The story
San Toy was a coal boomtown in the hills of Perry County, thrown up around the mines of the Sunday Creek Coal Company in the early 1900s. It was a hard place — men died in its saloons and streets as well as in the mines — but at its height it had a theater, a hospital (the only one ever built in the county), several saloons, stores, and schools, and by the boosters' count as many as 2,500 residents, though the 1920 census recorded closer to a thousand.
The end came fast and ugly. On September 25, 1924, a group of disgruntled miners rolled a coal car loaded with burning railroad ties into a mine; the fire that followed destroyed the theater and the hospital. When the second mine failed in 1927 there was nothing left to hold the town. Between 1920 and 1930 San Toy lost more of its population, per capita, than any other town in the United States, dropping from nearly a thousand people to about 128. In 1931, seventeen of the town's nineteen remaining voters chose to dissolve the municipality.
The woods have taken most of it. The brick skeleton of the one-room jail still stands, with company-store and school foundations nearby.
What remains today
The brick shell of the town jail, plus foundations of the company store and school, scattered in the woods.
Society Pro
San Toy on the old USGS survey, and what the record holds around it
Within five miles the record maps 1 mine shafts, adits and prospect pits, 0 named mineral sites, 14 lost places and 15 cemeteries. Pro puts them on the map with the 1879–1919 survey underneath and a swipe to today.
From the archives
San Toy turns up on 168,198 digitized newspaper pages from Ohio — read them free in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection.
Source: Library of Congress digital collections.
Questions from the field
- Why did San Toy, Ohio disappear?
- A 1924 mine fire set by angry miners destroyed key buildings, and the last mine failed in 1927. The population crashed, and in 1931 the remaining voters dissolved the town.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at San Toy — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
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Credited, dated, and preserved as part of San Toy's permanent record.
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Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1077272
- — Wikipedia — San Toy, Ohio
- — Perry County / Ohio ghost-town histories