Hidden deep in the woods in Vinton County is a remnant of a bygone time.

A tunnel inexplicably, in the middle of nowhere with the word Moonville marking its entrance.

Something used to be here, though additional clues are few and far between.

It's a difficult process, piecing together the past when so little of it remains.

Thankfully, this tunnel does a lot of heavy lifting, keeping the memory of this place alive.

A place that in the late 1800s was dotted with small towns and humming with industry.

Over 150 years later, the story of Moonville is still being written.

It begins with a railroad company with big ambitions.

About the middle 1800s.

The nation had been gripped by rail fever, and so a bunch of guys got together in Marietta and they got a charter to start the Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad.

The idea of the railroad was to make a faster, efficient way to Cincinnati because that was the whole key to get to Cincinnati.

And then you could go westward from there.

If you look at a map, you can draw a straight line from Marietta right to Cincinnati.

The problem is you're going through southeast Ohio, and it's not an easy thing.

Not an easy thing might be underselling it.

For the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad to traverse the hilly terrain of southeast Ohio, several tunnels would have to be constructed.

This was a backbreaking labor intensive process.

With inventions like dynamite still another decade or so away.

Some crews were lucky to tunnel through a foot or two of rock each day.

Given this incredibly expensive undertaking, there had to be more at play than just a quicker route to Cincinnati.

There was this promise of the minerals.

This place is a unbelievable natural resource bonanza.

Black diamonds, they called it, coal, iron ore, burrstone, just all kinds of minerals.

This was going to be a happening place.

So that's kind of the selling point of why people got involved.

And as a land owner, you know, everybody wanted the railroad to go through their property, Right?

Okay, you're here.

Look around.

All right.

So how are you getting your stuff, your timber, your whatever to anywhere?

The Coe family was already here.

Samuels the one that seems to get all the credit.

Allegedly got on his horse in the late 1840s and rode his horse to Chillicothe, which is where corporate headquarters were for the Marrietta & Cincinnati Railroad and convinced the railroad to put this tract right through his property.

The appeal of resource extraction so close to convenient transportation, led several small towns to spring up along this stretch of track, including King Station, Ingham Station, Hope Furnace and Moonville, where both the tunnel and the Coe property were located.

The tunnel was built in 1853 1854.

Somewhere in there it opened up in the spring of 1856.

The first trains came through here.

There was a collection of homes, including the Coe home, which was the largest one.

And across the railroad tracks from the Coe home was a rail depot, which was very small.

Probably also had the post office was in there and there was a cemetery, which is still around.

There was a one room schoolhouse.

There was a sawmill down the Raccoon Creek.

There was some coal mines.

That was Moonville.

That was it.

So theres probably a collection of, I don't know, ten or 15 homes that had 5 to 10 people in them, you know, extended families.

So conventional wisdom says there was a hundred people around here.

And I would say that's probably accurate.

While there's enough information to provide a general layout of Moonville, there's a high probability we'll never know what it actually looked like.

The first of several mysteries.

This was a happening place maybe from 1870 to 1900, 1880.

That's when it was at its heyday.

How many cameras were around?

And this was not a very affluent area necessarily.

So they didn't necessarily have cameras.

And if they had a camera, why would you take a picture of this right at the time?

We wish they did, but they don't seem to exist.

The lack of photos from this time leads us to our second mystery that the original tunnel might have looked very different from the one we see today.

The Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad had extreme bankruptcy problems.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bought them in the 1880s.

The president of the railroad, he wanted an inventory done of all their properties, all the trestles, all the bridges, all the tunnels.

What do we got?

What's good, what's not?

They came here to this tunnel and they evaluated it, and they must have determined it was falling apart.

When they built it, they were still kind of learning how to do it, kind of winging it.

There were new technologies 50, 60 years later, and they redid the tunnel.

So there was a plaque on top of the arch of the tunnel said 1903 and there's a plaque inside the tunnel.

It has the engineer and all the guys involved.

1903 They, in my opinion, rebuilt the tunnel.

I don't think it was brick before.

I don't think it looked like that.

But there's no pictures that exist that you know, before and after.

I don't know.

There are other tunnels in this state that look like that, that the same characters rebuilt it.

So I think this was just kind of the new model.

Hey, we need something that's a little more stout.

This one's fallen apart, so let's line it in brick, and let's do this and let's do that.

They made changes.

Adding to the intrigue is the existence of King's Tunnel, a virtual stone's throw away from Moonville Tunnel, but of a much different look and design.

King's Tunnel is original.

It's timber.

It's all 100% timber.

It's only two miles from here.

The same topography, same.

pretty much everything.

But it's made out of timber.

It's a very interesting tunnel.

The King's Tunnel.

To recap, we have a tunnel made of timber, a mere two miles from one made of brick that runs through a town we have no photographic evidence of, that sprang up around the Coe property, yet is named Moonville Let's tackle the final mystery.

Who is this elusive Mr.

Moon?

I've spent a considerable amount of time.

More time than any normal person should to look into that.

But I have found no evidence ever that there was a man named Moon that lived here.

I've looked at the census records from the state of Ohio and Vinton County from 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860.

Yes, I have other hobbies, but I was so intrigued by this to find this guy named Moon or Moonie or, you know, Moonenstein or just something that there is no person that existed that I could ever find.

It could have been something just as easy as, Hey, look how brilliant the moon is here.

It's really pretty.

Let's call it Moonville.

Leaving mystery behind, the railroad is established, roughly 100 people call Moonville home, and industry is operational.

It took a lot of effort to get to this point.

It took even more to live here.

This was described by many on the railroad as the most desolate stretch of track on the whole Marietta and Cincinnati line.

People, because there were no roads around, people used the railroad tracks to walk back and forth.

In this particular area, you have Raccoon Creek, which is 200 yards away from the tunnel.

If you were on the bridge, that was a problem.

Drinking was prevalent at the time.

There were stories of people that just had too much to drink and fell asleep on the tracks.

There were a lot of deaths in and around this area, not necessarily right here at this tunnel, but on this stretch of track.

As if life here wasn't hard enough, the area soon found itself staring misfortune in the face.

There was better iron ore up north The coal quality here was not what they thought it was going to be.

It was better elsewhere.

To run the furnace, the Hope Furnace, where a lot of this stuff went to.

Took a tremendous amount of timber and land management was kind of not really a concept back then.

They would just cut trees and you wake up one day and you're two miles to the nearest tree and the railroad.

So people just gradually started moving away and moving away and moving away.

You wake up one day and there's virtually nobody here.

Eventually, everything burned down.

And it's not like you're going to call the fire department because there's nobody to call.

By 1947, Moonville was abandoned.

A few decades later, the train tracks were too, and were completely removed.

In the late 1980s.

Much work has been done in the meantime to convert the old rail line to recreational paths, which can be used for hiking, biking and horseback riding.

Yes, mysteries remain, but maybe that's not the point.

Instead, maybe we should be in awe that people even got here in the first place.

Can you imagine?

Okay, so you take a wagon ride from New York State, your wife and your six, seven, eight kids in a wagon.

A wagon.

Right.

Hey honey.

We got land granted to us in Ohio.

Great, great opportunity.

Let's go.

I mean, how would you know you got here?

I mean, seriously, who knows if that road was even there?

It was probably a cart path.

A dirt cart path.

We're here.

Where are we going to spend the first night?

Where are we going to build a housr?

It was just sheer determination and patience and just hard, backbreaking work.

That determination and work gave us this tunnel that will ensure the memory of this place lives on.

Even when everything else was lost.

It's a small chapter in Ohio's history, but one that will not soon be forgotten.