State Route 571 has been designated the least traveled road in Ohio by Geotab using data from the government’s Highway Performance Monitoring System. In this second part of this two-part story on the loneliest road in Ohio, Renee Wilde picks up the story in the former prairie land around West Milton, and ends up at the Ohio border in Union City.
Originally a series of roads that connected Union City to Springfield, State Route 571 coalesced into one road known as state route 71 by 1939.
When Ohio renumbered state highways that shared route numbers with the new Interstate system in 1962, State Route 71 became 571.
In 1912 when SR 571 was just a series of dirt roads, travelers could drive through remnants of the original tall grass prairies that extended into Ohio. Bison and Elk were keystone species that would have roamed these prairies.
You can still see these majestic animals today driving along SR 571 outside of West Milton at Miami Valley Elk and Bison.
Owner Gail Shoup said that he started the ranch about 25 years ago.
“And I’m not even really a farmer, quite frankly,” Gail laughed, looking over the herd of bison in an enclosure surrounded by a tall fence. “But I’ve always enjoyed hunting and so forth and I enjoyed the elk.”
It’s not unusual to see Bison grazing in farm fields along Ohio’s roadways. The lean meat has become a popular alternative to beef for consumers.
But elk?
“Ohio, believe it or not, we’ve got 3 or 4 elk ranches,” Gail said. “This group I got from Nebraska. The females here, I think I bought 14 of them and the rest of them was (sic) born on this farm.”
Right now, Gail has 40 elk and around 13 bison but he has had as many as 100 elk in the past.
“I sold out a couple years ago for a short period of time and I no more sold out then I decided ‘now why did I do that?’ I liked those animals so well,” Gail recalled. “So I ended up buying more, and so we’re building our elk herd back up.”
Gail owns farmland on both sides of state route 571 and is not convinced that this is the loneliest road in Ohio.
“I would question that, especially since West Milton is expanding this way,” he said.
You can see that expansion from his farm, where a large subdivision of houses are being built a stone's throw away.
“It’s kind of the corridor between Dayton and Tipp City, and then Greenville - they head up 571 to Greenville,” he said of the traffic flowing up and down the rural roadway in front of his farm.
“Now during the day there’s not a great amount of traffic, but boy, in the evening there’s times I sit out here at the end of the driveway for three or four minutes trying to get out on the roads,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem like the loneliest road, (laughs) but I could be wrong,” Gail added, with a hearty laugh.”
Thriving business on the edge
Robin Jones owns the Thrifty Treasures Thrift Shop on state route 571 on the edge of Union City.
Jones pointed out the window to a highway sign about 50 feet from the former Dairy Queen turned thrift store. “See that sign out there, that starts 571,” she said.
Her mother Pat, however, thinks that state route 571 keeps going for a couple more blocks into town and ends at the state line, which included the house she has lived in for 45 years.
“This was a Dairy Queen and we bought the Dairy Queen,” Pat said. “We lived out on the Indiana side and then a year later in ‘78 we bought that house right down the street.”
When the Dairy Queen shut down, her daughter Robin repurposed the building.
“I said ‘you know what, I like to rummage sale. I think I can do something with that’”, she said laughing. “So I turned it into a thrift store”
Robin has the thrift store listed on Google search, which has increased the amount of customers finding their way to the quirky thrift store on the edge of town.
“I think it’s gotten just a little bit more busier in the last couple years, since 2020, because people are traveling more,” she said, watching a customer who was from out of town browse the store. “I meet all kinds of different people, that they say they travel the back road, so I’ve noticed an increase in traffic, yeah.”
The large plate glass windows of the store offer a panoramic view of 571 coming out of town, where it gently curves just before vanishing out of sight into the Ohio countryside.
As a car comes by Robin counted off, ‘One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.”
Robin said “ I call this three seconds into your life. Anybody that goes by, if I’m sitting here I can see what happens in your life for three seconds.”
“And I could tell you some of the things I’ve seen,” she laughed
