In the Shadow of Zoar: The 1947 Murder of John Myers, Part One

From a life of hard labor to a mysterious death outside a quiet tavern, the story of John Myers unravels a forgotten Tuscarawas County tragedy.

John Russell Lee Myers (1892-1947), who occasionally went by the name Russell or Lee, was born in Pine Grove, West Virginia in 1892. His father, William H. Myers (1861-?), was a farmer and farm laborer and married a woman named Hester Masters (1861-?) around 1880. John did not see much of school; he attended only until he reached the third grade or so. When he was seventeen years old, and claimed he was nineteen, he married Clarisa Ellen Campbell (1886-1972), often called Clara, in Calhoun, West Virginia.

John and Clara found themselves in Wetzel County, West Virginia by the time John registered for the draft for World War One. While he gave his occupation as that of a farmer on the registration, it was likely that he was there to find work in the gas and oil industry that had blossomed in the county during the previous twenty years. There is no evidence that John served in the military during World War One and where the family spent the census year of 1920 is still in question. They were, however, back in West Virginia in 1922 when they welcomed their first, and only, child.

The couple relocated to Washington County, Pennsylvania where they were recorded in the 1930 census. John worked as a coal loader in one of the local coal mines and the family lived in the community of Crescent Heights near modern Centerville. The family relocated again before the 1940 census, this time to Washington County, Ohio and the small community of Grandview along the Ohio River. John Myers worked at that time for the Works Progress Administration on a road building crew with his recently married daughter’s husband.

When World War Two began, John Myers’ son-in-law found work with a Stark County, Ohio construction company and the two families eventually relocated to Bolivar in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Once there, John Myers found work on a farm near Zoar, Ohio where he was recorded as working when he registered for the draft during World War Two. His son-in-law, later that decade, found work in a Stark County steel mill to help him provide for his and Myers’s daughter’s large family.

Around the same time that his son-in-law started his job at the steel plant, John Myers found employment with the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad. The railroad employed John as a flagman on one of their bridge building/repairing gangs that worked along the railroad’s lines in Stark and Tuscarawas County. The days were long and the work was hard but John Myers, now nearing 60 years old, worked hard his entire life.

It was just after a long, hard day working that John Myers, on his way home to Bolivar, decided to stop at a Zoar Tavern to buy some tobacco just before 7:00 pm on November 19, 1947. Whether John noticed the idling green sedan, an Oldsmobile or Buick model, sitting in the parking lot is impossible to know. John went inside, purchased his tobacco with a $5 dollar bill, and then left to return to his car in the tavern parking lot. Thirty minutes later, and after a furious car chase, John Myers’s body was found in a ditch 30 feet from the tavern door. How he died was clear, but who killed him was unknown.

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© Noel B. Poirier, 2025