Taylorsville sits along the Great Miami River just north of Dayton, off US-40 in Vandalia. It is a Five Rivers MetroParks property split across four entrances, plus a dam, a bike path, and the site of a vanished town. The East Park alone has more than 8 miles of trail.

I did the East, North and South parks and skipped the West. The East Park is the one worth your time.

What you need to know

• Where: East Park is at 2101 US-40, Vandalia. North Park is 2005 US-40 and South Park is 2000 US-40. West Park is somewhere else entirely, at 1200 Brown School Road.
• What I hiked: the East Park loop, about 4.75 miles in roughly 2 hours
• The Yellow and Orange Trails: about five miles, with enough incline to get your heart rate up
• Difficulty: moderate. Real inclines, lots of switchbacks, stone stairs, roots and rocks.
• Cost: free
• Parking: several lots across the park sections
• Restrooms: at almost every parking lot. The one on the Yellow Trail was gross and had no light in it, which is a problem because it is genuinely dark in there at 8am.
• Cell reception: fine
• Crowds: I was the only car in the East Park lot
• Trails through here: the Buckeye Trail and the North Country Trail both pass through. The Buckeye is a 1,440-mile loop around Ohio.

The background

This was once one of the busiest crossroads in the country.

A village called Tadmor stood here, and four major transportation routes met within yards of each other: the Great Miami River, the Old National Road, the Miami-Erie Canal and the Dayton & Michigan Railroad. The canal reached Tadmor by 1837 and the National Road came through in the 1830s. The canal itself was hand-dug, took twenty years, and when it was finished in 1845 it connected the Ohio River at Cincinnati to Lake Erie at Toledo.

Everybody expected Tadmor to grow into something. It never did, because the Great Miami kept flooding it.

The great flood of 1913 was the end of it. The Miami Conservancy District built the Taylorsville Dam in response, finishing it in 1922, and rerouted US-40 across the top. The dam is what finally made the site uninhabitable. The thing built to stop the flooding is what actually finished the town off.

When I went, and how it was

The East Park lot is right next to the road and it smelled bad. It only lasts about a quarter mile though, and then it is gone, so do not let it turn you around at the start. You can hear the traffic from the lot too.

You never get away from the sound. Traffic, trains and planes, the whole hike. There is a working rail line and an airport nearby and you are a few miles from the highway. Even sitting down by the river you can hear the hum of it. You do not forget you are near a city out here.

That said, it is still peaceful, and the trail itself is easy to follow.

The stone staircases are the best part. There are a lot of them and they make the whole thing feel like a secret pathway through the woods. There is a CCC shelter in the East Park, so my guess is the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stairs too, though I have not confirmed that.

There was a cornfield where I expected a river. I came down to the bottom of the trail thinking I would be walking alongside the water, and instead there was a wide dried-out channel with corn growing down the middle of it. Very strange thing to walk up on.

There is a reason for it. Taylorsville is a dry dam, one of five the Miami Conservancy District built after the 1913 flood. It holds no permanent pool of water, so the basin behind it stays dry except during a flood, and the land in it gets farmed the rest of the time.

There is a good rocky spot down by the river where I sat for a while. Worth stopping.

The other sections

South Park: parking, picnic areas, and a nice dam you can fish from. Not much else.

North Park: this is where you want to park if Tadmor is the goal. The Tadmor trail technically starts from the south, but parking north saves you walking extra for no reason. From the north lot you can reach it on the paved bike path or on a hiking trail that runs about twenty feet into the woods alongside it. The strip of ground between those two trails looks like where the canal used to run.

On the Buckeye Trail around 10:30 in the morning, I walked into every spiderweb in Ohio. Clearly nobody had been through ahead of me. I thought about taking the paved path back just to escape them, and then walked straight into another one. At one point a spider ended up on my arm and I yelled like a little girl. I hope nobody on the bike path heard it.

Tadmor itself was underwhelming. I was expecting something still standing. What is actually there is two posts telling you this used to be the depot and this used to be another building, plus a bit of damaged canal and bridge. If you are going for ruins, adjust your expectations down.

I never got a good view of the river from the north hiking path either.

What I learned

The East Park is the hike. The rest is not necessary if what you want is an interesting walk in the woods.

The Tadmor section is better on a bike. It is a good paved ride. As a hike it does not give you much.

Park at the north lot for Tadmor. No reason to add distance from the south.

Go later in the day on the Buckeye Trail, or carry a stick, or accept your fate.

Would I go back

I would not go out of my way to come back. But if I lived in the area I think the east trails would be one of my regular spots.

It reminds me a lot of Highbanks — that is Highbanks Metro Park up in Columbus — with a lot of zigzags and inclines.