Smokey's house

Smokey, of course, is best known as the star of the longest-running public service announcement campaign in American history, cautioning people since 1947 on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service to “remember ... only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

That’s why it’s appropriate that standing behind the giant Smokey at the state fairgrounds is a second icon of Ohio forest management history: the 60-foot Armintrout Fire Tower.

At least 48 fire towers once stood on state, federal, and private lands across the Buckeye State — 39 of which were operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry. The first, Copperhead Fire Tower, was erected at Shawnee State Forest in 1924. The last one in use, Green Ridge at Pike State Forest, closed 56 years later in 1978 as aircraft became more commonly used for wildfire detection.  

The retired Armintrout tower was relocated from Pike County to the state fairgrounds in 2016.

Fire towers are memorable not only for the important purpose they once served, but also for the people they attracted to staff them as lookouts. Years ago, the outdoors humorist Patrick McManus wrote an article for Sports Illustrated titled “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” in which he described the types of people who applied for the federal jobs.

“The experience of the Forest Service suggests that no particular kind of individual is ideally suited to life in a tower suite, and the recruits who show up for training early each summer prove to be a strangely mixed lot: prim lady schoolteachers, college professors, ministers’ wives, loggers, vacationing businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, coeds, honeymooners, old marrieds, beauty queens, students, female truck drivers, ex-marines, and cookie-baking housewives; in short, just about anyone who can shake off the fetters of routine life for three months.”

The candidates also may or may not have possessed much experience or knowledge about the outdoors. For instance, McManus related the story of one fire tower lookout who nervously radioed his supervisor that “big, hairy beasts are ganging up around the foot of my tower.” Going outside for another check, the lookout quickly ran back to the radio yelling, “Now they’re coming up the stairs!” Fearing the worst, the supervisor jumped in his pickup truck and raced to the fire tower, only to find a family of pack rats playing on the lower levels of the stairway.

But there were legitimate dangers. Fire towers were equipped with lightning rods, yet could still be hit by lightning, producing an effect much like sitting inside an exploding bomb. “Rangers consider the first lightning storm as the qualifying exam for their new lookouts,” McManus wrote. “Up to then, they’re amateurs. After it, they’re pros.”  

One particular lookout qualified as a pro during his first night on the job, his tower being struck by lightning nine times! McManus wrote, “Asked if he would like a few days off to pull himself together, the lookout said no, he would stick to his post — an obvious case of shell shock.”