Ghost town goes for almost $2 million

Ghost town goes for almost $2 million

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" isn't a Halloween poem, but for me, a scrim of dread has always clung to its lines, particularly stanza VII:

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

It was written by Connecticut's most famous insurance executive, literary lion Wallace Stevens, and I couldn't help but think of his gaunt and haunting "thin men of Haddam" when news began circulating of a Victorian ghost town in East Haddam, Connecticut, heading to auction for Halloween.

The story of Johnsonville, a mill town three times abandoned, is a strange one. It has been dominated for the past half-century by an eccentric and now deceased millionaire who half-conjured the Victorian village, trucking in old buildings from other towns, solely for the use and amusement of himself and his wife.

On Thursday, the 62 acres and eight historic structures that remain of Johnsonville sold at auction for $1.9 million, opening an unwritten chapter for the village. Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.

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The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

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An old Neptune twine ad.
An old Neptune twine ad.

Johnsonville sprang up in the mid-1800s as an informal worker's village surrounding Emory Johnson's thriving Neptune Twine and Cord Mills on the Moodus River. The cotton business was booming, and Johnson's mills spun and twisted it into sturdy strands -- "famous for its superiority the world over," according to the industry journal Fibre & Fabric in July 1902 -- used for nets by local fishermen.

In 1896, after Johnson died, son E. Emory Johnson took over the business. Fibre & Fabric noted with satisfaction that "Mr. Johnson takes great pride in the appearance of his property, and the village of Johnsonville is a model of neatness." (Modern readers might want to take all this with a grain of salt, though. A tagline at the end of the Fibre & Fabric piece appears to attribute the article to the Connecticut Valley Advertiser -- whose publisher was apparently one E. Emory Johnson.)

Business managed to limp along through the Great Depression (possibly because people increased their fish consumption as meat grew too costly) and beyond, even as so many other mill towns succumbed to modernization. Still, by the 1960s the heirs were only too ready to leave Johnsonville behind.

And self-made millionaire Raymond Schmitt, an aerospace entrepreneur and history buff, was eager to have it.

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Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

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Where others saw only a relic, Schmitt saw possibility. At the very least, Johnsonville's handful of quaint buildings would be an ideal setting for his vast collection of antiques. And he meant to keep the mill running, too; he doubtless didn't expect to get richer from it, but he considered it worth preserving. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)

Until 1972, his hobby town appears to have hummed along productively.

The old mill. It's gone now, having burned down after a 1972 lightning strike. You can see the milldam behind it on the right.
The old mill. It's gone now, having burned down after a 1972 lightning strike. You can see the milldam behind it on the right.

Then lightning struck the historic mill. The wooden structure burned to the ground, killing any mill-town prospects for commerce along with it. The old machinery was irreplaceable.

Schmitt and his wife, Carole, persisted in restoring the village anyway. They pored over documents to get a sense of how the town used to look, then bought similar buildings from surrounding towns. The chapel came from Waterford, purchased out from under "a woman who wanted to turn it into a beauty salon," Mrs. Schmitt told the New York Times in 1977. The town's original schoolhouse was now a private residence, but she located a similar one in Canterbury and had it dismantled and reassembled in Johnsonville.

Another of the Schmitts' extravagant purchases: an 80-foot riverboat acquired from Walt Disney for $90,000.

Many accounts say that the Schmitts intended to develop Johnsonville into a tourist attraction, perhaps along the lines of a Colonial Williamsburg, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They lived there quietly, possibly in the stately old mill office. Over their three decades there, they opened it to the public only perhaps a couple of times a year -- most famously at Christmastime, when they would lavishly decorate the village with museum-like displays, including life-size animated figures and miniatures, drawing families from around the region. They also held fundraisers for local causes, and sometimes rented out facilities -- the chapel hosted many weddings, for example -- but none of these would have been big moneymakers for the Schmitts.

In 1988, they appear to have made a halfhearted effort at turning a profit, opening an antiques store and the Red House restaurant.

Gilead Chapel steeple. Click a photo for a slideshow.
Gilead Chapel steeple. Click a photo for a slideshow.

"The people who look in are not so bad. You can only hope that they are not physically in your living room," a resigned Mrs. Schmitt told the Day of New London, Connecticut, in August of that year.

The restaurant was open only sporadically, mostly when the place was rented out for events.

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Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.

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And then in 1994, Ray Schmitt abruptly decided he'd had it with those thin men of Haddam, the narrow-minded pencil-pushers who ran the city. He hung a "for sale" sign on the picket gate leading into Johnsonville and washed his hands of the place.

He even canceled all the weddings scheduled for the chapel that June.

What precipitated his fit of pique? It seems that Schmitt wasn't a big believer in city permits, and a city official had stumbled across a big pond Schmitt was digging outside Johnsonville, on another property he owned in town. The city told him to stop work pending a hearing.

"My advice was to appeal the cease-and-desist order," Schmitt's lawyer told the New York Times. "But Mr. Schmitt said, 'I'm bailing out. This time they've gone too far. I have to fight them all the way. I devoted all these years to making the place a showplace.' Frankly, he's frustrated."

The president of Schmitt's company also allowed that "the aerospace business is very difficult right now" and that "was one of the reasons we're liquidating" Johnsonville -- "to raise cash, clean up some of the records" -- but he insisted that "if they weren't giving Mr. Schmitt so much trouble, we would've just gone along without selling the property. Now he said, 'Let's dump it and pay off a portion of the note.' "

And that, it seems, was that. Schmitt never reopened Johnsonville. When he died in 1998, the village still hadn't sold, but a huge auction that his executors held over several days raked in somewhere around $5 million in real estate and antique sales. Martha Stewart placed bids over the phone.

Johnsonville still didn't sell; his executors deemed the bids inadequate.

A little over a decade ago, an investment company finally did buy Johnsonville. It drew up plans for a $100 million retirement community with more than 100 Victorian-style homes.

Concerns about sewers and density bogged down the plans, though, according to a 2006 article in the Day of New London. Eventually the company gave up on Johnsonville too and tried to sell. The village continued to deteriorate.

On Thursday, an unnamed buyer placed a high bid of $1.9 million on Auction.com for Johnsonville. It's believed to exceed the undisclosed reserve price, but of course the sale could still fall through.

It's too early to know what the buyer's plans for Johnsonville are.

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It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

More tales fit for a Halloween night from Yahoo Homes:

Cities of the dead around the world -- including one where the living inhabit relatives' tombs
Real-life haunted homes for sale, and the ghost stories behind them
The house Ozzie Nelson haunted
Tour the Addams Family's mansion