounts of gold were discovered, which caused attention to be paid to all the streams in the area.
One spring day shortly after the general rush, Abe Steltz took his bottle with him out to work in the field, and it seems that he worked harder on the bottle than the field. That afternoon, Abe was attempting to make his way back uphill toward his farmhouse, when he tripped and fell into the small stream that runs north, down the hillside, to where it joins into Honey Creek.
Slipping, falling, grunting, and cussing, Steltz made so much noise that it drew the attention of some of his neighbors who went to rescue the hapless farmer.
When they finally got Abe to his feet, they discovered that by dragging himself up the stream bed, he had stirred up deposits in the bed of the run, and it had left some small, shiny flakes on the farmer’s overalls. Abe Steltz had accidentally found gold.
Now, the amounts were negligible, and Abe himself showed little interest in the flakes, even after sobering up, for panning for trace elements of gold would likely prove harder work than just your average day of farming.
But, according to the book Tales of the Mohican by Dwight Wesley Garber, one of Steltz’s rescuers apparently did show interest, and undertook to pan the stream and find out if America’s next great gold rush would be coming to their hillside.
A quick check of reference books shows that, in fact, it did not. Garber said that he was shown a memento passed down through a local family: a small vial that contained about “a half thimble full of gold flakes” panned from the stream.
The interest in gold has, nonetheless, continued around Bellville, as the hill-cutting waterways are thought by many to be ideal gold-panning creeks. Panning activities continue in some of these streams to this day. If the history-making lucky strike hasn’t yet hit, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying over the last 175 years.
As for Steltz, he remained a tough and ornery character, nearly getting crushed by a collapsing pile of logs in 1873. After his neighbors got him unburied, Abe simply went back to work sawing the logs. He finally passed away in 1878 and is buried in Bellville Cemetery.
