A Bottle’s Haunting Trail from Start to “Finnish”
By Cathy Dries
Photo by Tarah Nicole Hoffman.
One of the joys of sea glass hunting is finding the origin of your beach finds. Sometimes you get lucky and have enough clues for a positive identification, and sometimes you have to reach out to the online sea glass community for an assist. This is one such story that starts with a beachcomber in New York who becomes intrigued by a mysterious bottle found by a beachcomber in Illinois. Here’s how an online post resulted in over two years of following clues, with an outcome that no one ever expected.
Photo by Tarah Nicole Hoffman
I was scrolling through Instagram on a late November night in 2021, when I stumbled upon a post of a unique beach-found bottle. Tarah Nicole Hoffman of @transformedbylakemichigan was looking for help identifying a UV bottle that was embossed “Aug. Edwards Ashtabula O.” on one side, and “Suomen Verenpuhdistus” on the other. I love researching finds and I was excited to immediately discover a 1916 Finnish-English cookbook with “Aug. Edwards” on the cover, as well as an August Edwards who was buried in Chestnut Grove Cemetery, Ashtabula, Ohio.
Photo by Tarah Nicole Hoffman
I contacted Tarah and reached out to Carly Llewellyn Ryan of Colorado, who was doing a little sleuthing about the other side of the bottle. The embossed words were indeed Finnish and translated to “Finnish Blood Purification.” That Finnish connection between the cookbook and the wording on the bottle confirmed that I had found the correct August Edwards. Tarah discovered that the identical bottle had been sold online, but other than that, there was absolutely nothing on the Internet mentioning August Edwards.
Cookbook by August Edwards, 1916 (The Internet Archive). Modern version of the same cookbook
I was curious how someone could afford to have their personal name, not a company, embossed on a bottle one hundred years ago. And what was the blood purification for? Certainly not an ingredient for the cookbook bearing his name? And why wasn’t there any other information about this man online? It was as if he were a ghost, which of course kept bringing me back to the only solid lead that I had. This mystery man was lying in a grave in Ashtabula, Ohio. Were there answers there to be uncovered? But what excuse would I have to travel from Long Island, New York, to Ashtabula, Ohio, on what sounded like a wild ghost chase?
A few months later, the opportunity became clear when the North American Sea Glass Association (now ISGA) announced that the location of their 2022 Sea Glass Festival was in Ohio. It was a ten-hour drive from my home, but I had attended the Sea Glass Association festivals every year since 2017. Now, I had an excuse to play Nancy Drew and explore Chestnut Grove Cemetery in search of August Edwards’ headstone. It was just under a three-hour drive from the festival, and I only had to convince my daughter to make a stop on our long drive home. How did I sell a cemetery visit (one of her least favorite haunts) to look for the grave of a man that I had absolutely no connection with and whose name appeared on a bottle found by someone I had never even met? Easy. I told her that there was wonderful beach glass hunting in Ashtabula, and we might as well do a little headstone hunting while we were there. I promised her it would be a quick stop. Or so I thought.
Neither Tarah nor I realized that we were attending the same festival, but we were lucky to meet briefly and reveal our plan to locate the grave of August Edwards. Something about the name Chestnut Grove Cemetery in Ashtabula conjured up a quaint little cemetery in my mind, and for that reason, I neglected to research beyond my expectations.
Chestnut Grove Cemetery, Ashtbula (Cathy Dries). Public records from Chestnut Grove Cemetery showing August Edwards’ interment
When my daughter and I finally arrived at the cemetery on May 23, 2022, we were completely caught off guard by the enormity of this hauntingly beautiful place. Undaunted, we started driving around the old winding carriage roads that meandered up a hill. We frequently got out of the van, reminiscent of a tedious episode of Scooby Doo, searching for the name Edwards and hoping to find a family plot. But it was a daunting task. The headstones were not in any chronological order, and we later found out that there are over 18,000 graves. We found one large monument marked “Edwards,” but none of the surrounding markers were engraved August, so we eventually gave up the search as we still had a long trip ahead of us.
I still really can’t explain why this next event happened, but earlier, we had passed two women planting flowers. They were the only people we had seen during the entire time that we explored the cemetery. As we went to leave, their car was approaching, and I suddenly felt compelled to speak to them. I directed my daughter to pull out in front of them to block their car from leaving. She understandably refused, which forced me to jump out of our vehicle and wave their car down as they passed. They started waving back and kept driving until I ran up to their window.
When they stopped, I immediately started spewing the tale of the bottle to these unsuspecting women, explaining why we were roaming the cemetery with a New York license plate. Call it a premonition or an unexplained pull from beyond, but at that very moment, the stars weirdly aligned, and I found myself talking to Rhonda Wright, who not only gave tours at Chestnut Grove Cemetery but was Vice President of the Ashtabula County Historical Society. I chatted with her and her sweet mother, Peggy, while they sat in the car. We exchanged information and Rhonda graciously agreed to help us in our quest.
During that conversation, Peggy asked me if I knew that the cemetery was extremely haunted, which was why she always accompanied her daughter. Fortunately, my daughter, Amy, was not within earshot of the whole “haunted” thing, because she remained in our vehicle after I had crazily flagged down a car in the middle of a cemetery. When we returned to New York, I did find out that Chestnut Grove is considered the most haunted cemetery in Ohio. So maybe it was best that I did not research the cemetery’s history before our visit, or my daughter may have driven right by the entrance.
Back in Ohio, Rhonda began searching the archives at the sexton’s office, which meant slogging through a plethora of thick record books. When she finally found August’s interment entry that summer, she enlisted the help of friends to scour the hillside of the cemetery searching for his headstone. Rhonda located where August should have been buried, but the plots were strangely empty—or so we thought.
August Edwards holding a newspaper (babel.hathitrust.org). Participants in the first meeting of American Finnish newspapermen in Calumet, Michigan, 1898 (digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi). Ashtabula Star Beacon, October 10, 1919
Although the initial online search for August Edwards in 2021 only turned up the Chestnut Grove Cemetery link and the cookbook, I kept periodically searching his name. Then in September 2022, bingo, August’s name suddenly appears in a research blog on “T-Bone Slim,” an American labor activist and songwriter born to Finnish immigrants in Ashtabula, Ohio. August Edwards was mentioned in relation to a newspaper and publishing company in Ashtabula. It had to be our August. The blog contact included researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland, so I emailed them on a whim, not too hopeful after the whole cemetery debacle. I was beyond excited to receive an extensive amount of history on the mysterious August Edwards from Lotta Leiwo, a research assistant from Finland. The summary of information that she sent was gleaned from Finnish sources that I did not have access to.
It turns out that August was the editor of the largest weekly Finnish newspaper in America from 1896 to 1913. It was called The Amerikan Sanomat which is Finnish for “The American Times.” I also learned that August owned a publishing company, which explained his name on the cookbook that I had found online months before. Apparently, August was also selling a diverse variety of goods ranging from violins to electric insoles to massage machines through his newspaper ads, but the most exciting product to see was Suomen Verenpuhdistus, the Finnish Blood Purification bottle. And better yet, August had published an ad for a free test bottle of the elixir that could be acquired by sending five cents for shipping with a letter addressed to “Aug. Edwards, Ashtabula, Ohio.”
Those were the exact words embossed on one side of the bottle that Tarah had found. I then asked Tarah to fill her bottle in Illinois with water, and sure enough, it held less than 2 oz. Based on this new information, I believe that Tarah’s bottle is most likely one of those advertised test bottles. This could also explain why it ended up just outside of Chicago. Even more interesting was reading the testimonials found in his newspaper ads for the product. It seems that August’s Finnish Blood Purification could cure heartburn, pimples, mange, itching, and anthrax. It was touted as a cure for diseases caused by “bad blood” in gunmen. Although the ingredients of Suomen Verenpuhdistus still remain a mystery to me, it was most likely a plant-based, homemade remedy that was prevalent across homes in America during that time.
It was so exciting to solve the mystery of the bottle, but one thing remained unclear. August Edwards was a prominent man in his local community with major contributions in journalism, publishing, and business. He even started the first Finnish school in Ashtabula and was appointed by the U.S. Treasury Department to serve as an interpreter in Quebec, where his fluency in six languages was an asset. So how is it that August Edwards, a man with a family, a man of stature, a man of financial means, was buried in an unmarked grave?
August died suddenly on October 10, 1919, from “apoplexy” according to his death certificate, most likely due to a stroke. He left behind a wife, Alice, and his only son, Malcolm Wallace. However, as I delved further into documents sent to me by Rhonda Wright, I sadly realized that August’s wife died from bronchial pneumonia a mere three months later. She was buried in Chestnut Grove with her husband, but where? Was their passing so close together the reason why there was no headstone? But what about their only son, Malcolm Wallace? I learned that he served in the military in World War I, so perhaps he was abroad and could not tend to arrangements after tragically losing both his parents. Further research revealed that Malcolm was not buried with his parents in Ashtabula. He died in 1964 and was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia, so my theories remained unanswered.
But there was one thing that I knew for sure. After years of serendipitous events and history revealed, I knew that a headstone had to be created for this accomplished man. After all, the community of Ashtabula had no record of his contributions. That’s when Tarah agreed to help me with a fundraiser for a double headstone for the married couple. We knew that our beachcombing community would support this historical project that stemmed from a beach-found bottle. I began working by phone with Lauri Haines Allen of Haines Memorial in Ohio on this project, but just like the rest of this journey, there were more twists ahead.
Halfway through the fundraising efforts, Haines Memorial discovered that August’s original plot number was incorrect. All the interment records were handwritten back then in enormous books. The antique binders are slowly falling apart, and as a result, the pages do not always line up. Luckily, there are other handwritten sources to cross reference the records. That’s when Haines Memorial located headstones for August and Alice Edwards, side by side, at Chestnut Grove Cemetery, waiting for us to find them. After the initial shock, we became excited with this turn of events. We had not yet raised enough for the double headstone, but now we had the funds to create a bronze memorial plaque for August’s marker, with at least some of his extensive résumé that had been hidden for 100 years.
Left, left to right: Amy Dries, Tarah Nicole Hoffman, Cathy Dries, Lauri Haines Allen, and Rhonda Wright at Chestnut Grove Cemetery (Mark Hoffman). Center: Memorial plaque (Amy Dries). Top right: Tarah donating the beach-found bottle to Rhonda Wright of the Ashtabula County Historical Society (Amy Dries). Bottom right: Rhonda Wright with the bottle and a reprinted copy of the cookbook published by August Edwards, which was gifted to the museum for exhibit
On June 22, 2024, an amazing meeting took place. It was one that I had often envisioned but never dreamed would come to fruition. Amy and I drove over 500 miles back to Chestnut Grove Cemetery. Tarah Nicole Hoffman and her husband Mark drove all night from Illinois and were there to greet us. Rhonda Wright, whom I had first met when I flagged down her car two years ago in that same cemetery, and who had spent hours helping me research, was also there. Lotta Leiwo, the researcher in Finland who opened my eyes to information that was waiting to be found in Finland’s records, was there in spirit. And Lauri Haines Allen, who helped me navigate creating a historical memorial project for a total stranger, took time from her busy schedule to join us. And August’s bottle was there…small, simple, and chipped, but what a big impact it had on our lives.
Tarah ceremoniously passed the bottle to Rhonda, as it will become a permanent part of an August Edwards exhibit at the local museum in Ashtabula, which will also be funded by the generosity of our beachcombing community.
You never know where a beach find will take you. It can bring you down a haunting trail of historical discoveries and mysterious surprises. It can guide you to lifelong memories and unexpected friendships. In my case, all of this is true. A little bottle from Ohio, found by a beachcomber in Illinois, intrigued this beachcomber in New York. And now, thanks to a coordinated team effort of dedicated women, and perhaps with a little help from beyond, that little bottle has found its way home to Ohio.
This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 44 September/October 2024
