Where did she go? Would she ever be found?
Anticipation and dread filled Wadsworth as more than 400 men assembled at the town center.
“Fellow citizens, give me your attention for a moment while I give you our directions,” Medina County Commissioner William Eyles told the restless crowd in 1824.
He ordered the villagers to march west, letting one man stop every 16 feet until the line extended more than a mile. A cascading blast of brass horns was the signal to advance.
“When the last horn sounds, all move forward,” Eyles said. “Then let no man shout, no horn blow, except to announce that she is found. Search around every log or brush heap with great care, for we only expect to find her lifeless body; and let each man remember his responsibility.
“This is not a bear hunt or a wolf hunt but a search for a lost fellow creature, and may God give us success. Move forward!”
The disappearance of Sylvia Beach, a deaf mute, was one of the greatest mysteries in the Western Reserve. Sympathetic pioneers traveled from afar to help local authorities search the vast wilderness for the missing woman.
Only a year earlier, the Beach family had moved to Ohio from Connecticut. Abel Beach, “a man of great mirthfulness and wit,” and his wife, Roxy, “a woman of strong and active purpose,” were the parents of three children, George, Sylvia and Orlando Beach, who were all in their 20s at the time.
The family cleared land for a farm and lived in a log cabin north of present-day Akron Road on the rugged outskirts of Wadsworth.
Abel and George Beach built Wadsworth’s first sawmill in 1824 on Blocker’s Run in association with Joseph and Sherman Loomis. There was an endless supply of lumber. The village stood on the eastern edge of a forest teeming with chestnut, beech, maple, oak, elm, ash, hickory, sycamore and whitewood trees.
Bears, wolves, wildcats and rattlesnakes prowled the edges of town. When a bear attacked the Beach family’s pigpen in 1823, Roxy Beach grabbed a rifle and shot the beast dead in its tracks.
Sylvia Beach, 23, had been deaf since contracting scarlet fever as a child. She was subject to bouts of mental confusion and occasionally strayed from home. One cold afternoon in 1824, Sylvia slipped away from the cabin and vanished into the woods.
The Rev. Edward Brown, who was 9 when Sylvia disappeared, recalled decades later how his father, Judge Frederick Brown, had participated in the search.
“The family ran out, but could not find her,” Brown wrote in 1875. “They and the neighbors searched for her all night, and in the morning, horseback couriers were sent to all in the region for three or four miles around.”
A light snow fell overnight and trackers found a faint set of footprints leading southwest — toward present-day Woodland and Highland avenues — but the morning sun melted the trail.
The search expanded to woods in Sharon, Copley, Norton and Chippewa. The Beach family’s hopes diminished with each passing day.
In April, villagers decided to make one final push to find Sylvia. Commissioner Eyles, an attorney who later was elected state representative and county judge, organized the search and welcomed hundreds of people from near and far.
The horns blared, and the men advanced. They searched the underbrush, checked streams, looked in hollow logs and explored dark recesses of rock formations, but Sylvia Beach was gone without a trace.
“Never was a community more stirred in sympathy for a poor wanderer, and the afflicted family,” Brown wrote. “But search was unavailing. Advertisements were sent to the Ohio Repository and the Cleveland Herald, but no tidings of the lost one or any remains were ever found.”
The family placed a marble tablet at Woodlawn Cemetery in Wadsworth: “Sylvia, daughter of A & R Beach. Lost in the woods April 17, 1824, and never found.” The April date may have been when the family gave up hope. Local history books generally agree that Sylvia vanished in March.
The weather-beaten memorial is still there today, but the original epitaph is barely legible, so the words have been re-carved on the back.
So what happened to Sylvia? She could have been attacked by a wild animal or abducted by a human predator. Perhaps she ran away with an accomplice and made a new life. Or maybe she took shelter in a hiding place that has yet to be found.
After nearly two centuries, the disappearance of Sylvia Beach has become part of local lore. Details of the tragedy inevitably softened over time.
Wadsworth cartoonist Jeff Nicholas and Franklin Elementary Principal Roger Havens teamed up on a 2014 book The Story of Sylvia Beach, a children’s tale about a pioneer girl who wanders into the woods and lives in a friendly bear cave. As part of Wadsworth’s bicentennial celebration, children were invited to search 22 businesses to find “Sylvia Beach or her grizzly bear” for a chance to win prizes.
The truth, undoubtedly, is much sadder.
From his sawmill, Abel Beach cleared the Western Reserve forest — one tree at a time — but he never again saw his daughter.
The woods did not give up their secret.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of the book Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.