64

JUST CALL US
KIN-CINNATI

OVER THE PAST 150

YEARS, THE SECRETIVE
FAMILIES OF SCOTTISH
AND IRISH TRAVELERS
DEVELOPED AN
UNBREAKABLE BOND
WITH CINCINNATI.

ILLUSTRATION BY BY
ZACHARY LAURIE
GHADERI PIKE

65

Since the
late 1800s,
local law enforcement and media
warned of the springtime “invasion”
of nomadic peddlers, fortune tellers,
and tinsmiths from all over the nation.
Curious in customs, speech, and dress,
the visitors rode into town in barrel-
shaped horse-drawn wagons; camped
along the Mill Creek in Northside,
Carthage, and Lockland; and cooked
on open fires.
66
They came to swindle residents,
said the warnings, divide up territory
for organized crime, and possibly steal
children. (They needed the babies, you
see, to breed into their gene pool, which
was perverted by intermarriage.) As
railroads were built, they began ship-
ping their dead here for burials.
What sounds like a crackpot fable
has a few surprising kernels of truth
and astonishing staying power. You
may have heard of the “Gypsy funer-
als” in Spring Grove Cemetery and Ar-
boretum over Memorial Day weekend,
or even seen for yourself the oversized
floral displays laid at the foot of red
granite gravestones. Maybe you re-
member the Cincinnati Business Cou-
rier, from 2009 through 2016, using
the relative modesty or copiousness
of what the paper called “gaudy” floral
displays as bellwethers indicating the
general economy’s direction.
Perhaps you are unaware of the tra-
dition, as many locals are. Either way,
it’s a thing. A misunderstood thing.
About 400 of these nomads come
through Cincinnati annually, according
to past police figures. (Cincinnati Police
officials did not respond to requests for
updated information.) Prior to World
War II, their presence was more visible.
In clothing more starkly different from
ours than it is today, they would draw
water from public pumps and bring it
back to campsites observable from the
road. They were called Gypsies then,
and often still are today.
The first thing to know about these
“Gypsies” is that they aren’t gypsies
in the traditional sense. The second
thing to know is that gypsy is a pejora-
tive word, offensive to those more ac-
curately known as Travelers (who are
mainly indigenous to the British Isles)
or Rom, Roma, or Romany (originat-
ing two millennia ago in India). The
third thing: Whatever you’ve heard
about Travelers in Cincinnati is sec-
ond-hand information, including this
article. Because, importantly, fourth:
Travelers do not talk to outsiders.
In the U.S., many Travelers, whose
numbers are unknown, maintain cus-
toms such as making large purchases
 nation to send BLOOM TOWN Cincinnati has become home base
for a good many Irish and Scottish Travelers, who meet
children to high up in the spring to bury and honor their dead at two

Most U.S. Travelers are school, and a be- local cemeteries.

lief that outsid-

Christian. Quite a lot of them ers are “unclean.”

cleave to practices that keep By defini-

tion, Travelers
them intentionally separate move—though

from mainstream society. less so in the

with cash and working as psychics or
mobile repairmen. It’s not a monolithic
culture, of course. Many descendants
P H OTO G R A P H S P R OV I D E D BY T H E N E C R O TO U R I S T / T N T I M AG E S ( C ) 2 0 2 1 . P H OTO G R A P H S BY C H A R G R AV E S
U.S. than else-
where. They’re
m o re u n d e r-
the-radar here, especially compared to
their more impoverished and perse-
cuted European counterparts. As the

of Travelers are indistinguishable from diaspora continues to span the globe,

the average Joe. Others are more quietly
Old World, similar in many ways to the
more traditional Roma.
Cincinnati has its share of Rom
residents and visitors, but Travelers
are more numerous here. To split a
hair, the Scottish and Irish Travelers
who circle through Cincinnati are for
the most part not Rom or have little
Rom blood from intermarriage. But
they’ll often have lifestyle likenesses
with Roma, the result of a similar itin-
erant life.
Most Travelers in the U.S. are
Christian. Like fundamentalists or
cult members, though, quite a lot of
them cleave to practices that keep
them intentionally separate from
“gadje,” or non-Roma: intermarriage,
restrictive cleansing rituals, a marked
difference in gender roles, a disincli-
Cincinnati stands as an unexpected
yet important locus for those based
in the U.S. It isn’t just a regular stop
in their journeys—it’s the national
headquarters for many.
“You could say Cincinnati is a
temporary capital,” says podcast host
Sam Biagetti. The most popular of the
140 episodes of his Historiansplaining
show is about Travelers.
Baby-stealers or colorful bohemi-
ans? There’s an idealized view of itin-
erant people. They are exoticized as
flamenco dancers and music-makers,
carefree ramblers living off the grid.
They eschew “homogenous Netflix
culture,” as Biagetti puts it. They are
not losers who can’t afford homes,
but modern hunter-gatherers whose
closeness to extended family provides
a connectedness that gadje sorely
yearn for. They inspired the #vanlife
and #gypset brands of on-the-go chic.
Reality is somewhere in between.
“They’re different,” Robert Winter
says of the Travelers who have patron-
ized St. Joseph New Cemetery in Price
Hill since 1872. The Gorman and Ham-
ilton surnames reign, with some 350
plots between them. “They always pay
in cash. Two or three guys will come
in and pull out rolls of $100 bills,” says
Winter, who, as general manager of the
Catholic cemetery, has served Travel-
ers for more than 40 years. “They try
to outdo each other with monuments.
There’s a black faceted one with gold
lettering, and so CONTINUED ON PAGE 102

67
JUST CALL US KIN-CINNATI
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 67
JUST CALL US
KIN-CINNATI
OVER THE PAST 150
YEARS, THE SECRETIVE
FAMILIES OF SCOTTISH
AND IRISH TRAVELERS
DEVELOPED AN
UNBREAKABLE BOND
WITH CINCINNATI.
ILLUSTRATION BY
ZACHARY
GHADERI
64
last year a 10-foot slab went up.”
One grave was recently festooned with
floral sculptures depicting a Chicago Cubs
logo and a pair of white horses. At the
cemetery entrance on Rapid Run Road is
a 6-foot disc, evoking a wagon wheel, in-
scribed “Gorman’s.” The apostrophe may
be a grammatical error, but it could also be
seen as intentional; the extended family
occupies a good chunk of real estate here,
more than 500 plots.
“Bernie Hamilton is the person we deal
with, their leader,” says Winter. “He’s a
big, strong guy with meat-cleaver hands.
WHY POKE INTO THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO WANT TO REMAIN
ANONYMOUS? IT’S AN IMPORTANT PART OF CINCINNATI
HISTORY THAT’S BEEN TOLD INACCURATELY.
One time about 25 years ago we were fin-
ishing business in the office and one of the
younger boys came in and peeled a $100 bill
off the pile, put it in his pocket and walked
off. The next day, Bernie hauled the kid in
by the ear and made him give it back. He
told the kid, Apologize! These people have
been good to us!” (Hamilton, a 75-year-old
roofing contractor in Oswego, Illinois, ac-
cording to his Facebook profile, did not re-
turn phone calls. Messages to several other
members of the Gorman family also went
unanswered.)
Why poke into the lives of those who
want to remain anonymous? I woke up in
the middle of the night with this ques-
tion, posed by a man who does business
with Travelers but declined to go on the
record. It’s an important part of Cincinnati
history, I told him, a chapter that’s been
told inaccurately. Another reason is that
the Travelers’ quietness has left a void in
1 0 2 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M M AY 2 0 2 2
the public sphere that gets filled by ru-
mors and what scraps of information we
do have. Most of the factual records are
crime reports. What doesn’t get notated
is the significant economic and societal
benefit of their presence here.
The story I originally hoped for was
not to be. The Travelers would not take
BY
LAURIE
PIKE
the mic and speak for themselves. A single
65
one allowed an interview on condition I
not use his real name. I have instead relied
on conversations with historians, law en-
forcement, and those who do business with
Travelers supplemented with information
from books, scholarly research, documen-
taries, message boards, and news reports.
WE KNOW THEM BEST FROM THEIR BURI-
als. The wayfarers return to Cincinnati
faithfully, shipping bodies of loved ones
across multiple states. Many in these
dynasties have no other relationship to
the city. And while many aspects of the
Traveler lifestyle have changed over the
decades—shifting from covered wagons
to luxury cars, life on the road to settled
existence, floor-length dresses to mini-
skirts—Cincinnati’s importance as the
gathering place remains constant.
The Irish Travelers hold 15-minute
graveside funerals instead of the church
services of yore. They come throughout
the year, not on one appointed holiday as
the Scottish do. They don’t dress up for
the occasion. “The men are in T-shirts
and jeans, and the young women are of-
ten, um, inappropriately dressed,” Winter
says. “There’s never a problem with them.
But they do drink a lot. They drink be-
fore, after, and sometimes during the ser-
vice. If it starts at 11, they’ll show up at
the cemetery at 10 and will be here until 2
or 3 in the afternoon.” Fights have broken
out, and once a family member stole the
car of another. The Crow’s Nest bar, near
the cemetery, often becomes the site of a
days-long wake.
On the other side of town at Spring
Grove Cemetery in Spring Grove Village,
Scottish Travelers, who are mainly Prot-
estant (and increasingly Pentecostal), bury
and honor their loved ones each Memorial
Day weekend. Julie Niesen, a Cincinnati
writer and small business owner, makes a
point of strolling through on that holiday
to catch a glimpse. “What struck me was
the children’s graves, where they still place
kid-themed floral arrangements,” she says.
“One kid had been gone 40 or 50 years,
and there was a brand new Shrek-themed
arrangement. That melted even my cold,
cynical heart.”
Barbara Osterbrock Loukes, a florist,
is another longtime observer of Scottish
Travelers. She grew up riding her bike
through Spring Grove. “I thought, Man,
these people spend a lot on flowers!” Now
they’re her clients. At Osterbrock Florist
in North College Hill, she arranges blooms
in baskets and on easels and places them
at Spring Grove, predominantly in section
17. The graves bear the surnames Johnston,
Stewart, Halliday, Horne, Reid, Gregg,
Keith, Williamson, Burns, and McDonald.
(It’s important to note that not everyone
interred at Spring Grove with those names
is a Traveler.)
“We do a lot of placing by death year
because there are 100 Virginia Stewarts,”
says Loukes. “It’s very confusing.” (Trav-
elers and Roma are known for repeating
names within families, even giving mul-
tiple siblings the same name, and referring
to kin by their nicknames.) Memorial Day,
she says, “is like their Christmas. It’s their
big holiday. They put out lawn chairs and
visit with each other.”
Loukes knows it’s one of the clan on the
phone when orders start up in the spring.
“They all talk alike, no matter where they
come from,” she says. “It’s a thick accent.
I can’t describe it. They talk very fast
and over you and over each other. They
repeat themselves a lot, some of them.”
Loukes’s associate, Heather McGuire,
adds, “They’re very warm. When you fin-
ish a conversation, they’ll say, Love you!”
Williamson is the best known Scot-
tish Traveler name. The family was the
inspiration for the 1997 movie Traveller,
starring Bill Paxton and Mark Wahlberg as
JUST CALL US KIN-CINNATI
con men from a tribe that lives in a jumble
of mobile homes in the woods. The fre-
quency of the scams said to be operated
by them—shoddy contracting, selling
fake Irish lace—led to them being dubbed
the “Terrible Williamsons” by Newsweek
in 1956. The moniker stuck, repeated in
publications as established as The Satur-
day Evening Post. The Newsweek article, a
journalistic “patient zero,” seeded sub-
sequent reports. Its exaggerations about
the extent of the roving family’s purported
crimes were debunked in the academic
Journal of American Culture in 1997, but the
words had been printed four decades prior,
and they spread. It may have been correct,
however, when the piece called Cincinnati
the family’s “command post.”
“The Williamsons first arrived in Cin-
cinnati in the 1800s,” says Dennis Mar-
lock, a retired lieutenant detective from
the Milwaukee Police Department. “Rob-
ert Williamson started luring other Trav-
elers to the U.S. by saying, There’s a sea of
“MY FRIENDS AND CLIENTS DON’T KNOW I’M A GYPSY,” SAYS
A LOCAL TRAVELER WHO DIDN'T WANT TO BE NAMED IN THIS
STORY. “I COULD LOSE BUSINESS.”
gullible marks here.” In the 1990s, Marlock
developed a seminar to teach cops how to
combat crimes associated with Travel-
ers and Roma. (Such profiling still takes
place; a training session like Marlock’s
was scheduled for this month in Kansas
City until accusations of bias forced it to
be cancelled.)
Marlock believes Roma and Travelers
are “organized crime,” but he allows a cave-
at. “They were doing roofing and driveway
scams, but sometimes they did good work,”
he says. “They were capable of that.”
Is the rate of crime by Travelers any
higher than that of the general public? It’s
impossible to say, since Traveler identity
isn’t captured by demographic studies or
the U.S. Census. What isn’t questioned
is that crimes by Travelers are, by a wide
margin, nonviolent, and that police ha-
rassment of Travelers has been rife. It
began with evicting them from campsites
1 0 4 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M M AY 2 0 2 2
and escalated to barring them from liv-
ing in certain cities or states—in essence,
from existing.
Some of those laws have only recently
been struck from the books. Cincinnati
Police no longer videotape Travelers at
funerals and follow them back to their ho-
tels from the cemetery—something they
boasted of doing in the 1980s—but last
year the Mariemont Police issued a public
warning about scams by “gypsies.” I called
to ask when the last such complaint was
reported. The answer: Eleven years ago.
Stan Davies knows from profiling and
harassment. The 70-year-old is typical of
Travelers living in Ohio. A descendant of
English immigrants who settled in Dayton
in 1855, he has Indian and Anatolian genes,
traces of the peregrinations of his Rom an-
cestors. He grew up with some aspects of
Rom culture but has always lived a settled
life. He looks and sounds like any other
middle-aged Buckeye. Like some Travel-
ers, he still uses the G-word. (Stan Davies
is not his real name; he requested ano-
nymity to speak freely. “My friends and
clients don’t know I’m a Gypsy,” he says.
“I could lose business.”)
“We were always taught not to wash
our hair or wash a baby in the kitchen
sink,” says Davies. It’s a watered-down
particular of Roma cleaning practices,
which also involve laundering women’s
clothing separately from men’s. His grand-
mother would make “gypsy” bread, which
is pan-fried and unleavened, a vestige of
campfire cooking. In a common Traveler
tradition of communal family support,
he learned home improvement trades and
turned over his entire paycheck to his fa-
ther well into his twenties. Davies bristles
at the characterization of Travelers as
rip-off artists. “I am a licensed painting
contractor,” he says. “We have an A+ rating
with the Better Business Bureau.”
Still, the police seminars started by
Dennis Marlock “would super-criminalize
us,” he says. “The police would say, Be on the
lookout for Gypsies. [Traveler] families who
may have been there for years would be ter-
rorized. People were encouraged not to pay
Gypsies for legitimate work.”
THE FIRST PROMINENT TRAVELER TO
call Cincinnati home was John Gorman,
who emigrated from County Cavan, Ire-
land, in the mid-1800s. Living on Dirr
Street, just steps from the Mill Creek in
what’s now South Cumminsville, he was
friends with Charles A. Miller, whose
eponymous funeral home sat at the corner
of Hamilton Avenue and Knowlton Street
in Northside. They were both Civil War
veterans and horse-traders. Gorman’s
achievements—he ran a rodeo!—were
documented in The Enquirer and The Penny
Paper, precursor to The Cincinnati Post. His
stature made him a beacon for family far
and wide.
The origins of the Scottish Travel-
ers here are less evident. There are more
families, and they’re less cohesively re-
lated. How did they come to patronize
Spring Grove? Oft told is the story that
a Traveler child passing through North-
side was killed by a horse carriage or a
street car. The family could not afford a
burial, but Miller offered to take care of it
on credit (or for free; versions differ). The
interment was at Spring Grove Cemetery,
so the story goes. Word of the kindness
spread in the wandering communities, and
the gesture was repaid with more than a
century’s worth of repeat business to both
Miller and Spring Grove. (A Spring Grove
representative said the cemetery does not
comment on clients.)
It’s a heartwarming tale, so it’s too bad
that it may not be true. It emerged in a
1990 essay by Paul Erwin, a late Univer-
sity of Cincinnati professor, who said he
learned it from Pete Miller, the last relative
of Charles A. Miller to be involved in the
business. But Erwin’s telling of the story
doesn’t include any benevolence on the
part of Spring Grove; it was the funeral
home that made the grand gesture.
Although there’s a slim possibility
the tale is accurate, there is no corrobora-
tion of it anywhere and no mention of it
in a century’s worth of pre-1990 media
coverage of Travelers. Subsequent rep-
etitions and looseness in the press of
Erwin’s original words created a game
of “telephone,” conflating the two es-
tablishments. (In fact, Erwin said the
child’s name was Gorman, in which case
he or she would have most likely been
interred at St Joseph.)
The selection of Spring Grove is
probably less due to the cinematic fate
of an unlucky child and more to the
cemetery’s proximity to the Mill Creek
camping spots and the Northside of-
ferings within walking distance: horse-
trading, wagon-making, a water pump,
and the undisputed home for Traveler
funeral services, Charles A. Miller.
Spring Grove was also nondenomina-
tional, something novel in the 1800s.
Widening the lens from Spring
Grove to the city of Cincinnati, geo-
graphic centrality is the most logical
reason this area became the home-
away-from-home for Travelers. It
made a convenient meeting point for
people edging North in summer and
South in winter. As Traveler families
multiplied and dispersed across the
nation, an agreed-upon time and place
for reunions helped maintain customs
and relationships. The wakes that an-
chor the gatherings are only one part
of the events: They were (and are) an
occasion to announce engagements,
arrange marriages for the next genera-
tion (that still happens), and—as law
enforcement has it—divide up territory
for “business.”
Many Traveler women still tell for-
tunes, modernizing their profession’s
name to “psychic reader” or “spiritual
advisor.” As for the scams and swindles,
yes, they’ve happened. The Cincinnati
chapter of the Better Business Bureau,
which decades ago regularly warned of
Traveler visits, now says it has no re-
cords of recent reports. What is likely—
but never mentioned—is that the Trav-
elers have poured way more money into
Cincinnati’s economy than they’ve ever
pulled out. Monuments, cemetery plots,
flowers, hotels, restaurants…it adds up.
Chances are great you have come in
contact with a Traveler, done business
with one, or are acquainted with one,
who, like Stan Davies, never told you of
their heritage. In this era of self-reve-
lation, identity pride, and “connected-
ness,” why don’t we hear more about
FOLLOW
this subculture? “My grandfather said
that if everybody knows your business,
you don’t have any business,” says Da-
vies. “Hold your cards close to your
chest. Love all, trust few.”
Observers of the clans say it’s only a
matter of time before its more extreme
differences fizzle out. “There are chang-
es in the wind,” says Dennis Marlock.
“Because of the internet, it’s getting
harder to keep the culture together. The
US
kids can see life outside what they’ve
been told their whole lives is the best
life on the planet.”
Perhaps. But modern communica-
tion methods were said to be degrading
the colorful culture more than a century
ago. “They are getting used to the tele-
graph more and more everyday,” reports
an 1897 newspaper article. “Poetically
inclined persons may agree with the
old-school Romany that this innova-
tion is a regrettable one, but the conve-
nience of the wire appeals to the young
gypsy.” The Enquirer lamented in 1902
that “the romance of gypsy life is really
fast disappearing” because of the auto-
mobile. The Post, in 1976, announced,
“Gypsies are, shockingly, becoming
homeowners.”
Death customs, though, have not
changed. Both Robert Winter, at St. Jo-
seph New Cemetery, and Barbara Os-
terbrock Loukes, who services clients
at Spring Grove, say business is as brisk
as ever. A culture that’s been dirt poor,
undereducated, and persecuted for two
millennia—yet continues to thrive and
maintain a semblance of ancestral ways—
isn’t easily obliterated by Facebook.
“They would have disappeared long
ago if there was not a viable niche and
demand for what they have to offer in
society,” says historian Biagetti. “Trav-
elers and the settled majority are not
opposites that cannot reconcile. They
are two sides of the same coin, all part of
the same civilization. I don’t see them
as a holdover from the past. I see them
as part of modern society, just in a dif- @CINCINNATIMAGAZINE
ferent role from others.”
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