How a childhood memory, a century of property records, and one very helpful Facebook stranger brought a forgotten Colerain Township house back into view.
There are certain things your brain decides to remember from childhood for absolutely no reason.
A song. A smell. A weird building you passed in the car.
For me, it was a little house sitting down in a valley along US 27.
When I was younger, I traveled US 27 religiously between Ross Township and Colerain. I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I made that drive, but I can tell you that I always noticed that house.
It sat down below the road, tucked among the trees, somewhere around Old Colerain Road and Colerain Avenue. It wasn't a mansion. It wasn't particularly beautiful. There wasn't a giant neon sign saying, ASHLEY, PLEASE SPEND 30 HOURS RESEARCHING ME IN 2026.
It was just a little old house in a strange place.
And the thing I remember most?
I don't remember ever seeing anyone living there.
Maybe someone did. Maybe I just never happened to see them. But every time I passed, the place looked abandoned. It was one of those houses that made you wonder who had lived there, why they'd left, and how long it had been sitting quietly among the trees.
Eventually, I grew up, stopped traveling that stretch of US 27 quite so often, and mostly forgot about it.
Mostly.
Because apparently, my brain had placed that house in a folder labeled:
WE WILL DEAL WITH THIS LATER.
Well.
Later has arrived.
This Was Supposed to Be a Quick Search
If you've read my other local-history adventures, you already know that sentence is a lie.
I'd recently finished chasing down another long-standing Colerain Township mystery involving Handle Bar Ranch, Anna Ritter, an extraordinary handmade house, and a turret that apparently had no interest in being found.
After finally seeing photographs of Anna's house, any reasonable person would have enjoyed the satisfaction of solving the mystery and moved on with life.
Instead, my brain immediately went:
Hey. What about that little house you used to see from US 27?
Of course.
Fine.
Let's find the house.
I remembered it being somewhere near Old Colerain Road and US 27, north of Struble Road. That's a relatively small area, so I figured identifying the property wouldn't be particularly difficult.
I was spectacularly wrong.
The landscape has changed considerably over the decades. Modern US 27 dominates the area, properties have been divided and reconfigured, old roads have shifted or disappeared, and trees have swallowed what were once open spaces.
To complicate matters, this little section of Colerain Township once contained several homesites.
Not one.
Not two.
Several.
So when I pulled up Historic Aerials and started comparing old photographs with modern maps, I wasn't looking at one obvious abandoned house. I was looking at an assortment of small buildings scattered across an area that had been rearranged more than once.
Fantastic.
On the upside, the search led me into the history of old Colerain and the origins of several local road names. That was fascinating in its own right.
But I had a house to find.
And I was not about to be defeated by a tiny building I'd been staring at through a car window since childhood.
A Very Interesting Little Property
One property immediately caught my attention.
10630 Colerain Avenue, associated in historical records with earlier road names including Colerain Pike and Willey Road.
The modern parcel number is 510-0170-0023-00.
According to the Hamilton County property records I examined, the house was listed as having been constructed in 1915.
Ohhhhh.
Now we're getting somewhere.
The records described a small frame house with approximately 851 square feet of living space, three bedrooms, and six rooms.
No central heat.
Zero full bathrooms.
And by 2014, its condition was officially listed as VERY POOR.
Well, that's not exactly a glowing real estate description.
Charming historic retreat nestled in a wooded valley! Three bedrooms! No central heat! No full bathroom! Condition: VERY POOR! Bring your imagination and possibly a tetanus shot!
As a REALTOR®, I couldn't help appreciating the contrast between how this property might have appeared in a creative listing and what the actual records had to say.
Still, it sounded remarkably similar to the little house I remembered.
The size made sense. The condition made sense. The setting made sense.
There was just one problem.
I needed to know whether that 1915 construction date was actually accurate.
And that is where everything went completely off the rails.
Meet the Shay Family
I began tracing the property backward through the deeds.
Rumpke purchased the property associated with 10630 from Paulamae Drake in 2006.
Before Drake came the Parrott family. Before the Parrotts came Wolfgang Popp, followed by Elbert and Minnie Hurdle, George Zack, and Robert Sevester as I worked my way backward through the chain of ownership.
And before Sevester?
The Shays.
At this point, I'd gone from casually wondering what happened to an abandoned house to asking questions like:
WHO OWNED THIS LAND DURING THE GROVER CLEVELAND ADMINISTRATION?
This is how these things happen.
The Shay family had owned land in this area for decades. John Shay acquired property here in 1874, and I began following the family through census records, maps, and local directories.
Eventually, I found John and his wife, whose name appears in historical records as Catherine, Katherine, and Katie.
Apparently, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century record keepers were not especially concerned with making life easier for someone researching them more than a century later.
But the records were beginning to tell a story.
And then I found something that made me sit up a little straighter.
John Moriarty, You Beautiful Historical Clue
In the 1910 United States Census, Katie Shay was a widow living on a farm in Colerain Township.
She owned the farm free and clear.
And she was living along Colerain Pike.
Interesting, but not enough by itself to establish that I'd found the right property. Plenty of families lived along Colerain Pike.
Then I looked at her neighbor.
Immediately before Katie in the census was a man named John Moriarity.
Remember that name.
Because decades later, when I examined a deed involving the property, it described an old right-of-way running toward Colerain Pike along land associated with John Moriarity.
EXCUSE ME?
Now we had something.
The census and the deed were created decades apart, for entirely different purposes, yet both connected the Shay and Moriarity properties.
That was much more compelling than simply finding the right surname somewhere in Colerain Township.
And the historical maps were about to make it even better.
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have the Farm
Next came a 1914 Hamilton County atlas.
In Section 17, I found a parcel labeled:
JOHN SHAY — 7.25 ACRES
Directly beside it was:
JOHN M. MORIARTY — 6.23 ACRES
There they were.
The families from the census.
The neighboring property referenced in the deed.
The exact acreage that would appear again in later tax records.
All in the same little section of Colerain Township.
I cannot adequately describe how satisfying it is when historical records created by different people, at different times, finally begin agreeing with one another.
For hours, I'd been comparing deeds, maps, and old photographs, wondering whether I was even following the correct property.
Now I had identified the Shay farm with considerably more confidence.
WE HAVE THE FARM!
And I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.
Which, historically, means I was approximately five minutes away from discovering another problem.
About That 1915 Construction Date...
Remember the Hamilton County property record that listed the house as being built in 1915?
Well, John Shay died in February 1910.
That didn't necessarily disprove the construction date. His family continued to own the property, and a house could certainly have been built after his death.
Except the 1910 Census told us something else.
Katie Shay was already living in a dwelling on the farm.
Five years before the modern property record says the house was built.
Oh, for the love of history.
Now we had several possibilities.
Perhaps the 1910 dwelling was an older farmhouse that was replaced around 1915. Perhaps the existing building underwent substantial reconstruction or alterations that year. Perhaps there were multiple dwellings on the property.
Or perhaps—and anyone who researches historic houses will recognize this possibility—the 1915 date was simply an estimate that found its way into the assessor's records and was repeated ever since.
A construction date in a modern property record can be useful, but it isn't always definitive proof of when an old building was originally erected.
I needed something closer to the time period.
And fortunately, the tax records had something to say.
The 1916 Tax Assessment
Hamilton County's 1916 real estate assessment identified the Shay property in Range 1, Township 2, Section 17.
The acreage?
7.25 acres.
Exactly what appeared on the 1914 atlas.
The assessment listed the land at $300 and buildings at $230.
Can you imagine?
Two hundred and thirty dollars in assessed building value.
Now, that figure isn't the same thing as a modern market value, but it does tell us that the county was assessing improvements on the property in 1916.
That mattered.
We now had evidence of a dwelling in 1910, a mapped Shay property in 1914, a reported 1915 construction date, and assessed buildings in 1916.
The timeline was becoming clearer, even if the precise identity of the house remained uncertain.
Then I located the 1922 assessment.
Same 7.25 acres.
Same $300 land assessment.
Buildings?
$250.
A whopping $20 increase.
Thanks, Hamilton County.
Extremely illuminating.
The assessment confirmed that improvements continued to be recorded on the property, but it didn't tell me whether the structure was new, old, rebuilt, or replaced.
And meanwhile, the Shay family had apparently moved.
So Who Was Living There?
This is where the story became particularly interesting.
In a 1911–1912 Hamilton County directory, John's widow Katherine and daughters Anna and Ella were no longer listed on Colerain Pike.
Instead, they were living near Fifth and Harrison Avenue in Mount Healthy.
By the 1920 Census, Catherine Shay appeared with family members including Jerry, Albert, Anna, and Anna's husband, Herman Mueller, on Hamilton Avenue in Springfield Township.
Yet the family still owned the Colerain property.
So who was occupying the farm?
Was it rented to someone else? Was one of the sons farming it? Was the dwelling vacant? Was a new house constructed around 1915 after the family moved away?
I couldn't establish an answer from the records I'd located.
Naturally, this led me into World War I draft registrations for Jerry and Albert Shay, because apparently there is no historical document I won't examine if I think it might contain one useful sentence.
Unfortunately, those records didn't resolve the question.
I had identified the family, the farm, the neighboring property, and a fairly substantial timeline.
But I still couldn't prove when the little house had actually been built.
Or even whether it was the same dwelling the Shay family occupied in 1910.
And then the property boundaries decided to become a problem.
When One Farm Becomes Several Parcels
The original Shay property didn't remain one neat, conveniently shaped piece of land.
Over time, it was divided and reconfigured.
The old tax cards showed parcel changes and boundary adjustments, including changes in the late 1960s.
Today, the area contains several oddly shaped parcels tucked between Old Colerain and modern US 27.
Two addresses became particularly interesting:
10630 and 10632 Colerain Avenue.
Both eventually became associated with Rumpke ownership.
Because, of course, they did.
At this point, I was beginning to think every historical property investigation in Colerain Township was destined to end with the same sentence:
And then Rumpke bought it.
The end.
One neighboring parcel was even described in historical assessment records as being on the east side of Colerain Avenue—REAR.
Which is exactly how I remembered the house.
Behind everything.
Down in the terrain.
Tucked into a wooded hollow.
A little forgotten pocket of land that modern US 27 now passes every day.
But there was a significant problem with identifying the exact parcel.
The old property boundaries didn't align neatly with the modern ones, and historical aerial photographs showed multiple structures in the vicinity.
It would have been easy to point to one modern address and declare the mystery solved.
But that wouldn't have been responsible research.
I wanted to know which house I was looking at, not simply which parcel looked promising.
And that meant returning to the aerial photographs.
Again.
My Personal War With Tiny Black Squares
I compared aerial photographs.
Then parcel boundaries.
Then the 1914 atlas.
Then aerial photographs again.
I examined structures visible in the earliest aerial photography I could access from 1932.
I compared the locations of old buildings with roads and property lines.
And then I found myself staring at a 1915 USGS topographic map.
If you've never tried identifying a specific old house from a century-old topographic map, allow me to describe the experience.
Tiny black squares.
Everywhere.
Little black squares that may represent buildings, but offer absolutely no explanation as to whether they're houses, barns, sheds, or something else entirely.
I stared at those squares until they began to feel like personal enemies.
And somewhere along the way, I developed an entirely one-sided historical feud with a man named Joshua Davis.
Joshua has been dead for approximately forever.
He is in no position to defend himself.
Nevertheless, he somehow managed to become one of the most aggravating people involved in this investigation.
I will not pretend that this is reasonable.
Historical research rarely is.
By the time I reached the end of the available records, I had established quite a bit about the Shay farm and its later ownership.
But the central question remained.
Was the little house listed at 10630 the exact same building I remembered seeing from US 27?
I thought it was possible.
Maybe even likely.
But I couldn't prove it.
And I still didn't have a close-up photograph of the house.
Not one.
The Wall
At that point, I'd exhausted the most promising records available to me.
I had deeds, census records, tax assessments, historical maps, property cards, and aerial photographs.
I knew Katie Shay lived on the farm in 1910. I knew where the 7.25-acre Shay property was located. I knew buildings were assessed there in 1916, and I knew the land had eventually been divided into the unusual parcels visible today.
But I still didn't know whether the house I remembered was the 1915 structure recorded at 10630 or a building on the neighboring parcel.
I reached out to the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library's Genealogy & Local History Department, hoping that older tax assessments or a 1915 directory might provide additional evidence.
And then I did something else.
I shared the story on Facebook.
Because if government records couldn't show me the house, maybe somebody in the community remembered it.
I ended that original investigation admitting that I'd hit a wall.
I had no idea what was about to happen.
Nine Days Later? Not This Time. Facebook Came Through.
I'd spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to identify the little house in the valley.
I had followed the Shay family through decades of records, studied the evolution of the property boundaries, and squinted at tiny buildings in old aerial photographs.
I'd even developed a completely unnecessary grudge against Joshua Davis.
But the one thing I hadn't been able to find was a photograph of the actual house.
Until I shared the investigation on Facebook.
Because apparently, once again, The Book of Faces comes in clutch.
Within a short time, a woman named Shelly Ray Wolfe commented on my post.
And what she said nearly made me fall out of my chair.
“My husband and I hiked down to the house in about 2014. We started near where the produce stand is now. The house wasn't much. Very small and falling in on itself. We figured out the ‘drive’ or ‘path’ that came out onto Old Colerain.”
EXCUSE ME?!
Not only did someone else remember the house.
SHE HAD BEEN TO IT.
She and her husband had actually walked down into that wooded hollow and explored the very place I'd spent years wondering about.
Naturally, I immediately asked the most important question.
DID YOU GET ANY PICTURES?!
Friends.
She did.
THERE'S THE HOUSE!
After all those years of wondering about this little building, I was suddenly staring at the first close-up photograph of it I'd ever seen.
And there it was.
The house I remembered.
Tall. Narrow. Tucked into the wooded hollow. Surrounded by trees.
By approximately 2014, when Shelly and her husband visited, it was clearly in terrible condition. The structure was deteriorating, and parts of it appeared to be losing their battle with gravity.
It wasn't a grand Victorian mansion.
It wasn't an elaborate architectural masterpiece.
It was a modest old rural house, standing quietly in the woods long after its best days had passed.
But I recognized it.
That was the house.
The strange little building I'd watched from the road as a child.
The one I'd wondered about for decades.
And now, finally, I could see it up close.
I cannot adequately explain how exciting that was.
It may have looked like a collapsing old house to everyone else.
To me, it was a piece of my childhood that I'd finally managed to recover.
And Then Shelly Mentioned the Driveway
As exciting as the photograph was, another part of Shelly's comment immediately caught my attention.
She remembered finding what appeared to be an old drive or path connecting the house toward Old Colerain.
That was particularly interesting because access routes had repeatedly appeared throughout my research.
Historical deeds referenced rights-of-way and neighboring properties. Old maps showed roads and paths that didn't necessarily align with the modern landscape. And the property divisions made understanding how people originally reached the house more complicated than it should have been.
Could Shelly and her husband have walked along part of an old access route?
Possibly.
Could it have been the exact same right-of-way referenced in a deed more than a century earlier?
I couldn't establish that.
And after spending this much time researching the property, I wasn't about to commit another historical felony by declaring something proven without the evidence.
But you better believe I wrote that detail down.
Because even when a memory doesn't establish a legal boundary or a historic right-of-way, it can tell us where to look next.
And Shelly had just provided something the property records couldn't.
A firsthand description of the site before it disappeared further into the landscape.
So... Did We Solve It?
Yes.
And no.
We answered the question that started this entire ridiculous adventure:
What happened to the little abandoned house I used to see from US 27?
We found a photograph of it.
For the first time, I could say with confidence that the building Shelly photographed matched the house I remembered.
But identifying the building visually wasn't quite the same thing as proving its complete property history.
The distinction between 10630 and 10632 Colerain Avenue remained unresolved.
And that mattered, because the records associated with 10630 gave us that intriguing 1915 construction date.
Which brings us to another question.
Was It Really Built in 1915?
Shelly's photograph gave me something I hadn't had before.
The actual architecture of the house.
And naturally, this created another rabbit hole.
At first glance, the house had some characteristics that made me consider whether it might have been a saltbox.
A traditional saltbox house has a distinctive asymmetrical roof, typically with a longer rear slope. The style is strongly associated with early American architecture, particularly colonial New England.
But I wasn't entirely convinced.
The photograph didn't provide enough clear views of the roofline and overall structure to confidently classify it.
And I wasn't going to declare it a colonial-era saltbox simply because one angle suggested an unusual roof shape.
If it were a genuinely early saltbox-style building, that would open some fascinating questions about its age and construction.
But architectural resemblance alone cannot establish a building's date.
Another possibility was that this was a simple two-story vernacular farmhouse, perhaps related to the I-house tradition commonly seen throughout nineteenth-century rural Ohio.
That interpretation would fit the broader regional context, although it, too, would require better photographs or physical evidence to establish with confidence.
So the architectural classification remains open.
And the 1915 construction date?
Still interesting.
Still unproven.
Because we know from the 1910 Census that Katie Shay was living in a dwelling on the farm five years before that date.
Perhaps the house in Shelly's photograph replaced an earlier dwelling.
Perhaps the existing building was altered or rebuilt.
Or perhaps the assessor's date was approximate all along.
For the first time, however, I had something tangible to compare against the written records.
I knew what the house looked like.
And that was a major breakthrough.
The Part That Makes Me Love Local History
This was now the second time I'd spent hours digging through deeds, maps, government records, and historical archives, only for Facebook to casually stroll into the investigation like:
Oh, you mean THIS?
First, Anna Ritter's mysterious house and its missing turret.
Now, the little house in the valley.
And both times, the missing piece came from people who remembered the places themselves.
I cannot overstate how valuable local memory is when researching properties like these.
Government records can tell me who owned the land.
Census records can tell me who lived in a particular area or household.
Tax records can establish that improvements were assessed.
Maps can help reconstruct where buildings and roads once stood.
But sometimes the only reason a forgotten place isn't completely lost is because somebody remembers it.
And in this case, somebody didn't just remember the house.
She walked down there.
She took photographs.
And more than a decade later, she still had them.
This is what I love about the community side of social media.
Somewhere between the political arguments, questionable videos, and advertisements disguised as entertainment, there are people holding pieces of local history that don't exist anywhere else.
Photographs tucked into albums.
Memories of old businesses.
Stories about houses that have disappeared.
Knowledge about roads, farms, and neighborhoods that never made it into an official record.
And sometimes, all it takes is asking the right question.
So thank you, Shelly Ray Wolfe, for hanging onto photographs of a collapsing little house in the woods.
You have no idea how happy you've made one woman who apparently cannot leave unidentified old houses alone.
What Happened to the Little House?
We know that the building was still standing, although badly deteriorated, when Shelly and her husband visited around 2014.
We know that the surrounding land had undergone significant changes over the decades.
And we know that the properties in this area eventually became associated with Rumpke ownership.
But there is still a chapter of this story I haven't completely reconstructed.
At some point, the Shay family moved away from the farm.
Later owners came and went.
The property was divided.
The surrounding landscape changed.
And somewhere along the way, a house that had once been somebody's home became that strange abandoned building sitting down in the valley.
That's the part that interests me most.
Not simply when the house was built or which parcel number appeared on the tax card.
But when it stopped being a home.
Who was the last family to live there?
When did someone last walk through the front door carrying groceries?
When did the lights go out for the final time?
Did the people who lived there ever imagine that decades later, a little girl passing along US 27 would notice their house and remember it for the rest of her life?
Probably not.
To them, it was simply home.
And that's the thing about old houses.
Even the ones that aren't particularly grand or architecturally significant have stories worth remembering.
One Last Look at the House
I also experimented with colorizing Shelly's photograph to get a better sense of the building's appearance.
The colorized version isn't an authentic historical color photograph, of course. It's simply an interpretation of the original image, and the colors shouldn't be treated as evidence of what the house actually looked like.
But seeing the structure in another way made me appreciate its shape and proportions even more.
I still want to see photographs from other angles.
I still want to know whether the roofline would support a particular architectural classification.
And I'd love to hear from someone who remembers the house before it deteriorated.
Because there may be another photograph out there.
Maybe one showing the front porch.
Maybe one with a family standing in the yard.
Maybe one taken when the house was still painted, maintained, and occupied.
For all I know, someone has that photograph sitting in a shoebox right now.
And if the Anna Ritter investigation taught me anything, it's that the photograph you need sometimes exists in the last place you'd think to look.
Why These Forgotten Houses Matter
As a REALTOR® and someone who loves researching the history of our communities, I spend a great deal of time looking at properties.
But the stories that interest me aren't always the ones attached to beautiful historic mansions or famous landmarks.
Sometimes they're attached to an 851-square-foot house with no central heat and no full bathroom.
Sometimes they're hiding behind a modern highway.
Sometimes the only thing that makes a house memorable is that a child looked out a car window and wondered why nobody seemed to live there.
And sometimes, decades later, that memory turns into a trail of deeds, tax assessments, census records, and a very helpful stranger on Facebook.
That's what Corporate House Takeover is about.
Not simply documenting what replaced an old building, or deciding whether development was good or bad.
It's about remembering what was there before.
The homes.
The families.
The farms.
The businesses.
The everyday places that quietly disappear as communities change.
Because once they're gone, their stories can be surprisingly difficult to recover.
And if nobody takes the time to ask, sometimes those stories disappear right along with the buildings.
The Mystery Isn't Entirely Over
I'm still interested in the older tax records.
I still want to establish whether the photographed house stood on what became 10630 or 10632 Colerain Avenue.
And I would absolutely love to know who lived there during its final years as a residence.
But for now, I'm celebrating the breakthrough.
After wondering about that little house since childhood, I finally have a photograph of it.
And I have Shelly to thank.
So if you remember an unusual old house, a vanished farm, a long-forgotten business, or a building that disappeared from your hometown, I'd love to hear about it.
Especially if you have photographs.
Because apparently, I am now the kind of person who spends her evenings investigating houses that no longer exist.
And somehow, Facebook keeps helping me find them.
We found the little house in the valley.
And Joshua Davis?
You're still on my list.
To be continued. Again.
Written and researched by Ashley Yoder | Homes With History — Corporate House Takeover
Historical research note: The identification of the photographed building is based on the author's childhood recollection and Shelly Ray Wolfe's firsthand account and photographs. The precise modern parcel identification, original construction date, and architectural classification remain unconfirmed.