LICKING COUNTY CVB Visitor Guide Stories
NOVEMBER 12, 2008
Floating Worlds from the Ice Age Past
CRANBERRY BOG
Can an island float? Outside of fantasy novels or science fiction, that is.
On the southern edge of Licking County, a five-mile long arc of water is Ohio’s oldest man-made lake, with an accidentally made marvel bobbing in its midst.
Cranberry Bog is the local name for a vast mat of sphagnum moss and other plants that was lifted as the waters of the Licking Summit Reservoir filled what had been, to early pioneers, the “Great Buffalo Swamp.”
Salt licks and other springs in this highland bog gave the Licking River’s South Fork and the county as a whole its name, but around 1830 the designers of the Ohio & Erie Canal saw a basin that could be dammed and filled to provide passage from the Scioto River drainage below Columbus to the Muskingum River watershed.
As the canal bed was cut, the Northbank was built across the open end of the boggy upland valley, and by 1835 the reservoir was a lake.
But in one area, now along the north-central shore of Buckeye Lake, the bog material rose up, holding a tenuous connection in the shallow waters through roots systems to the now-lakebed below. This mat of material still shelters pitcher plants (the kind that “eat” insects!), sedges and grasses more common nearer to Hudson’s Bay today — and, of course, cranberries.
Since becoming Ohio’s first state park in 1949, Buckeye Lake has tried to shelter this fragile ecosystem from the growth of vacation cottages and the wakes of powerboats passing nearby. Each major windstorm slices a chunk or two off the edge, and there are less than twenty acres left to visit. Perhaps someday there will be no more.
The state allows a day each June to visit, limited to 400 by lottery, and other groups by special arrangement with the Greater Buckeye Lake Historical Society (www.buckeyelakehistory.org). An ingenious arrangement of boardwalks and narrow paths allow you to step off a boat onto Cranberry Bog, walk into the heart of this glacial era remnant, and then at your guide’s encouragement, jump just a bit into the air . . .
The ripples you feel beneath your feet when you land confirm that this island is, indeed, floating
* * *
A Homestead for Your Family
LONGABERGER HOMESTEAD
Just east of the Licking County border, after you drive past the famous seven-story tall “basket building” housing the Longaberger Corporation’s home offices in Newark, is the Longaberger Homestead (www.longaberger.com/homestead.aspx).
You may step just across the county line to get there near Frazeysburg, but a huge piece of Licking County history is the anchor of the Homestead experience — the Crawford Barn.
Once a fixture of the north end of Newark, the Crawford family first introduced Belgian and Percheron horse breeds to the Midwest, and to hold these massive creatures they needed a 12,000 square-foot barn, which Col. George Crawford built in 1890.
His grandson, Bert Crawford, donated the majestic structure to Dave Longaberger in 1999, as retail and residential Newark had long since grown awkwardly around the barn’s former location. Over 60% of the 90’-by-54’ barn’s timbers were reused, and skilled local timber framers and Longaberger workers re-erected the six-bay building, added a new wing in the same design, and lovingly resheathed it all as the new rustic heart of the complex of shops and restaurants and factory stores that are “The Homestead.”
In tribute to the barn’s origins, the modern day re-assemblers used a team of Percherons to hoist the main timbers into place on Labor Day weekend of 1999.
Among these buildings, new and old, Longaberger collectors and casual visitors can learn about how hand-made baskets are assembled from start to finish (you can even sign up to make one yourself), eat your fill of good old-fashioned Ohio cooking. And, yes, shoppers can visit the Factory Store to purchase discounted goods.
Sitting just down the road from Dave Longaberger’s hometown of Dresden, The Longaberger Homestead holds seasonal events around major holidays, and hosts events for their consultants and collectors, often in conjunction with “The Place Off the Square,” their hotel in downtown Newark, or with the Longaberger Golf Club in eastern Licking County.
The goal of the Crawford Barn and Longaberger Homestead is “to capture the spirit of our American craft and tradition.” A visit to The Homestead will help you feel that spirit, and possibly even to hold that spirit in your own hands.
* * *
Three Museums, One Village
GRANVILLE
Granville has always carried her heritage and history close to her heart. The village was established in 1805 by New England settlers, who found a small party of Welsh pioneers already here in the valleys north of town that are still called the “Welsh Hills.”
Near the heart of the modern-day village, where classic Greek Revival architecture and modern business activity peacefully co-exist, you can stroll to three unique “immersion experiences” which can also be called museums.
Within a week of their 1805 arrival, the Massachusetts settlers began organizing a library, which in their efficient New England way was to be a bank too. It was incorporated as the “Alexandrian Society,” after the ancient institution in Egypt. The bank didn’t do so well, and brought the first library down with it, but the solid sandstone structure they built in 1816 stands proudly on Broadway today.
Now home to the Granville Historical Society (www.granvillehistory.org), they carry the stories and artifacts of centuries, leavened with tales of hymns heard in the forest, curses that brought down floods, and businesses that didn’t end up all that busy.
The basement holds a fascinating collection of 19th century craftsmanship (if you’re an old Eric Sloane fan, it’s like walking through the pages of “A Museum of Early American Tools”), and they also maintain the Granville Academy building a block away, a schoolhouse of 1833 that was the site of a dramatic early meeting of Ohio abolitionists.
Denison University sits mostly on a ridge along the north side of downtown, but the “lower campus” — which once was a separate college for women in the 1800s, and is now the Fine Arts quadrangle — is easily reached on foot from Granville’s historic “Four Corners.”
Burke Hall is a modern anomaly amidst the Victorian and Federal architecture of College Street, a white wedge that holds performance spaces, rehearsal rooms, and the Denison Museum (www.denison.edu/campuslife/museum). Holding more than 8,000 objects from Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, the exhibit space is constantly changing, tied to various events, speakers, and symposia through the academic year, and a senior art display each spring.
You can always expect a surprise, and a new perspective, when you visit the Denison Museum at Burke Hall.
The Avery-Downer House & Robbins Hunter Museum has new displays through the year, as well (www.robbinshunter.org), but the steady, peaceful beauty of this 1842 Greek Revival home is why it holds such a special place in the hearts of many local residents and visiting guests.
A truly beautiful home — some say one of the most beautiful houses in America — the history of this striking building is accented by the collection of materials found within, gathered by the last private owner, Robbins Hunter, whose will turned it into a museum in 1981.
* * *
Things Come Together Here
DOWNTOWN NEWARK
Coming to Newark’s historic downtown area, you might drive east down Main Street, past the Historic Row on Sixth Street, and to the entranceway framing the 1876 Courthouse, formed by the new Licking County Library and the restored century old Avalon Apartments.
Or you might arrive off of Route 16 onto Fourth Street, where a gateway district is being transformed this very year. Some may drive west on Main Street having started into the city from the Longaberger Home Offices, the famous “basket building,” and enter through the old style girder-framed bridge that frames the courthouse on four sides, like a picture on display.
When you reach the encircling square with plentiful parking and tall shady trees, you can become a pedestrian and stroll around the compact area of shops, offices, restaurants, and residences. From Buckeye Winery and Dal Cielo restaurant, past a Louis Sullivan former bank and now architectural gem built in 1914, through one of America’s first covered malls, The Arcade, still open and operating for business over a century later. Cross the street and find The Natoma, a restaurant operated by the same family since the 1920s.
The Midland Theatre is a classic movie house of that same era, now hosting live performance many nights each month, restored by the late Dave Longaberger and grandly reopened by Bill Cosby in 2002. Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and local youth ballet doing “The Nutcracker” are all part of the living history that is on stage today.
As you head to the south side of the downtown area, knowing you need to check out The Works, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of technology, industry, and history for Licking County, you realize that there are quite a few people around the square who don’t, well, move very much. Then the light catches the bronze and you realize that sculpture is everywhere!
Called “the Reese Bronzes” by some, after Lou and Gib Reese who have donated most of them, you will find many works by noted sculptors Gary Lee Price and Seward Johnson around the downtown area — two elderly women in mid-discussion on a bench, a man offering a candy bar to a little girl, children saluting the flag, a reading boy in The Works’ courtyard with his dreams unfurling above him.
Soon you start to look for them, and find that almost every corner shelters a bit more statuary; in front of the library you passed earlier with a “Learning Curve” of books greeting readers (and two more sculpted readers and a great blue heron can be found among the stacks), along the bike paths connecting neighborhoods overlooking major roads, and out at the Ohio State Newark campus.
Once you start to look, you find that faces peer back at you everywhere — a winged lion on the Sullivan building, a wreathed face over an imposing stone doorway, even a small gargoyle tucked into a side of the old county jail. Mural art ads faces blocks surrounding the square, showing pictures of the area when canal boats and daily street markets were the usual scene. Even more public art is planned in the very near future.
High above the courthouse square, on all four sides, are blindfolded figures holding the scales of justice. In some cities, that may be about all the sculpture you can find downtown on public display, but in Newark Lady Justice has plenty of company!
* * *
Soaring Music, Heartland Musicians
NEWARK-GRANVILLE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
While a boldly colored hot air balloon slowly rose above a green hillside last Labor Day, a glowing red sun settled behind the Dawes Arboretum bandshell.
Seated across that hillside enjoying the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra were over 3,000 people from all across central Ohio, knowing that whether bluegrass or Berlioz the performance would be world-class.
This fully professional orchestra was formed in 2005 from earlier symphonic groups in the area, pulling together talented local performers under the direction of Timothy Weiss, conductor and music director.
Venues for the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra, or NGSO (www.ngsymphony.com), when they’re not out under Licking County skies, include Swasey Chapel at Denison University in Granville, and on The Ohio State University at Newark campus in the J. Gilbert Reese Center.
Seasonal favorites, such as romantic classics for Valentine’s Day, patriotic music for the Fourth of July, or holiday favorites around Christmastime, are mixed in with a full complement of classical symphonic standards. The coming year includes works by Copland and Ravel, and culminates in the premiere of a beautiful composition written by local rising star, Ching-chu Hu, music chair at Denison University.
A real benefit to bringing together the strands that weave into the NGSO is the ability to sponsor programs like the Newark-Granville Youth Symphony, in its third season under the direction of Susan Larson. The NGYS was created to bring together young musicians interested in orchestra from not only Licking but also surrounding counties, and gives these young artists a chance to rehearse and perform a full variety of orchestral repertoire.
The NGYS offers concerts on their own, and the youth also get to perform alongside of and even as part of the NGSO when the occasion demands; local high school choirs also get to work with the NGSO through the year.
Many of the skilled performers in the regular NGSO are also music teachers in local schools, professionals in other fields with musical backgrounds that need an outlet, and faculty at area higher educational institutions. They and their younger counterparts cover the entire breadth of Licking County through the week, and represent our concentrated best on the stage when the conductor’s baton rises, and calls them to harmony we can all enjoy.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Faces Around Downtown (570 wds, no weblinks, cd be eight)
Coming to Newark’s historic downtown area, you might drive east down Main Street, past the Historic Row on Sixth Street, and to the entranceway framing the 1876 Courthouse, formed by the new Licking County Library and the restored century old Avalon Apartments.
Or you might arrive off of Route 16 onto Fourth Street, where a gateway district is being transformed this very year. Some may drive west on Main Street having started into the city from the Longaberger Home Offices, the famous “basket building,” and enter through the old style girder-framed bridge that frames the courthouse on four sides, like a picture on display.
When you reach the encircling square with plentiful parking and tall shady trees, you can become a pedestrian and stroll around the compact area of shops, offices, restaurants, and residences. From Buckeye Winery and Dal Cielo restaurant, past a Louis Sullivan former bank and now architectural gem built in 1914, through one of America’s first covered malls, The Arcade, still open and operating for business over a century later. Cross the street and find The Natoma, a restaurant operated by the same family since the 1920’s.
The Midland Theatre is a classic movie house of that same era, now hosting live performance many nights each month, restored by the late Dave Longaberger and grandly re-opened by Bill Cosby in 2002. Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and local youth ballet doing “The Nutcracker” are all part of the living history that is on stage today.
As you head to the south side of the downtown area, knowing you need to check out The Works, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of technology, industry, and history for Licking County, you realize that there are quite a few people around the square who don’t, well, move very much. Then the light catches the bronze and you realize that sculpture is everywhere!
Called “the Reese Bronzes” by some, after Lou and Gib Reese who have donated most of them, you will find many works by noted sculptors Gary Lee Price and Seward Johnson, dotted around the downtown area – two elderly women in mid-discussion on a bench, a man offering a candy bar to a little girl, children saluting the flag, a reading boy in The Works’ courtyard with his dreams unfurling above him.
Soon you start to look for them, and find that almost every corner shelters a bit more statuary; in front of the library you passed earlier with a “Learning Curve” of books greeting readers (and two more sculpted readers and a great blue heron can be found among the stacks), along the bike paths connecting neighborhoods overlooking major roads, and out at the Ohio State Newark campus.
Once you start to look, you find that faces peer back at you everywhere – a winged lion on the Sullivan building, a wreathed face over an imposing stone doorway, even a small gargoyle tucked into a side of the old county jail. Mural art faces blocks surrounding the square, showing pictures of the area when canal boats and daily street markets were the usual scene. Even more public art is planned in the very near future.
High above the courthouse square, on all four sides, are blindfolded figures holding the scales of justice. In some cities, that may be about all the sculpture you can find downtown on public display, but in Newark Lady Justice has plenty of company!
Coming to Newark’s historic downtown area, you might drive east down Main Street, past the Historic Row on Sixth Street, and to the entranceway framing the 1876 Courthouse, formed by the new Licking County Library and the restored century old Avalon Apartments.
Or you might arrive off of Route 16 onto Fourth Street, where a gateway district is being transformed this very year. Some may drive west on Main Street having started into the city from the Longaberger Home Offices, the famous “basket building,” and enter through the old style girder-framed bridge that frames the courthouse on four sides, like a picture on display.
When you reach the encircling square with plentiful parking and tall shady trees, you can become a pedestrian and stroll around the compact area of shops, offices, restaurants, and residences. From Buckeye Winery and Dal Cielo restaurant, past a Louis Sullivan former bank and now architectural gem built in 1914, through one of America’s first covered malls, The Arcade, still open and operating for business over a century later. Cross the street and find The Natoma, a restaurant operated by the same family since the 1920’s.
The Midland Theatre is a classic movie house of that same era, now hosting live performance many nights each month, restored by the late Dave Longaberger and grandly re-opened by Bill Cosby in 2002. Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and local youth ballet doing “The Nutcracker” are all part of the living history that is on stage today.
As you head to the south side of the downtown area, knowing you need to check out The Works, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of technology, industry, and history for Licking County, you realize that there are quite a few people around the square who don’t, well, move very much. Then the light catches the bronze and you realize that sculpture is everywhere!
Called “the Reese Bronzes” by some, after Lou and Gib Reese who have donated most of them, you will find many works by noted sculptors Gary Lee Price and Seward Johnson, dotted around the downtown area – two elderly women in mid-discussion on a bench, a man offering a candy bar to a little girl, children saluting the flag, a reading boy in The Works’ courtyard with his dreams unfurling above him.
Soon you start to look for them, and find that almost every corner shelters a bit more statuary; in front of the library you passed earlier with a “Learning Curve” of books greeting readers (and two more sculpted readers and a great blue heron can be found among the stacks), along the bike paths connecting neighborhoods overlooking major roads, and out at the Ohio State Newark campus.
Once you start to look, you find that faces peer back at you everywhere – a winged lion on the Sullivan building, a wreathed face over an imposing stone doorway, even a small gargoyle tucked into a side of the old county jail. Mural art faces blocks surrounding the square, showing pictures of the area when canal boats and daily street markets were the usual scene. Even more public art is planned in the very near future.
High above the courthouse square, on all four sides, are blindfolded figures holding the scales of justice. In some cities, that may be about all the sculpture you can find downtown on public display, but in Newark Lady Justice has plenty of company!
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
2009 Licking County Convention and Visitors Bureau Guide -- text drafts
* * *
Floating Worlds From the Ice Age Past (369 wds, with weblink)
Can an island float?
Outside of fantasy novels or science fiction, that is. . .
On the southern edge of Licking County, a five mile long arc of water is Ohio’s oldest man-made lake, with an accidentally made marvel bobbing in its midst.
Cranberry Bog is the local name for a vast mat of sphagnum moss and other plants that was lifted as the waters of the Licking Summit Reservoir filled what had been, to early pioneers, the “Great Buffalo Swamp.”
Salt licks and other springs in this highland bog gave the Licking River’s South Fork and the county as a whole its name, but around 1830 the designers of the Ohio & Erie Canal saw a basin that could be dammed and filled to provide passage from the Scioto River drainage below Columbus to the Muskingum River watershed.
As the canal bed was cut, the Northbank was built across the open end of the boggy upland valley, and by 1835 the reservoir was a lake.
But in one area, now along the north-central shore of Buckeye Lake, the bog material rose up, holding a tenuous connection in the shallow waters through roots systems to the now-lakebed below. This mat of material still shelters pitcher plants (the kind that “eat” insects!), sedges and grasses more common nearer to Hudson’s Bay today, and of course cranberries.
Since becoming Ohio’s first state park in 1949, Buckeye Lake has tried to shelter this fragile ecosystem from the growth of vacation cottages and the wakes of powerboats passing nearby. Each major windstorm blows a chunk or two off the edge, and there are less than twenty acres left to visit, perhaps someday -- no more.
The state allows a day each June to visit, limited to 400 by lottery, and other groups by special arrangement with the Greater Buckeye Lake Historical Society (www.buckeyelakehistory.org). An ingenious arrangement of boardwalks and narrow paths allow you to step off a boat onto Cranberry Bog, walk into the heart of this glacial era remnant, and then at your guide’s encouragement, jump just a bit into the air . . .
The ripples you feel beneath your feet when you land confirm that this island indeed is floating!
* * *
A Homestead For Your Family (364 wds, with weblink)
Just east of the Licking County border, after you drive past the famous seven story tall “basket building,” housing the Longaberger Corporation’s home offices in Newark, is the Longaberger Homestead (www.longaberger.com/homestead.aspx).
You may step just across the county line to get there near Frazeysburg, but a huge piece of Licking County history is the anchor of the Homestead experience – the Crawford Barn.
Once a fixture of the north end of Newark, the Crawford family first introduced Belgian and Percheron horse breeds to the Midwest, and to hold these massive creatures they needed a 12,000 square foot barn, which Col. George Crawford built in 1890.
His grandson, Bert Crawford, donated the majestic structure to Dave Longaberger in 1999, as retail and residential Newark had long since grown awkwardly around the barn’s former location. Over 60% of the 90’ by 54’ barn’s timbers were reused, and skilled local timber framers and Longaberger workers re-erected the six bay building, added a new wing in the same design, and lovingly resheathed it all as the new rustic heart of the complex of shops and restaurants and factory stores that are “The Homestead.”
In tribute to the barn’s origins, the modern day re-assemblers used a team of Percherons to hoist the main timbers into place on Labor Day weekend of 1999!
Among these buildings, new and old, Longaberger collectors and casual visitors can learn about how hand-made baskets are assembled from start to finish (you can even sign up to make one yourself), eat your fill of good old fashioned Ohio cooking, and yes, there are a few baskets for sale.
Sitting just down the road from Dave Longaberger’s hometown of Dresden, The Longaberger Homestead holds seasonal events around major holidays, and hosts events for their consultants and collectors, often in conjunction with “The Place Off the Square,” their hotel in downtown Newark, or with the Longaberger Golf Club in eastern Licking County.
The goal of the Crawford Barn museum and Longaberger Factory Store is “to capture the spirit of our American craft and tradition.” A visit to The Homestead will help you feel that spirit, and possibly even to hold that spirit in your own hands.
* * *
Three Museums, One Village (463 wds, 3 weblinks)
Founded in 1805 by New England settlers, who found a small party of Welsh pioneers already here from 1801 in the valleys north of town that are still called the “Welsh Hills,” Granville has always carried her heritage and history close to her heart.
Near the heart of the modern day village, where classic Greek Revival architecture and modern business activity peacefully co-exist, you can stroll to three unique “immersion experiences” which can also be called museums.
Within a week of their 1805 arrival, the Massachusetts pioneers began organizing a library, which in their efficient New England way was to be a bank, as well. So it was incorporated as the “Alexandrian Society,” after the ancient institution in Egypt. The bank didn’t do so well, and brought the first library down with it, but the solid sandstone structure they built in 1816 stands proudly on Broadway today.
Now home to the Granville Historical Society (www.granvillehistory.org), they carry the stories and artifacts of centuries, leavened with tales of hymns heard in the forest, curses that brought down floods, and businesses that didn’t end up all that busy.
The basement holds a fascinating collection of 19th century craftsmanship (if you’re an old Eric Sloane fan, it’s like walking through the pages of “A Museum of Early American Tools”), and they also maintain the Granville Academy building a block away, a schoolhouse of 1833 that was the site of a dramatic early meeting of Ohio abolitionists.
Denison University sits mostly on a ridge along the north side of downtown, but the “lower campus” which once was a separate college for women in the 1800’s, and is now the Fine Arts quadrangle, is easily reached on foot from Granville’s historic “Four Corners.”
Burke Hall is a modern anomaly amidst the Victorian and Federal architecture of College St., a white wedge that holds performance spaces, rehearsal rooms, and the Denison Museum (www.denison.edu/campuslife/museum). Holding over 8,000 objects from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, their exhibit space is constantly changing, tied to various events, speakers, and symposia through the academic year, and a senior art display each spring.
You can always expect a surprise, and a new perspective, when you visit the Denison Museum at Burke Hall.
The Avery-Downer House & Robbins Hunter Museum has new displays through the year, as well (www.robbinshunter.org), but the steady, peaceful beauty of this 1842 Greek Revival home is why it holds such a special place in the hearts of many local residents and visiting guests.
A truly beautiful home, some say one of the most beautiful houses in America, the history of this striking building is accented by the collection of materials found within, gathered by the last private owner, Robbins Hunter, whose will turned it into a museum in 1981.
* * *
Things Come Together Here (375 wds, 3 weblinks)
Courthouse squares are the center of most Midwestern county seats, planned from the start as the place where things come together.
Roads converge on diagonals, following old pioneer paths or even earlier Indian trails, the grid of north-south and east-west right angle streets pace off the benchmark of a public square or central governmental building, and from legal affairs to banks to churches to retail, downtown starts as the heart of it all.
The last century has presented certain challenges to classic downtowns, with cars helping spread business out to the newer edges of communities. Some cities have found that this kind of change in shopping patterns creates a host of new opportunities for what a downtown can be, and Newark has been a leader in that kind of transformation!
Movies may be out at the mall, but the grand theaters of early last century are now again where live performance is on stage, and today’s downtown visitor is looking for something real and immediate – the Midland Theater (www.midlandtheatre.org), spectacularly renovated a few years ago, is host to performers like Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and Kenny Loggins.
Youth ballet companies put on “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake,” and community groups gather concerts of local talent along with appearances by celebrities like B.B. King and Emmylou Harris.
The 1876 Courthouse is still home to the main county courtrooms, but other county offices and agencies fill the blocks nearby, supporting an assortment of restaurants like The Natoma (www.thenatoma.com), run by the same family since the 1920’s on the square; or Dal Cielo, the newest place in town for Italian cuisine, including pasta and specialty pizza.
Above Dal Cielo is an apartment where the owners live, reflecting a growing trend for residential use of formerly retail space. A downtown grocery store, a rarity in many cities, is part of the supportive mosaic that includes coffee shops, specialty stores, and a little fast food.
And those malls that challenge some downtowns in other places trace their roots to structures like The Arcade, built in 1907 (newarkarcade.com), one of the first covered malls in the United States! You can walk through both history and present opportunity in this attractive and active part of modern day Newark.
* * *
Soaring Music, Heartland Musicians (371 wds, one weblink)
While a boldly colored hot air balloon slowly rose above a green hillside last Labor Day, a glowing red sun settled behind the Dawes Arboretum bandshell.
Seated across that hillside enjoying the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra were over 3,000 people from all across central Ohio, knowing that whether bluegrass or Berlioz the performance would be world-class.
This fully professional orchestra was formed in 2005 from earlier symphonic groups in the area, pulling together talented local performers under the direction of Timothy Weiss, their conductor and music director.
Venues for the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra, or NGSO (www.ngsymphony.com), when they’re not out under Licking County skies, include Swasey Chapel at Denison University in Granville, and on The Ohio State University at Newark campus in the J. Gilbert Reese Center.
Seasonal favorites, such as romatic classics for Valentine’s Day, patriotic music for the Fourth of July, or holiday favorites around Christmastime, are mixed in with a full complement of classical symphonic standards. The coming year includes works by Copland and Ravel, and culminates in the premiere of a beautiful composition written by local rising star, Ching-chu Hu, music chair at Denison University.
A real benefit to bringing together the strands that weave into the NGSO is the ability to sponsor programs like the Newark-Granville Youth Symphony, in its third season under the direction of Susan Larson. The NGYS was created to bring together young musicians interested in orchestra from not only Licking but also surrounding counties, and gives these young artists a chance to rehearse and perform a full variety of orchestral repertoire.
The NGYS offers concerts on their own, and the youth also get to perform alongside of and even as part of the NGSO when the occasion demands; local high school choirs also get to work with the NGSO through the year.
Many of the skilled performers in the regular NGSO are also music teachers in local schools, professionals in other fields with musical backgrounds that need an outlet, and faculty at area higher educational institutions. They and their younger counterparts cover the entire breadth of Licking County through the week, and represent our concentrated best on the stage when the conductor’s baton rises, and calls them to harmony we can all enjoy.
* * *
Floating Worlds From the Ice Age Past (369 wds, with weblink)
Can an island float?
Outside of fantasy novels or science fiction, that is. . .
On the southern edge of Licking County, a five mile long arc of water is Ohio’s oldest man-made lake, with an accidentally made marvel bobbing in its midst.
Cranberry Bog is the local name for a vast mat of sphagnum moss and other plants that was lifted as the waters of the Licking Summit Reservoir filled what had been, to early pioneers, the “Great Buffalo Swamp.”
Salt licks and other springs in this highland bog gave the Licking River’s South Fork and the county as a whole its name, but around 1830 the designers of the Ohio & Erie Canal saw a basin that could be dammed and filled to provide passage from the Scioto River drainage below Columbus to the Muskingum River watershed.
As the canal bed was cut, the Northbank was built across the open end of the boggy upland valley, and by 1835 the reservoir was a lake.
But in one area, now along the north-central shore of Buckeye Lake, the bog material rose up, holding a tenuous connection in the shallow waters through roots systems to the now-lakebed below. This mat of material still shelters pitcher plants (the kind that “eat” insects!), sedges and grasses more common nearer to Hudson’s Bay today, and of course cranberries.
Since becoming Ohio’s first state park in 1949, Buckeye Lake has tried to shelter this fragile ecosystem from the growth of vacation cottages and the wakes of powerboats passing nearby. Each major windstorm blows a chunk or two off the edge, and there are less than twenty acres left to visit, perhaps someday -- no more.
The state allows a day each June to visit, limited to 400 by lottery, and other groups by special arrangement with the Greater Buckeye Lake Historical Society (www.buckeyelakehistory.org). An ingenious arrangement of boardwalks and narrow paths allow you to step off a boat onto Cranberry Bog, walk into the heart of this glacial era remnant, and then at your guide’s encouragement, jump just a bit into the air . . .
The ripples you feel beneath your feet when you land confirm that this island indeed is floating!
* * *
A Homestead For Your Family (364 wds, with weblink)
Just east of the Licking County border, after you drive past the famous seven story tall “basket building,” housing the Longaberger Corporation’s home offices in Newark, is the Longaberger Homestead (www.longaberger.com/homestead.aspx).
You may step just across the county line to get there near Frazeysburg, but a huge piece of Licking County history is the anchor of the Homestead experience – the Crawford Barn.
Once a fixture of the north end of Newark, the Crawford family first introduced Belgian and Percheron horse breeds to the Midwest, and to hold these massive creatures they needed a 12,000 square foot barn, which Col. George Crawford built in 1890.
His grandson, Bert Crawford, donated the majestic structure to Dave Longaberger in 1999, as retail and residential Newark had long since grown awkwardly around the barn’s former location. Over 60% of the 90’ by 54’ barn’s timbers were reused, and skilled local timber framers and Longaberger workers re-erected the six bay building, added a new wing in the same design, and lovingly resheathed it all as the new rustic heart of the complex of shops and restaurants and factory stores that are “The Homestead.”
In tribute to the barn’s origins, the modern day re-assemblers used a team of Percherons to hoist the main timbers into place on Labor Day weekend of 1999!
Among these buildings, new and old, Longaberger collectors and casual visitors can learn about how hand-made baskets are assembled from start to finish (you can even sign up to make one yourself), eat your fill of good old fashioned Ohio cooking, and yes, there are a few baskets for sale.
Sitting just down the road from Dave Longaberger’s hometown of Dresden, The Longaberger Homestead holds seasonal events around major holidays, and hosts events for their consultants and collectors, often in conjunction with “The Place Off the Square,” their hotel in downtown Newark, or with the Longaberger Golf Club in eastern Licking County.
The goal of the Crawford Barn museum and Longaberger Factory Store is “to capture the spirit of our American craft and tradition.” A visit to The Homestead will help you feel that spirit, and possibly even to hold that spirit in your own hands.
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Three Museums, One Village (463 wds, 3 weblinks)
Founded in 1805 by New England settlers, who found a small party of Welsh pioneers already here from 1801 in the valleys north of town that are still called the “Welsh Hills,” Granville has always carried her heritage and history close to her heart.
Near the heart of the modern day village, where classic Greek Revival architecture and modern business activity peacefully co-exist, you can stroll to three unique “immersion experiences” which can also be called museums.
Within a week of their 1805 arrival, the Massachusetts pioneers began organizing a library, which in their efficient New England way was to be a bank, as well. So it was incorporated as the “Alexandrian Society,” after the ancient institution in Egypt. The bank didn’t do so well, and brought the first library down with it, but the solid sandstone structure they built in 1816 stands proudly on Broadway today.
Now home to the Granville Historical Society (www.granvillehistory.org), they carry the stories and artifacts of centuries, leavened with tales of hymns heard in the forest, curses that brought down floods, and businesses that didn’t end up all that busy.
The basement holds a fascinating collection of 19th century craftsmanship (if you’re an old Eric Sloane fan, it’s like walking through the pages of “A Museum of Early American Tools”), and they also maintain the Granville Academy building a block away, a schoolhouse of 1833 that was the site of a dramatic early meeting of Ohio abolitionists.
Denison University sits mostly on a ridge along the north side of downtown, but the “lower campus” which once was a separate college for women in the 1800’s, and is now the Fine Arts quadrangle, is easily reached on foot from Granville’s historic “Four Corners.”
Burke Hall is a modern anomaly amidst the Victorian and Federal architecture of College St., a white wedge that holds performance spaces, rehearsal rooms, and the Denison Museum (www.denison.edu/campuslife/museum). Holding over 8,000 objects from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, their exhibit space is constantly changing, tied to various events, speakers, and symposia through the academic year, and a senior art display each spring.
You can always expect a surprise, and a new perspective, when you visit the Denison Museum at Burke Hall.
The Avery-Downer House & Robbins Hunter Museum has new displays through the year, as well (www.robbinshunter.org), but the steady, peaceful beauty of this 1842 Greek Revival home is why it holds such a special place in the hearts of many local residents and visiting guests.
A truly beautiful home, some say one of the most beautiful houses in America, the history of this striking building is accented by the collection of materials found within, gathered by the last private owner, Robbins Hunter, whose will turned it into a museum in 1981.
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Things Come Together Here (375 wds, 3 weblinks)
Courthouse squares are the center of most Midwestern county seats, planned from the start as the place where things come together.
Roads converge on diagonals, following old pioneer paths or even earlier Indian trails, the grid of north-south and east-west right angle streets pace off the benchmark of a public square or central governmental building, and from legal affairs to banks to churches to retail, downtown starts as the heart of it all.
The last century has presented certain challenges to classic downtowns, with cars helping spread business out to the newer edges of communities. Some cities have found that this kind of change in shopping patterns creates a host of new opportunities for what a downtown can be, and Newark has been a leader in that kind of transformation!
Movies may be out at the mall, but the grand theaters of early last century are now again where live performance is on stage, and today’s downtown visitor is looking for something real and immediate – the Midland Theater (www.midlandtheatre.org), spectacularly renovated a few years ago, is host to performers like Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and Kenny Loggins.
Youth ballet companies put on “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake,” and community groups gather concerts of local talent along with appearances by celebrities like B.B. King and Emmylou Harris.
The 1876 Courthouse is still home to the main county courtrooms, but other county offices and agencies fill the blocks nearby, supporting an assortment of restaurants like The Natoma (www.thenatoma.com), run by the same family since the 1920’s on the square; or Dal Cielo, the newest place in town for Italian cuisine, including pasta and specialty pizza.
Above Dal Cielo is an apartment where the owners live, reflecting a growing trend for residential use of formerly retail space. A downtown grocery store, a rarity in many cities, is part of the supportive mosaic that includes coffee shops, specialty stores, and a little fast food.
And those malls that challenge some downtowns in other places trace their roots to structures like The Arcade, built in 1907 (newarkarcade.com), one of the first covered malls in the United States! You can walk through both history and present opportunity in this attractive and active part of modern day Newark.
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Soaring Music, Heartland Musicians (371 wds, one weblink)
While a boldly colored hot air balloon slowly rose above a green hillside last Labor Day, a glowing red sun settled behind the Dawes Arboretum bandshell.
Seated across that hillside enjoying the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra were over 3,000 people from all across central Ohio, knowing that whether bluegrass or Berlioz the performance would be world-class.
This fully professional orchestra was formed in 2005 from earlier symphonic groups in the area, pulling together talented local performers under the direction of Timothy Weiss, their conductor and music director.
Venues for the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra, or NGSO (www.ngsymphony.com), when they’re not out under Licking County skies, include Swasey Chapel at Denison University in Granville, and on The Ohio State University at Newark campus in the J. Gilbert Reese Center.
Seasonal favorites, such as romatic classics for Valentine’s Day, patriotic music for the Fourth of July, or holiday favorites around Christmastime, are mixed in with a full complement of classical symphonic standards. The coming year includes works by Copland and Ravel, and culminates in the premiere of a beautiful composition written by local rising star, Ching-chu Hu, music chair at Denison University.
A real benefit to bringing together the strands that weave into the NGSO is the ability to sponsor programs like the Newark-Granville Youth Symphony, in its third season under the direction of Susan Larson. The NGYS was created to bring together young musicians interested in orchestra from not only Licking but also surrounding counties, and gives these young artists a chance to rehearse and perform a full variety of orchestral repertoire.
The NGYS offers concerts on their own, and the youth also get to perform alongside of and even as part of the NGSO when the occasion demands; local high school choirs also get to work with the NGSO through the year.
Many of the skilled performers in the regular NGSO are also music teachers in local schools, professionals in other fields with musical backgrounds that need an outlet, and faculty at area higher educational institutions. They and their younger counterparts cover the entire breadth of Licking County through the week, and represent our concentrated best on the stage when the conductor’s baton rises, and calls them to harmony we can all enjoy.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Disrobed In the Public Square – Urbanscapes 2008
Denison University First Year Program
Jeff Gill
Oxford is home to the original “Town and Gown” controversy.
From the 11th century roots of English college life, students were semi-monastic participants in religious life, so like monks and brothers in most monasteries, they wore robes that marked them as part of an intentional community.
Even as academic colleges grew more and more distinct from their monastic and seminary origins, the robes and hoods remained both useful and decorative in the vast drafty cathedral-like buildings, their uniformity across the quadrangles and cloisters mixing with the subtle flash of brightly colored linings, marking which school or institution was their scholastic home.
The rights and privileges carried by monastic establishments in the medieval period continued under royal charters that usually gave them exemptions from local authority. Local court jurisdiction and the ability to penalize students and faculty were limited, leading to growing resentments of people “who aren’t from here” by the folks who grew up and worked around the college precincts.
“Town and Gown” may rhyme, but they once were put together mainly to describe the two sides in street riots, conflicts that included death and dismemberment in medieval Oxford. The gowns slowly eroded into the 20th century as the style became more of a symbol, until the 1960s when the obligatory wearing of the short remnant robe was ended.
Today’s students at a Denison don’t wear any kind of academic robe other than at graduation, with faculty (some) wearing regalia (partially) at certain campus events through the year (occasionally). In the village, students once may have been quickly and readily recognizable by their style of dress, even if not a uniform garb, but no longer.
Clothing that a college student would wear is just as likely to be seen on a Granville grandmother or traveling tourist at a sidewalk café; the uniform of non-conformity is widely adopted, so the ability of any one person to spot another person from a distance and think “college student” is non-existent. A local high school kid, a young adult from a neighboring town on an errand, or an entrepreneur between conference calls can all be in similar clothing.
If everyone is dressed the same in the public square, then we have equality and collegiality, right? Recent concerns and questions lead us to shake our heads “no.” The distinctions between classes and cohorts may have visually narrowed, but the knowledge that inequalities and injustices still exist in economic opportunity and social mobility leads to an ever more careful parsing of glances and intonations. How much weight can “a look” carry? When other means of non-verbal communications are limited, quite a bit.
How we look at how people look at us is also framed in our assumptions about what they are likely to think about us. Sensitivities about what we wear are no longer rooted in whether we have a tie or a dress on, or if we are in our “dress clothes” or “work clothes.” There is less today for others to be “looking at,” focusing now on our faces, our skin, our own gaze back at them. This can be a vulnerable way to feel looked at, more personal than assumptions about “you’re a worker,” “you are wealthy,” “you are out of place.”
Granville has long wanted to be seen as a place where “all are welcome.” In such a location, no one would be “out of place.” With rapid population growth in the surrounding area along with increased tourism bringing many new faces to the streetscape and public square, there is going to be a certain amount of “visual sorting” going on no matter how welcoming the village may be.
“Do I know you? Are you someone I’ve met? Do I need to greet you, or can I keep moving?” These are questions that come to mind in a public social activity, propped up by social conventions like the Midwestern “hello” to strangers or the Northeastern “never make eye contact with strangers” assumption. Clothing and accessories used to be social lubricants, allowing the Town and Gown to slide easily past each other without a glance, friendly or not.
Those markers and signals are gone, and a certain uneasiness is all that remains in their place. Direct communication, personal relationship – those would be the gold standard, the ideal for building community and weaving together the streetscape at the foot of College Hill. TV time and commuting and technology have so far only worked against adding more interaction between students and staff and faculty and the residents of Granville.
Town and Gown may have more need of community with less obvious distinction separating them, since they do have different schedules and timetables and priorities in many ways. Understanding what has changed, even just about how those two aspects of our village see each other, may help us envision what we need to do to see each other afresh – then we might be better able to make the intentional effort to relate.
Denison University First Year Program
Jeff Gill
Oxford is home to the original “Town and Gown” controversy.
From the 11th century roots of English college life, students were semi-monastic participants in religious life, so like monks and brothers in most monasteries, they wore robes that marked them as part of an intentional community.
Even as academic colleges grew more and more distinct from their monastic and seminary origins, the robes and hoods remained both useful and decorative in the vast drafty cathedral-like buildings, their uniformity across the quadrangles and cloisters mixing with the subtle flash of brightly colored linings, marking which school or institution was their scholastic home.
The rights and privileges carried by monastic establishments in the medieval period continued under royal charters that usually gave them exemptions from local authority. Local court jurisdiction and the ability to penalize students and faculty were limited, leading to growing resentments of people “who aren’t from here” by the folks who grew up and worked around the college precincts.
“Town and Gown” may rhyme, but they once were put together mainly to describe the two sides in street riots, conflicts that included death and dismemberment in medieval Oxford. The gowns slowly eroded into the 20th century as the style became more of a symbol, until the 1960s when the obligatory wearing of the short remnant robe was ended.
Today’s students at a Denison don’t wear any kind of academic robe other than at graduation, with faculty (some) wearing regalia (partially) at certain campus events through the year (occasionally). In the village, students once may have been quickly and readily recognizable by their style of dress, even if not a uniform garb, but no longer.
Clothing that a college student would wear is just as likely to be seen on a Granville grandmother or traveling tourist at a sidewalk café; the uniform of non-conformity is widely adopted, so the ability of any one person to spot another person from a distance and think “college student” is non-existent. A local high school kid, a young adult from a neighboring town on an errand, or an entrepreneur between conference calls can all be in similar clothing.
If everyone is dressed the same in the public square, then we have equality and collegiality, right? Recent concerns and questions lead us to shake our heads “no.” The distinctions between classes and cohorts may have visually narrowed, but the knowledge that inequalities and injustices still exist in economic opportunity and social mobility leads to an ever more careful parsing of glances and intonations. How much weight can “a look” carry? When other means of non-verbal communications are limited, quite a bit.
How we look at how people look at us is also framed in our assumptions about what they are likely to think about us. Sensitivities about what we wear are no longer rooted in whether we have a tie or a dress on, or if we are in our “dress clothes” or “work clothes.” There is less today for others to be “looking at,” focusing now on our faces, our skin, our own gaze back at them. This can be a vulnerable way to feel looked at, more personal than assumptions about “you’re a worker,” “you are wealthy,” “you are out of place.”
Granville has long wanted to be seen as a place where “all are welcome.” In such a location, no one would be “out of place.” With rapid population growth in the surrounding area along with increased tourism bringing many new faces to the streetscape and public square, there is going to be a certain amount of “visual sorting” going on no matter how welcoming the village may be.
“Do I know you? Are you someone I’ve met? Do I need to greet you, or can I keep moving?” These are questions that come to mind in a public social activity, propped up by social conventions like the Midwestern “hello” to strangers or the Northeastern “never make eye contact with strangers” assumption. Clothing and accessories used to be social lubricants, allowing the Town and Gown to slide easily past each other without a glance, friendly or not.
Those markers and signals are gone, and a certain uneasiness is all that remains in their place. Direct communication, personal relationship – those would be the gold standard, the ideal for building community and weaving together the streetscape at the foot of College Hill. TV time and commuting and technology have so far only worked against adding more interaction between students and staff and faculty and the residents of Granville.
Town and Gown may have more need of community with less obvious distinction separating them, since they do have different schedules and timetables and priorities in many ways. Understanding what has changed, even just about how those two aspects of our village see each other, may help us envision what we need to do to see each other afresh – then we might be better able to make the intentional effort to relate.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Flipping Through the Pages of Time, Slowly
“I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept…only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”
- Charles Darwin “On the Origin of Species” (1859)
Imagine a vast book, with pages the size of Ohio, and even larger. Look at the edge of that volume, laying flat, with sheaves of edges layered one above the other. You can almost sense the piled narrative hidden within, pick up on the heft and depth and duration of the story to be told.
Lay that book out upon the landscape, with the illustrations and lines of text receding into the distance. You peel back the cover and begin to read—from the most recent description of events on the first page before you, down to the beginning of the plot far below.
In terms of geologic books, then, one “murder” mystery of pre-history is the riddle of mass extinction. The fossil record shows repeated episodes through deep time where large numbers of living creatures simply vanish. Their rocky remains are buried in earlier, or deeper strata, but are nowhere to be found in later stratigraphy, the geologic layers closer to the surface.
Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick? That’s the question, after a fashion: Who, or what, did the deed?. Much consideration and interest in recent years has been given to a large weapon and the single assassin. Who killed the dinosaurs? Well, there’s strong evidence that an asteroid hit Earth about 65 million years ago, leaving an impact crater near the Yucatan peninsula called Chicxulub Crater. Many geologists and paleontologists who study “macrostratigraphy,” the way the layers of sediment tell their immense story, think the Chicxulub event led directly to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species, right down to snails and plankton. Through the course of time, there have been dozens of other continent-wide extinction events, with at least five in the last 500 million years (just the last chapter or two as a geologist reads).
Shanan Peters ’98, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to look at the wider story of mass extinctions, and started doing a body count—remember, you can only read this book from the end back to the beginning, from the surface to the earlier depths. His research has unearthed, if you will, some significant findings, and earned him equally significant recognition as one of geology’s rising stars. In fact, just last year Peters received the Hodson Award of the Palaeontological Association of Great Britian, given annually to a paleontologist under the age of 35 who has made a significant early contribution to the science.
Peters knew, starting with his work as a Denison undergrad with professors like Ken Bork, that there were places around the globe where earlier layers gave the careful reader a peek ahead, or actually back closer to the start of the story. Through his graduate work at the University of Chicago and a post-doc at the University of Michigan, he got a look at parts of the narrative revealed in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, around the globe to India’s eroded strata, and off into desert regions of Egypt.
Along with the glimpses into the deeper past, he was working to find new approaches to “quantifying the rock record”— to read between the lines, in a way, using chemistry in the rocks and details of the smallest fossils embedded there to figure out just what happened when 75 to 95 percent of the plants and animals on the planet seemed to suddenly vanish.
Peters’ work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, led to a report published in June by the noted science journal Nature, which says not that the butler did it, but that what appears to be sudden and dramatic extinction events may be the result of something as slow and steady and inevitable as the rise and fall of sea levels.
Peering directly at the make-up of the sediments themselves, Peters is able to show whether fossils are embedded either in material made substantially from the breakdown of shells and skeletal material during their cycle of life and death, leaving behind much silica -- or are primarily the aftermath of simple sediments washed down from the land.
A broad inland continent wide sea, like the one once spreading across the central United States, will drain and change as tectonic plates push up and when climactic changes lock up more polar ice, further lowering sea levels. As the seas dry up, the animals and plants, from the largest shark to the smallest shrimp or algae must move, or die, and sometimes both. They disappear quickly from the fossil record, but as a result of processes that take long stretches of time to play out.
Under the title "Environmental determinants of extinction selectivity in the fossil record," the study looks at the chemistry and make-up of the pages of time themselves, and fossils embedded there serving as virtual page numbers. With the help of a global compendia of marine animal fossils complied by Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, those page numbers help compare the chemical traces of ocean levels to "shifts in shallow marine environments that play out over the space of an entire continent," Peters observes. Page by page, through 4,000 samples from over 500 American sites stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Peters' analysis looks back through Darwin's "imperfectly kept" record of geologic time in sedimentary layers, showing how the rise and fall of the earth's oceans can readily account for the mass extinctions as they occur again and again over millenia.
Peters is quick to point out that there are still asteroids and volcanic eruptions in the story, and biological factors of evolution like competition and disease play their part. “This work links them and smaller events in terms of a forcing mechanism, and it also tells us something about who survives and who doesn't across these boundaries,” Peters explains. “These results argue for a substantial fraction of change in extinction rates being controlled by just one environmental parameter.”
With concerns over global climate change and ocean levels high in today’s world, Peters research into the deeper reaches of earth’s history also carry a current relevance. Extinctions today and sea level rise may leave a mark on the earth that will be studied in ages to come – we hope.
“I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept…only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”
- Charles Darwin “On the Origin of Species” (1859)
Imagine a vast book, with pages the size of Ohio, and even larger. Look at the edge of that volume, laying flat, with sheaves of edges layered one above the other. You can almost sense the piled narrative hidden within, pick up on the heft and depth and duration of the story to be told.
Lay that book out upon the landscape, with the illustrations and lines of text receding into the distance. You peel back the cover and begin to read—from the most recent description of events on the first page before you, down to the beginning of the plot far below.
In terms of geologic books, then, one “murder” mystery of pre-history is the riddle of mass extinction. The fossil record shows repeated episodes through deep time where large numbers of living creatures simply vanish. Their rocky remains are buried in earlier, or deeper strata, but are nowhere to be found in later stratigraphy, the geologic layers closer to the surface.
Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick? That’s the question, after a fashion: Who, or what, did the deed?. Much consideration and interest in recent years has been given to a large weapon and the single assassin. Who killed the dinosaurs? Well, there’s strong evidence that an asteroid hit Earth about 65 million years ago, leaving an impact crater near the Yucatan peninsula called Chicxulub Crater. Many geologists and paleontologists who study “macrostratigraphy,” the way the layers of sediment tell their immense story, think the Chicxulub event led directly to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species, right down to snails and plankton. Through the course of time, there have been dozens of other continent-wide extinction events, with at least five in the last 500 million years (just the last chapter or two as a geologist reads).
Shanan Peters ’98, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to look at the wider story of mass extinctions, and started doing a body count—remember, you can only read this book from the end back to the beginning, from the surface to the earlier depths. His research has unearthed, if you will, some significant findings, and earned him equally significant recognition as one of geology’s rising stars. In fact, just last year Peters received the Hodson Award of the Palaeontological Association of Great Britian, given annually to a paleontologist under the age of 35 who has made a significant early contribution to the science.
Peters knew, starting with his work as a Denison undergrad with professors like Ken Bork, that there were places around the globe where earlier layers gave the careful reader a peek ahead, or actually back closer to the start of the story. Through his graduate work at the University of Chicago and a post-doc at the University of Michigan, he got a look at parts of the narrative revealed in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, around the globe to India’s eroded strata, and off into desert regions of Egypt.
Along with the glimpses into the deeper past, he was working to find new approaches to “quantifying the rock record”— to read between the lines, in a way, using chemistry in the rocks and details of the smallest fossils embedded there to figure out just what happened when 75 to 95 percent of the plants and animals on the planet seemed to suddenly vanish.
Peters’ work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, led to a report published in June by the noted science journal Nature, which says not that the butler did it, but that what appears to be sudden and dramatic extinction events may be the result of something as slow and steady and inevitable as the rise and fall of sea levels.
Peering directly at the make-up of the sediments themselves, Peters is able to show whether fossils are embedded either in material made substantially from the breakdown of shells and skeletal material during their cycle of life and death, leaving behind much silica -- or are primarily the aftermath of simple sediments washed down from the land.
A broad inland continent wide sea, like the one once spreading across the central United States, will drain and change as tectonic plates push up and when climactic changes lock up more polar ice, further lowering sea levels. As the seas dry up, the animals and plants, from the largest shark to the smallest shrimp or algae must move, or die, and sometimes both. They disappear quickly from the fossil record, but as a result of processes that take long stretches of time to play out.
Under the title "Environmental determinants of extinction selectivity in the fossil record," the study looks at the chemistry and make-up of the pages of time themselves, and fossils embedded there serving as virtual page numbers. With the help of a global compendia of marine animal fossils complied by Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, those page numbers help compare the chemical traces of ocean levels to "shifts in shallow marine environments that play out over the space of an entire continent," Peters observes. Page by page, through 4,000 samples from over 500 American sites stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Peters' analysis looks back through Darwin's "imperfectly kept" record of geologic time in sedimentary layers, showing how the rise and fall of the earth's oceans can readily account for the mass extinctions as they occur again and again over millenia.
Peters is quick to point out that there are still asteroids and volcanic eruptions in the story, and biological factors of evolution like competition and disease play their part. “This work links them and smaller events in terms of a forcing mechanism, and it also tells us something about who survives and who doesn't across these boundaries,” Peters explains. “These results argue for a substantial fraction of change in extinction rates being controlled by just one environmental parameter.”
With concerns over global climate change and ocean levels high in today’s world, Peters research into the deeper reaches of earth’s history also carry a current relevance. Extinctions today and sea level rise may leave a mark on the earth that will be studied in ages to come – we hope.
Friday, February 22, 2008
DenMag L&F issue
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Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [first unused draft]
How would you feel if you were digging through a large crate for, say, a “major award” and didn’t find anything (not even a lamp shaped like a leg)?
Then you find out later it was what you only thought was packing material, the little white peanuts, or straw, or blocks of foam, that actually had value. Ow.
If DNA can be compared to the leg lamp, then Jeff Thompson, assistant professor of biology, is working to get people to take a look at the stuff Ralphie and his dad would just toss aside. Instead of “excelsior,” the stuff is called “histone,” and histones may not only play a role in building DNA, but as proteins themselves, actually interact with this building block of life to build and repair chromosomes. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes are made of in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ‘07, Arzu Arat, Lindsey Bostelman ‘05, and Andrew Keller ‘06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), gets repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named “DNA Repair.”
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of the genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. If DNA is the blueprint of life, histones work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
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*thanks to a note from Jeff Thompson –
* * *
Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [take two]
If DNA is the blueprint of life, “histones” work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
Biology professor Jeff Thompson is showing students how to work with histones, and manage their ability to repair damage that comes with the wear and tear of everyday life. This mundane maintenance process within the cell sounds unremarkable, until you realize that repair and rebuilding processes running out of control is better known as – cancer.
Histones not only play a role in building DNA strands, but they are proteins themselves, interacting with the building blocks of life to build and maintain the inheritable genetic blueprint of an organism. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material that makes up those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ’07, Arzu Arat ’08, Lindsey Bostelman ’05, and Andrew Keller ’06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), is repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named DNA Repair.
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. That’s where histones and other proteins draw out the details that may fit into the broader strokes sketched by DNA.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
* * *
Who Are You Callin’ a Dwarf Planet?
Astronomers are not known for their combative nature.
Long nights glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, or even longer days analyzing data from giant dish antennas, can leave them sleepless, but usually not feisty.
The gloves came off recently at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), when a panel announced a new definition of “planet” which left out Pluto, relegating the once ninth planet to the status of “dwarf planet.”
In a nutshell, the IAU definition sounds pretty straightforward, starting with orbiting a sun (remember, this is not just a definition for our neighborhood, the Solar System), and having enough gravity to become a sphere, but then they said a planet should “clear out its neighborhood.” This isn’t some cosmic block watch program, doing citizen arrests of graffiti artists, but a cosmological process where dust and sky junk is gathered by a regular orbit into tidy heaps, or better yet, moons.
Pluto has been known for some years to have a small moon, Charon, and the Hubble Space Telescope has added Nix and Hydra to Pluto’s realm. What makes Pluto unique by any standard is the vast, irregular orbit dipping down into Neptune’s neighborhood and looping off towards the Oort Cloud, taking some 250 years for a full lap of the Sun. Add in that the orbit is essentially unpredictable into the future, and you have a wild set of variables. A NASA mission called New Horizons launched last year will reach Pluto in 2015, but some worry the craft may be doomed by the amount of junk still floating aimlessly in the neighborhood, because it hasn’t been cleared.
Which brings us back to the IAU, which used this fact as grounds to, as some said, break the hearts of every child and adult who as a child had a map of the Solar System on their wall or mobile of the planets hanging from the ceiling. Even the canine Disney character, created in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the “newest planet,” howled when the IAU declared that Pluto was no longer a planet.
Mike Mickelson, professor emeritus of astronomy at Denison, passed along a comment from a colleague saying “science does not advance by authoritative pronouncements.” Dr. Mickelson and others have passed around a petition asking the IAU to reverse their proclamation, and allow the regular processes of science to work out a definition through study, research, and publication of proposals. They point out that Jupiter does not qualify as a planet under the new definition, since the neighborhood of Jupiter looks like a salvage yard on a Monday, space clutter-wise.
All agree that there is a bright spot in this whole debate, overdramatized by some as the “Great Pluto War.” The new discussion is not so much about yellow dogs or ninth planets, but a chance for greater awareness of the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune which turns out to have a pretty large population, and a number of objects larger than Pluto, such as 2005’s discovery, Eris, which was last closest to the Sun in 1700. Sedna, with an orbital period of 12,000 years, may be as large or larger than Pluto as well.
For astronomers interested in the Kuiper Belt, or real estate investors with an outer planets portfolio, these are boom times during the “Great Pluto War.”
* * *
* * *
Lost, and Found
Internet search engines often have a short line at the top of their “results page” telling you that the following information was recovered in something like “1.8 seconds” and there are “114,838” hits that match your search terms.
“Impressive,” rumbles Darth Vader.
Yes, a computer search for information has a force all its own, taking precision and accurary and moving with what seems beyond light speed swiftness through a dimply imagined ocean of bits, bytes, and file names.
On the other hand, if you type “lama” instead of “llama,” the sheaf of references dumped onto your screen will be utterly different, just as one misplaced punctuation mark will get you a “404 Not Found” or something entirely different.
You can be literally lost in the profusion of information, what some commentators call “datasmog.” The totality of information available on-line is amazing, and only manageable (so far) with tools that demand ruthless precision or return only what we know to look for, with the fringe benefit that you can hyperlink your way into unexpected fields of view, but related to the entry point you started with.
A crucial element of a more traditional library experience is the very fact that it is, in fact, limited. That limitation is comforting in many ways, even if the idea of something less than everything isn’t what modern life tends to value.
When you enter a collection, a campus library or museum archive, there is the strong sense of selection wrapped around you. Librarians and archivists know that the idea that every volume on the shelves was carefully picked and preserved is less than true; contingency and randomness leak in, but the presence of some overarching ideas and ideals is very real – the needs of undergraduate researchers, special areas of strength, a cultivated taste that has years more development than your own.
This may work against libraries in some ways, since we’re told by the culture in so many ways that our tastes and desires are absolute, but when confronted by a new challenge, there is an innate human desire to look to one side to see how an experienced hunter chases and catches the game, knowing that our ignorance might leave our bellies empty.
In the same way, we have a voice inside that wants at least a little direction, preferably from a wiser and more wily head. We know that book jackets and magazine covers, and now web pages, are carefully gamed and plotted to lure us to consume, and when a particular sort of content is needed, we need a trusted guide to take us to the moment of capture.
But there’s also a growing sense that a particular kind of guided serendipity is both fun, and useful. We want to find the thing that we didn’t know we were looking for, which can come through hyperlinks on webpages, no doubt about it; that isn’t quite going to work when we’re unsure of what we’re looking for in the first place. There’s a kind of affinity of things and objects cultivated by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, walking the stacks and thumbing the indexes, which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on-line.
The 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” got into ventriloquism by going to the library for a book that wasn’t there for a skill he was learning, but a book on ventriloquism was, so he signed it out. Asked after his win what the original book was about, he admitted “I don’t remember.”
Looking up some information on Frances Slocum, a girl abducted and adopted before the American Revolution by Native Americans out of Pennsylvania to my native Indiana, I found a number of books describing the amazing life of Mississinewa, as she became known. One of the books pointed me to the 70 volume set of Thwaites’ transcriptions and translations of the “Jesuit Relations,” letters of the 17th century from the frontier of the New World to missionary supervisors back in France and Italy. Flipping through those weighty, leather-bound books faster than I realistically could have scanned on-line (where the do, also, usefully reside), I found notes about ball games played for the entertainment of their black robe visitors, which pointed me to further works a few shelves over about seasonal practices of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, which led me to my first look at the ancient Newark Earthworks, sprawling across the valleys just east of Denison.
This was a decade before I first laid eyes on the mounds themselves, but the chain of connection that made me aware of them is still alive and vital in my mind a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, I struggle to reconstruct the chain of links that got me to an interesting article just yesterday. Was I reading that on the CNN website? No, wait, there was this thing in the newspaper’s on-line version that . . .
The very speed and subtlety of how one makes links with virtual information can undermine our ability to process and internalize what we’re learning, or maybe just consuming. As an informational consumer, I wonder how many “empty calories” I’m stuffing my mental diet with, never building up much lasting muscle or sinew, just buzzing off the intake and hungry soon for more.
I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s as true a statement as any of us can ever make. What I do know is that there are some ways of finding what I don’t know that I’m more sure to know later; that libraries and printed volumes aren’t the best way for me to check what the percentage of Americans who never read a book in a year is (just went on-line, that would be 1 in 4, he moaned), but if I want to drawn into my awareness how people learn to read and value it as adults, I’ll want to turn from the Wikipedia entry on Piaget and go to the stacks.
* * *
* * *
Indiana Jones Denied Tenure
If Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. were to go up for tenure at Denison as a professor of archaeology, his colleagues would doubtless have a number of hard questions for him about field methodology, use of sources, and publications.
The board of trustees, though, would likely want to know: “What did you do with the Ark of the Covenant?” Because it could lie hidden somewhere on our campus . . .
If you saw the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you may well recall that along with inappropriate relationships with students and daughters of colleagues, Indy rarely ended up with the “artifact” he was after in the first place (nor do you ever see him on his hands and knees for hours, in the sun, scraping off soil layers). The end of the first tale, set in 1936, saw US government agents assure Professor Jones (someone must have given him a position) that the ancient Biblical golden box, lost in the fall of Jerusalem, was in secure hands, studied by “top men.”
The “top men” were probably named Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, as the closing sequence shows the Ark of the Covenant being nailed into a crate and wheeled off into a vast government storage facility. But as it disappears into the towering aisles, a tantalizing clue is visible: an accession number for the National Archives, # 9906753.
Just a few years later, a major portion of the National Archives were brought to Denison University for safekeeping, fearing the possibilities of Nazi Germany raiding Washington DC itself from the sea, or at least bombarding the nation’s capital by ship and inflicting a blow on our country’s morale. The location where the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were hidden has never been officially revealed, but is generally considered to have been Fort Knox, Kentucky.
The rest of our national heritage, including items like the George Washington papers, the Northwest Ordinance, and Henry Ford’s grocery lists, came to Granville and went up the hill to the basement of Swasey Chapel, where crates and boxes were piled high and packed tight.
Could anything from those days have been left behind? Heather Lyle, university archivist, doubts it. “We don’t retain any items from those days other than the records of our arrangement with the federal government,” she says.
What if someone had crept in and stolen a particular item from the trove? Were there armed guards? “There were soldiers and officers in training on campus all during the World War II period, but no armed guards that we’re aware of.”
The number on the crate containing the “lost ark” is not in our record-keeping system, either. But isn’t that what you’d expect? What if some on campus during those dark days thought the Ark too valuable to let return to the thoughtless hands of civil officials? Might it still be here, carefully hidden?
And imagine the latest sequel: “Indiana Jones and the College on the Hill,” with love interest Jennifer Garner, and wacky sidekick Steve Carell.
* * *
* * *
Mindprints
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page
Somewhere between an image in a book and a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
The parchment Declaration of Independence that nestles into a high-tech frame at the National Archives is a very different experience from reading the text of Jefferson’s words and a list of signers on page 27 of the class text. Out into the hills and hollows of the thirteen colonies, how did Americans in late 1776 and early 1777 first encounter those startling words?
Their experience would be similar to the one enjoyed by many Denison students last fall thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled. Important works on human rights and liberty are the special focus of this collection, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the selections brought to Denison included an early printing of the Declaration, a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350, and the first publication of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in book form.
When President Dale Knobel gave a lecture on the role Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” played in the early republic, and how that impact was echoed in the slow, steady spread of Lincoln’s formulations across American understanding of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” listeners could pass around the room – carefully! – versions that were exactly what the first audiences received on their release.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, who was an honored Civil War officer in his youth and hired Alger Hiss as one of his last law clerks in the early 1930’s. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (where it sails to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past the survival of his reputation.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View
When some fellow says to the disgruntled Alfalfa, after George Bailey steals his girl in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the fateful words “Did you know there’s a pool under that floor?” – we know it’s only a matter of time before the pool is revealed, with the only question being who will fall in (answer: everyone).
Even without a gym floor hiding it, pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the lines and the drains and the bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there is something shocking about the sloping, slanted void that gapes within the edge.
It isn’t the pool that you see, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on. The tiles are geometric and discrete, and you step away, not towards.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building. Somehow the idea of a pool once below us will likely continue to intrigue, and provoke.
* * *
No Propellers
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
Lost & Found – Mindprints – DenMag edit2 08
* * *
Gadgets for Gnosis [144 wds.]
Not so very long ago, boys built crystal set radios from kits ordered off the back of pulp magazines, girls drew architectural renderings with colored pencils bought at the art store off of courthouse square, and philosophy professors built . . . logic machines, from home-brew motherboards out of wires and switches.
Professor Maylan Hepp's Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine looks like an artifact from centuries ago in this day of solid state electronics and silicon chips and flash memory of 5G in your shirt pocket. Well, the last century, anyhow. Logic problems in philosophy, for those who got beyond “Socrates was a man, all men have hair; therefore, Socrates had hair,” can get incredibly complicated. Before algorithms powered your handheld gaming device, this was one way to test out sets of propositions – and like that crystal radio set, Dr. Hepp built it himself.
* * *
What’s a Syllogisiac? [157 wds.]
If you were a student of Professor Maylan Hepp in the 1950’s, you didn’t have “The Sims” on your laptop, a calculator in your cell phone, or even a mainframe computer to run problems of symbolic logic. You would learn how sets and symbols and propositions would operate by Dr. Hepp’s guidance through the switches and lights of his own, home built Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine.
The properties of propositional and predicate logic allow mathematicians and philosophers to manipulate variables in ways that can be done swiftly and easily on modern computer programs. Just 50 years ago, these means were still only visible in sci-fi movies (and were still bigger than Robbie the Robot). To mechanically run through a series of permutations without a room full of blackboards and a box of chalk, Hepp’s Syllogisiac was the only way at Denison to manipulate such problems until the arrival of the first computer systems in the late 1960’s.
* * *
Mindprints [untouched – 210 wds.]
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page [edited to 146 wds.]
You can talk about the Magna Carta of 1215 from a political science text on the birth of civil rights, and you can go to the National Archives in Washington or a couple of cathedrals in England to see the original sheepskin manuscripts.
Somewhere between an image in a book or a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
Thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation based in Jeffersonville, Indiana that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled, members of the Denison community had the chance to literally pick up and consider a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350. It was a version like this one that brought the meaning of human rights and liberty into the daily workings of the English legal system, the basis for American democracy today.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock [edited to 180 wds.]
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, an honored Civil War officer when young and had Alger Hiss as a law clerk when an elder statesman. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father, OWH, Sr., was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (so preserved to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past fame’s survival.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View [edited down to 160 wds.]
Pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the submerged lines and bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there’s something shocking about the sloping, slanted void. It isn’t the pool that you normally look at, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building.
* * *
No Propellers [didn’t change – 137 wds.]
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is [will change when I know what your picture is! – now 293 wds.]
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
* * *
Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [first unused draft]
How would you feel if you were digging through a large crate for, say, a “major award” and didn’t find anything (not even a lamp shaped like a leg)?
Then you find out later it was what you only thought was packing material, the little white peanuts, or straw, or blocks of foam, that actually had value. Ow.
If DNA can be compared to the leg lamp, then Jeff Thompson, assistant professor of biology, is working to get people to take a look at the stuff Ralphie and his dad would just toss aside. Instead of “excelsior,” the stuff is called “histone,” and histones may not only play a role in building DNA, but as proteins themselves, actually interact with this building block of life to build and repair chromosomes. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes are made of in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ‘07, Arzu Arat, Lindsey Bostelman ‘05, and Andrew Keller ‘06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), gets repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named “DNA Repair.”
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of the genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. If DNA is the blueprint of life, histones work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
* * *
*thanks to a note from Jeff Thompson –
* * *
Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [take two]
If DNA is the blueprint of life, “histones” work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
Biology professor Jeff Thompson is showing students how to work with histones, and manage their ability to repair damage that comes with the wear and tear of everyday life. This mundane maintenance process within the cell sounds unremarkable, until you realize that repair and rebuilding processes running out of control is better known as – cancer.
Histones not only play a role in building DNA strands, but they are proteins themselves, interacting with the building blocks of life to build and maintain the inheritable genetic blueprint of an organism. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material that makes up those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ’07, Arzu Arat ’08, Lindsey Bostelman ’05, and Andrew Keller ’06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), is repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named DNA Repair.
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. That’s where histones and other proteins draw out the details that may fit into the broader strokes sketched by DNA.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
* * *
Who Are You Callin’ a Dwarf Planet?
Astronomers are not known for their combative nature.
Long nights glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, or even longer days analyzing data from giant dish antennas, can leave them sleepless, but usually not feisty.
The gloves came off recently at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), when a panel announced a new definition of “planet” which left out Pluto, relegating the once ninth planet to the status of “dwarf planet.”
In a nutshell, the IAU definition sounds pretty straightforward, starting with orbiting a sun (remember, this is not just a definition for our neighborhood, the Solar System), and having enough gravity to become a sphere, but then they said a planet should “clear out its neighborhood.” This isn’t some cosmic block watch program, doing citizen arrests of graffiti artists, but a cosmological process where dust and sky junk is gathered by a regular orbit into tidy heaps, or better yet, moons.
Pluto has been known for some years to have a small moon, Charon, and the Hubble Space Telescope has added Nix and Hydra to Pluto’s realm. What makes Pluto unique by any standard is the vast, irregular orbit dipping down into Neptune’s neighborhood and looping off towards the Oort Cloud, taking some 250 years for a full lap of the Sun. Add in that the orbit is essentially unpredictable into the future, and you have a wild set of variables. A NASA mission called New Horizons launched last year will reach Pluto in 2015, but some worry the craft may be doomed by the amount of junk still floating aimlessly in the neighborhood, because it hasn’t been cleared.
Which brings us back to the IAU, which used this fact as grounds to, as some said, break the hearts of every child and adult who as a child had a map of the Solar System on their wall or mobile of the planets hanging from the ceiling. Even the canine Disney character, created in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the “newest planet,” howled when the IAU declared that Pluto was no longer a planet.
Mike Mickelson, professor emeritus of astronomy at Denison, passed along a comment from a colleague saying “science does not advance by authoritative pronouncements.” Dr. Mickelson and others have passed around a petition asking the IAU to reverse their proclamation, and allow the regular processes of science to work out a definition through study, research, and publication of proposals. They point out that Jupiter does not qualify as a planet under the new definition, since the neighborhood of Jupiter looks like a salvage yard on a Monday, space clutter-wise.
All agree that there is a bright spot in this whole debate, overdramatized by some as the “Great Pluto War.” The new discussion is not so much about yellow dogs or ninth planets, but a chance for greater awareness of the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune which turns out to have a pretty large population, and a number of objects larger than Pluto, such as 2005’s discovery, Eris, which was last closest to the Sun in 1700. Sedna, with an orbital period of 12,000 years, may be as large or larger than Pluto as well.
For astronomers interested in the Kuiper Belt, or real estate investors with an outer planets portfolio, these are boom times during the “Great Pluto War.”
* * *
* * *
Lost, and Found
Internet search engines often have a short line at the top of their “results page” telling you that the following information was recovered in something like “1.8 seconds” and there are “114,838” hits that match your search terms.
“Impressive,” rumbles Darth Vader.
Yes, a computer search for information has a force all its own, taking precision and accurary and moving with what seems beyond light speed swiftness through a dimply imagined ocean of bits, bytes, and file names.
On the other hand, if you type “lama” instead of “llama,” the sheaf of references dumped onto your screen will be utterly different, just as one misplaced punctuation mark will get you a “404 Not Found” or something entirely different.
You can be literally lost in the profusion of information, what some commentators call “datasmog.” The totality of information available on-line is amazing, and only manageable (so far) with tools that demand ruthless precision or return only what we know to look for, with the fringe benefit that you can hyperlink your way into unexpected fields of view, but related to the entry point you started with.
A crucial element of a more traditional library experience is the very fact that it is, in fact, limited. That limitation is comforting in many ways, even if the idea of something less than everything isn’t what modern life tends to value.
When you enter a collection, a campus library or museum archive, there is the strong sense of selection wrapped around you. Librarians and archivists know that the idea that every volume on the shelves was carefully picked and preserved is less than true; contingency and randomness leak in, but the presence of some overarching ideas and ideals is very real – the needs of undergraduate researchers, special areas of strength, a cultivated taste that has years more development than your own.
This may work against libraries in some ways, since we’re told by the culture in so many ways that our tastes and desires are absolute, but when confronted by a new challenge, there is an innate human desire to look to one side to see how an experienced hunter chases and catches the game, knowing that our ignorance might leave our bellies empty.
In the same way, we have a voice inside that wants at least a little direction, preferably from a wiser and more wily head. We know that book jackets and magazine covers, and now web pages, are carefully gamed and plotted to lure us to consume, and when a particular sort of content is needed, we need a trusted guide to take us to the moment of capture.
But there’s also a growing sense that a particular kind of guided serendipity is both fun, and useful. We want to find the thing that we didn’t know we were looking for, which can come through hyperlinks on webpages, no doubt about it; that isn’t quite going to work when we’re unsure of what we’re looking for in the first place. There’s a kind of affinity of things and objects cultivated by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, walking the stacks and thumbing the indexes, which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on-line.
The 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” got into ventriloquism by going to the library for a book that wasn’t there for a skill he was learning, but a book on ventriloquism was, so he signed it out. Asked after his win what the original book was about, he admitted “I don’t remember.”
Looking up some information on Frances Slocum, a girl abducted and adopted before the American Revolution by Native Americans out of Pennsylvania to my native Indiana, I found a number of books describing the amazing life of Mississinewa, as she became known. One of the books pointed me to the 70 volume set of Thwaites’ transcriptions and translations of the “Jesuit Relations,” letters of the 17th century from the frontier of the New World to missionary supervisors back in France and Italy. Flipping through those weighty, leather-bound books faster than I realistically could have scanned on-line (where the do, also, usefully reside), I found notes about ball games played for the entertainment of their black robe visitors, which pointed me to further works a few shelves over about seasonal practices of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, which led me to my first look at the ancient Newark Earthworks, sprawling across the valleys just east of Denison.
This was a decade before I first laid eyes on the mounds themselves, but the chain of connection that made me aware of them is still alive and vital in my mind a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, I struggle to reconstruct the chain of links that got me to an interesting article just yesterday. Was I reading that on the CNN website? No, wait, there was this thing in the newspaper’s on-line version that . . .
The very speed and subtlety of how one makes links with virtual information can undermine our ability to process and internalize what we’re learning, or maybe just consuming. As an informational consumer, I wonder how many “empty calories” I’m stuffing my mental diet with, never building up much lasting muscle or sinew, just buzzing off the intake and hungry soon for more.
I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s as true a statement as any of us can ever make. What I do know is that there are some ways of finding what I don’t know that I’m more sure to know later; that libraries and printed volumes aren’t the best way for me to check what the percentage of Americans who never read a book in a year is (just went on-line, that would be 1 in 4, he moaned), but if I want to drawn into my awareness how people learn to read and value it as adults, I’ll want to turn from the Wikipedia entry on Piaget and go to the stacks.
* * *
* * *
Indiana Jones Denied Tenure
If Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. were to go up for tenure at Denison as a professor of archaeology, his colleagues would doubtless have a number of hard questions for him about field methodology, use of sources, and publications.
The board of trustees, though, would likely want to know: “What did you do with the Ark of the Covenant?” Because it could lie hidden somewhere on our campus . . .
If you saw the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you may well recall that along with inappropriate relationships with students and daughters of colleagues, Indy rarely ended up with the “artifact” he was after in the first place (nor do you ever see him on his hands and knees for hours, in the sun, scraping off soil layers). The end of the first tale, set in 1936, saw US government agents assure Professor Jones (someone must have given him a position) that the ancient Biblical golden box, lost in the fall of Jerusalem, was in secure hands, studied by “top men.”
The “top men” were probably named Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, as the closing sequence shows the Ark of the Covenant being nailed into a crate and wheeled off into a vast government storage facility. But as it disappears into the towering aisles, a tantalizing clue is visible: an accession number for the National Archives, # 9906753.
Just a few years later, a major portion of the National Archives were brought to Denison University for safekeeping, fearing the possibilities of Nazi Germany raiding Washington DC itself from the sea, or at least bombarding the nation’s capital by ship and inflicting a blow on our country’s morale. The location where the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were hidden has never been officially revealed, but is generally considered to have been Fort Knox, Kentucky.
The rest of our national heritage, including items like the George Washington papers, the Northwest Ordinance, and Henry Ford’s grocery lists, came to Granville and went up the hill to the basement of Swasey Chapel, where crates and boxes were piled high and packed tight.
Could anything from those days have been left behind? Heather Lyle, university archivist, doubts it. “We don’t retain any items from those days other than the records of our arrangement with the federal government,” she says.
What if someone had crept in and stolen a particular item from the trove? Were there armed guards? “There were soldiers and officers in training on campus all during the World War II period, but no armed guards that we’re aware of.”
The number on the crate containing the “lost ark” is not in our record-keeping system, either. But isn’t that what you’d expect? What if some on campus during those dark days thought the Ark too valuable to let return to the thoughtless hands of civil officials? Might it still be here, carefully hidden?
And imagine the latest sequel: “Indiana Jones and the College on the Hill,” with love interest Jennifer Garner, and wacky sidekick Steve Carell.
* * *
* * *
Mindprints
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page
Somewhere between an image in a book and a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
The parchment Declaration of Independence that nestles into a high-tech frame at the National Archives is a very different experience from reading the text of Jefferson’s words and a list of signers on page 27 of the class text. Out into the hills and hollows of the thirteen colonies, how did Americans in late 1776 and early 1777 first encounter those startling words?
Their experience would be similar to the one enjoyed by many Denison students last fall thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled. Important works on human rights and liberty are the special focus of this collection, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the selections brought to Denison included an early printing of the Declaration, a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350, and the first publication of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in book form.
When President Dale Knobel gave a lecture on the role Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” played in the early republic, and how that impact was echoed in the slow, steady spread of Lincoln’s formulations across American understanding of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” listeners could pass around the room – carefully! – versions that were exactly what the first audiences received on their release.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, who was an honored Civil War officer in his youth and hired Alger Hiss as one of his last law clerks in the early 1930’s. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (where it sails to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past the survival of his reputation.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View
When some fellow says to the disgruntled Alfalfa, after George Bailey steals his girl in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the fateful words “Did you know there’s a pool under that floor?” – we know it’s only a matter of time before the pool is revealed, with the only question being who will fall in (answer: everyone).
Even without a gym floor hiding it, pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the lines and the drains and the bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there is something shocking about the sloping, slanted void that gapes within the edge.
It isn’t the pool that you see, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on. The tiles are geometric and discrete, and you step away, not towards.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building. Somehow the idea of a pool once below us will likely continue to intrigue, and provoke.
* * *
No Propellers
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
Lost & Found – Mindprints – DenMag edit2 08
* * *
Gadgets for Gnosis [144 wds.]
Not so very long ago, boys built crystal set radios from kits ordered off the back of pulp magazines, girls drew architectural renderings with colored pencils bought at the art store off of courthouse square, and philosophy professors built . . . logic machines, from home-brew motherboards out of wires and switches.
Professor Maylan Hepp's Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine looks like an artifact from centuries ago in this day of solid state electronics and silicon chips and flash memory of 5G in your shirt pocket. Well, the last century, anyhow. Logic problems in philosophy, for those who got beyond “Socrates was a man, all men have hair; therefore, Socrates had hair,” can get incredibly complicated. Before algorithms powered your handheld gaming device, this was one way to test out sets of propositions – and like that crystal radio set, Dr. Hepp built it himself.
* * *
What’s a Syllogisiac? [157 wds.]
If you were a student of Professor Maylan Hepp in the 1950’s, you didn’t have “The Sims” on your laptop, a calculator in your cell phone, or even a mainframe computer to run problems of symbolic logic. You would learn how sets and symbols and propositions would operate by Dr. Hepp’s guidance through the switches and lights of his own, home built Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine.
The properties of propositional and predicate logic allow mathematicians and philosophers to manipulate variables in ways that can be done swiftly and easily on modern computer programs. Just 50 years ago, these means were still only visible in sci-fi movies (and were still bigger than Robbie the Robot). To mechanically run through a series of permutations without a room full of blackboards and a box of chalk, Hepp’s Syllogisiac was the only way at Denison to manipulate such problems until the arrival of the first computer systems in the late 1960’s.
* * *
Mindprints [untouched – 210 wds.]
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page [edited to 146 wds.]
You can talk about the Magna Carta of 1215 from a political science text on the birth of civil rights, and you can go to the National Archives in Washington or a couple of cathedrals in England to see the original sheepskin manuscripts.
Somewhere between an image in a book or a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
Thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation based in Jeffersonville, Indiana that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled, members of the Denison community had the chance to literally pick up and consider a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350. It was a version like this one that brought the meaning of human rights and liberty into the daily workings of the English legal system, the basis for American democracy today.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock [edited to 180 wds.]
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, an honored Civil War officer when young and had Alger Hiss as a law clerk when an elder statesman. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father, OWH, Sr., was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (so preserved to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past fame’s survival.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View [edited down to 160 wds.]
Pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the submerged lines and bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there’s something shocking about the sloping, slanted void. It isn’t the pool that you normally look at, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building.
* * *
No Propellers [didn’t change – 137 wds.]
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is [will change when I know what your picture is! – now 293 wds.]
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
Licking County CVB Magazine 2008
* * *
Fragile Strength Makes Lasting Beauty – National Heisey Glass Museum
Glass is a significant part of human civilization, from over 4,000 years ago to your last look out a window today.
In ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), across the Roman Empire, and for the earliest American colonists, glass making by heating and blowing and shaping the red hot fluid into a stable, brittle form has always been a highly respected, even magical art.
For Licking County, glassmaking industries have long been part of the landscape, and the summit of those achievements is visible at the National Heisey Glass Museum, on Sixth Street near downtown Newark.
Part of the Veteran’s Park series of historic structures, the museum is located in one of the area’s rich heritage of Greek Revival style buildings, dating to 1831 and moved onto the present site in 1973. The Heisey Collectors of America, Inc. own and operate this museum next door to their neighbors, the Licking County Historical Society.
Collectors of the HCA have donated or loaned the 4,500 objects which were made by the distinguished A. H. Heisey & Co. glassmaking firm between 1896 and 1957. You will find on display every imaginable color and form that a piece of glass can take, arranged to show the craftsmanship, originality, and quality that have long been associated with the Heisey name.
Augustus Heisey was born in Germany, home of many American pioneer glass artisans. He fought in the American Civil War including on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, and following the war began his career, culminating in the firm which bore his name. Hand-blown glass was the particular specialty of the Heisey company, and the unique quality that also led to the firm’s demise, with the importation of mass produced machine-blown glass from overseas in the 1950’s.
What machine-blown glass can’t offer is the fine detail and exquisite lines of what Heisey collectors seek, and why so many come to view the collection in Newark. Etched, cut, and colored, glass goes through thousands of degrees of heat that goes for a short time into cherry red, back down through glowing yellows, to the enduring hues placed in the crystalline structure by minerals and chemicals baked into the substance itself . . . meaning that when you return a century or two from now to see the National Heisey Glass Museum again, the colors in bright sunlight will look just as they do on your visit this year.
A 25 minute movie on Heisey Glass is available to visitors during museum hours; they are closed Mondays, and for hours on other days, call 740.345.2932, or check www.heiseymuseum.org.
* * *
Little Gears Turn Big Minds – The Works
At the corner of Newark’s First Street and Scheidler St., a piece of industrial history houses a wide range of not only historic artifacts, but also a vibrant home for cultural activity, community engagement, and education.
The Scheidler Machine Works building went up in 1861, at the heart of Newark’s industrial birth, a three story shop for fabricating steam engines. Local businessman and industrialist Howard LeFevre saw it empty and abandoned in the 1980’s, but could see potential in the solid brick walls and historic neighborhood, once the Ohio & Erie Canal route through the city’s south side. He had ridden the electric interurbans as a boy, helped build a national infrastructure through interstate transportation, and knew personally the inventors of fiberglas and other pioneers of modern technology.
Why not a museum of technology, from the first flint tool makers of Licking County, through blacksmiths and glassblowers to Reinhard Schiedler himself, and on to education for children and families in the technology that shapes our world today? Hands-on exhibits and working displays of what builds the world we live in, where kids could turn a crank and see an entire workshop spring to life?
Mr. LeFevre’s dream has expanded to become an “Ohio Center for History, Art, & Technology,” with status as a Smithsonian Affiliate museum since 2002. The LeFevre Courtyard hosted his 100th birthday party in 2007, and from the newest art on display to ancient Native American artifacts, The Works is born anew almost every day.
Tuesdays through Saturdays are daily glassblowing demonstrations -- an unforgettable demonstration of unimaginable temperatures, skillfully handled and unbelievably shaped to become everything from elegant pitchers to simple, squat pumpkins. The Art Works Museum hosts a variety of different exhibits through the year, along with the various artisans to put on workshops and living history demonstrations.
To find out what wheels are turning at The Works when you visit, check www.attheworks.org, or call 740.349.9277. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
* * *
Rooted in Licking County
William Dawes rode just a horse behind Paul Revere, galloping on the road to Lexington and Concord (you know, “one if by land, two if by sea”), and unlike the more famous silversmith and patriot, Dawes actually made it to Lexington.
His descendants made it into the Ohio Territory, helped to found Marietta College, and went into a range of fields, such as Charles Dawes, who was vice-president of the United States and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Charles had a brother, Beman Gates Dawes, who married a vivacious young woman named Bertie Burr who won a medal for lifesaving and loved the outdoors. Beman and Bertie built a family around his work building up the Pure Oil Company, and they built a legacy around their family home south of Newark, “Daweswood.”
Among foresters and arborists and plain old lovers of trees, Beman, the quiet Dawes, is the famous one. He and Bertie founded an arboretum in 1929, inspired by the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, Illinois, home of Arbor Day. They began with trees they planted around their house. Inviting “tree dedicators” like brother Charles, his close friend Gen. John Pershing, and other notables of the 1920’s and 30’s became a way to help the general public, not just their friends and family, identify with the cause of replanting an Ohio landscape that was still nearly cut bare of forestation.
The Dawes Arboretum now extends far beyond the original groves, still the heart of TDA’s 1,700 acres. Hiking trails and auto tour routes wind for miles across a rolling landscape looking across the valley of the Licking River’s South Fork.
Their motto is “Dedicated to increasing the love and knowledge of trees, history and the natural world,” and this dedication is rooted in the preservation of old growth trees, for nurturing unique species brought for experimental purposes to central Ohio, and to new ways of appreciating the diversity of a natural landscape.
A carefully manicured Japanese Garden, complete with Zen garden of raked gravel and standing stones, nestles into a hillside where further up, a Holly Grove with many different evergreen shrubs grow to remarkable dimensions. The southern extent of the grounds features the words “Dawes Arboretum” in hedge lettering so vast they can be clearly read by passengers heading for a landing at Port Columbus Airport, and in the northern reaches, a newly constructed wetlands zone allows plants from Ohio’s earliest, post-glacial landscape to return and flourish.
Your visit to the grounds of this beautiful arboretum can be as long or short as your schedule allows; their Nature Center will soon undergo extensive renovations, just one part of an ongoing plan of improvement and interpretation for the general public. A Gift Shop is part of the main office area with items of particular interest to birders.
The gates are open from dawn to sunset every day of the year, except New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with free admission to the grounds. For detailed information about Visitor Center hours and special programs, call 800.44.DAWES, 740.323.2355, or click www.dawesarb.org. you can reach the Daweswood gates at 7770 Jacksontown Rd. SE (Ohio Route 13) six miles south of Newark and four miles north of the Rt. 13 exit off I-70.
* * *
This Land Is Your Land
The Licking Park District began life as an organization in 1989, when interested citizens and the county commissioners authorized the establishment of a board of park commissioners. Their job, then and now, is to acquire, preserve, and present the natural wonders of this diverse county to the residents and visitors of Licking County.
Over 1,400 acres in almost a dozen sites are now held as a public trust, maintaining open space and natural areas while residential growth edges out of Columbus, our state capital, towards Licking County. The commissioners and staff of the LPD also watch over and maintain the county rails-to-trails network.
Headquartered at Infirmary Mound Park on Lancaster Road, Ohio Route 37, you can find out what’s going on where around the county system by calling Park HQ at 740.587.2535, or checking the always interesting park district website, www.lickingparkdistrict.org.
One of the newest features of the LPD is their William C. Kraner Nature Center, located in the southeastern corner of Licking County, on Fairview Road just off of Linnville Road, towards Flint Ridge State Memorial. This nearly 3,000 square foot facility contains displays and exhibits for all ages, with a primary focus on children.
Opened in 2001, the staff continues to regularly update the material out for hands-on education and play. The Nature Center is on the southern edge of the Taft Reserve of LPD, whose 425 acres extend north all the way to Flint Ridge Road, with trails for hiking and, like many of the trails in the LPD system, for horseback riding as well. A hike in the Taft Reserve will take you on a loop past Native American mounds built over two millennia in the past, and back to computer stations in the center where the latest information on migratory birds and plant species is just a click away today.
The William C. Kraner Nature Center is free and open to the public Tuesdays to Sundays from Noon to 4:00 pm and other times by special arrangement; the entire building is handicapped accessible. To contact the Nature Center itself, call 740.323.0520.
* * *
CVB Finds a New, Old Home! [322 words]
Licking County is one of Ohio’s largest counties, and contains the largest complex of ancient geometric earthworks in the world.
When the award-winning museum at the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks needed refurbishment after thirty years of service, great minds thought alike, and saw a chance to put the hub of visitor services for the county there.
The Ohio Historical Society, owner of major portions of the remaining Newark Earthworks, continues as an active partner, while the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau staff and volunteers offer a warm welcome year-round.
Already, visitors from many states and even a few foreign countries have dropped by and been glad to have a friendly face to greet them. Knowledge of the upcoming nomination of the earthworks as a “World Heritage Site” recognized by the United Nations has kept visitation growing.
A new museum display with interactive exhibits and a number of artifacts related to the area will open this spring, and a dedication ceremony with participation by Native American representatives will officially open the already busy space.
Office space and informational displays for the diversity of Licking County visitor experiences is located in this new facility at the Great Circle, but it’s actually just the center of a large, ever-growing circle of communication and connection to a national and global travel and tourism market.
Just as visitors brought materials from distant cultures, like copper and mica and seashells, in exchange for natural resources such as the multi-colored flint of ancient Licking County 2,000 years ago, today we offer the cultural and economic diversity of today’s landscape as an experience our visitors can take home with them.
If they want to buy some handmade baskets, decorative glass, or even pieces of Flint Ridge flint to take home, that would complete a circle of sorts, wouldn’t it?
And the new Great Circle Visitor’s Center, home of the CVB, will be the center of that circle.
* * *
Licking County Courthouse [91 words]
From 1809 to the present, four courthouses have stood on the "public square" at the heart of Licking County. A new brick building in 1815 replaced the original log structure, which was then supplanted in 1832 by an attractive building which burnt down in 1874. Today's Courthouse was erected in the French Provincial style popular in 1876, just in time for the nation's centennial; a fire in 1879 led to a magnificent restoration whose West Courtroom on the second floor is admired to this day, and the iconic central clock tower.
* * *
Fragile Strength Makes Lasting Beauty – National Heisey Glass Museum
Glass is a significant part of human civilization, from over 4,000 years ago to your last look out a window today.
In ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), across the Roman Empire, and for the earliest American colonists, glass making by heating and blowing and shaping the red hot fluid into a stable, brittle form has always been a highly respected, even magical art.
For Licking County, glassmaking industries have long been part of the landscape, and the summit of those achievements is visible at the National Heisey Glass Museum, on Sixth Street near downtown Newark.
Part of the Veteran’s Park series of historic structures, the museum is located in one of the area’s rich heritage of Greek Revival style buildings, dating to 1831 and moved onto the present site in 1973. The Heisey Collectors of America, Inc. own and operate this museum next door to their neighbors, the Licking County Historical Society.
Collectors of the HCA have donated or loaned the 4,500 objects which were made by the distinguished A. H. Heisey & Co. glassmaking firm between 1896 and 1957. You will find on display every imaginable color and form that a piece of glass can take, arranged to show the craftsmanship, originality, and quality that have long been associated with the Heisey name.
Augustus Heisey was born in Germany, home of many American pioneer glass artisans. He fought in the American Civil War including on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, and following the war began his career, culminating in the firm which bore his name. Hand-blown glass was the particular specialty of the Heisey company, and the unique quality that also led to the firm’s demise, with the importation of mass produced machine-blown glass from overseas in the 1950’s.
What machine-blown glass can’t offer is the fine detail and exquisite lines of what Heisey collectors seek, and why so many come to view the collection in Newark. Etched, cut, and colored, glass goes through thousands of degrees of heat that goes for a short time into cherry red, back down through glowing yellows, to the enduring hues placed in the crystalline structure by minerals and chemicals baked into the substance itself . . . meaning that when you return a century or two from now to see the National Heisey Glass Museum again, the colors in bright sunlight will look just as they do on your visit this year.
A 25 minute movie on Heisey Glass is available to visitors during museum hours; they are closed Mondays, and for hours on other days, call 740.345.2932, or check www.heiseymuseum.org.
* * *
Little Gears Turn Big Minds – The Works
At the corner of Newark’s First Street and Scheidler St., a piece of industrial history houses a wide range of not only historic artifacts, but also a vibrant home for cultural activity, community engagement, and education.
The Scheidler Machine Works building went up in 1861, at the heart of Newark’s industrial birth, a three story shop for fabricating steam engines. Local businessman and industrialist Howard LeFevre saw it empty and abandoned in the 1980’s, but could see potential in the solid brick walls and historic neighborhood, once the Ohio & Erie Canal route through the city’s south side. He had ridden the electric interurbans as a boy, helped build a national infrastructure through interstate transportation, and knew personally the inventors of fiberglas and other pioneers of modern technology.
Why not a museum of technology, from the first flint tool makers of Licking County, through blacksmiths and glassblowers to Reinhard Schiedler himself, and on to education for children and families in the technology that shapes our world today? Hands-on exhibits and working displays of what builds the world we live in, where kids could turn a crank and see an entire workshop spring to life?
Mr. LeFevre’s dream has expanded to become an “Ohio Center for History, Art, & Technology,” with status as a Smithsonian Affiliate museum since 2002. The LeFevre Courtyard hosted his 100th birthday party in 2007, and from the newest art on display to ancient Native American artifacts, The Works is born anew almost every day.
Tuesdays through Saturdays are daily glassblowing demonstrations -- an unforgettable demonstration of unimaginable temperatures, skillfully handled and unbelievably shaped to become everything from elegant pitchers to simple, squat pumpkins. The Art Works Museum hosts a variety of different exhibits through the year, along with the various artisans to put on workshops and living history demonstrations.
To find out what wheels are turning at The Works when you visit, check www.attheworks.org, or call 740.349.9277. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
* * *
Rooted in Licking County
William Dawes rode just a horse behind Paul Revere, galloping on the road to Lexington and Concord (you know, “one if by land, two if by sea”), and unlike the more famous silversmith and patriot, Dawes actually made it to Lexington.
His descendants made it into the Ohio Territory, helped to found Marietta College, and went into a range of fields, such as Charles Dawes, who was vice-president of the United States and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Charles had a brother, Beman Gates Dawes, who married a vivacious young woman named Bertie Burr who won a medal for lifesaving and loved the outdoors. Beman and Bertie built a family around his work building up the Pure Oil Company, and they built a legacy around their family home south of Newark, “Daweswood.”
Among foresters and arborists and plain old lovers of trees, Beman, the quiet Dawes, is the famous one. He and Bertie founded an arboretum in 1929, inspired by the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, Illinois, home of Arbor Day. They began with trees they planted around their house. Inviting “tree dedicators” like brother Charles, his close friend Gen. John Pershing, and other notables of the 1920’s and 30’s became a way to help the general public, not just their friends and family, identify with the cause of replanting an Ohio landscape that was still nearly cut bare of forestation.
The Dawes Arboretum now extends far beyond the original groves, still the heart of TDA’s 1,700 acres. Hiking trails and auto tour routes wind for miles across a rolling landscape looking across the valley of the Licking River’s South Fork.
Their motto is “Dedicated to increasing the love and knowledge of trees, history and the natural world,” and this dedication is rooted in the preservation of old growth trees, for nurturing unique species brought for experimental purposes to central Ohio, and to new ways of appreciating the diversity of a natural landscape.
A carefully manicured Japanese Garden, complete with Zen garden of raked gravel and standing stones, nestles into a hillside where further up, a Holly Grove with many different evergreen shrubs grow to remarkable dimensions. The southern extent of the grounds features the words “Dawes Arboretum” in hedge lettering so vast they can be clearly read by passengers heading for a landing at Port Columbus Airport, and in the northern reaches, a newly constructed wetlands zone allows plants from Ohio’s earliest, post-glacial landscape to return and flourish.
Your visit to the grounds of this beautiful arboretum can be as long or short as your schedule allows; their Nature Center will soon undergo extensive renovations, just one part of an ongoing plan of improvement and interpretation for the general public. A Gift Shop is part of the main office area with items of particular interest to birders.
The gates are open from dawn to sunset every day of the year, except New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with free admission to the grounds. For detailed information about Visitor Center hours and special programs, call 800.44.DAWES, 740.323.2355, or click www.dawesarb.org. you can reach the Daweswood gates at 7770 Jacksontown Rd. SE (Ohio Route 13) six miles south of Newark and four miles north of the Rt. 13 exit off I-70.
* * *
This Land Is Your Land
The Licking Park District began life as an organization in 1989, when interested citizens and the county commissioners authorized the establishment of a board of park commissioners. Their job, then and now, is to acquire, preserve, and present the natural wonders of this diverse county to the residents and visitors of Licking County.
Over 1,400 acres in almost a dozen sites are now held as a public trust, maintaining open space and natural areas while residential growth edges out of Columbus, our state capital, towards Licking County. The commissioners and staff of the LPD also watch over and maintain the county rails-to-trails network.
Headquartered at Infirmary Mound Park on Lancaster Road, Ohio Route 37, you can find out what’s going on where around the county system by calling Park HQ at 740.587.2535, or checking the always interesting park district website, www.lickingparkdistrict.org.
One of the newest features of the LPD is their William C. Kraner Nature Center, located in the southeastern corner of Licking County, on Fairview Road just off of Linnville Road, towards Flint Ridge State Memorial. This nearly 3,000 square foot facility contains displays and exhibits for all ages, with a primary focus on children.
Opened in 2001, the staff continues to regularly update the material out for hands-on education and play. The Nature Center is on the southern edge of the Taft Reserve of LPD, whose 425 acres extend north all the way to Flint Ridge Road, with trails for hiking and, like many of the trails in the LPD system, for horseback riding as well. A hike in the Taft Reserve will take you on a loop past Native American mounds built over two millennia in the past, and back to computer stations in the center where the latest information on migratory birds and plant species is just a click away today.
The William C. Kraner Nature Center is free and open to the public Tuesdays to Sundays from Noon to 4:00 pm and other times by special arrangement; the entire building is handicapped accessible. To contact the Nature Center itself, call 740.323.0520.
* * *
CVB Finds a New, Old Home! [322 words]
Licking County is one of Ohio’s largest counties, and contains the largest complex of ancient geometric earthworks in the world.
When the award-winning museum at the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks needed refurbishment after thirty years of service, great minds thought alike, and saw a chance to put the hub of visitor services for the county there.
The Ohio Historical Society, owner of major portions of the remaining Newark Earthworks, continues as an active partner, while the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau staff and volunteers offer a warm welcome year-round.
Already, visitors from many states and even a few foreign countries have dropped by and been glad to have a friendly face to greet them. Knowledge of the upcoming nomination of the earthworks as a “World Heritage Site” recognized by the United Nations has kept visitation growing.
A new museum display with interactive exhibits and a number of artifacts related to the area will open this spring, and a dedication ceremony with participation by Native American representatives will officially open the already busy space.
Office space and informational displays for the diversity of Licking County visitor experiences is located in this new facility at the Great Circle, but it’s actually just the center of a large, ever-growing circle of communication and connection to a national and global travel and tourism market.
Just as visitors brought materials from distant cultures, like copper and mica and seashells, in exchange for natural resources such as the multi-colored flint of ancient Licking County 2,000 years ago, today we offer the cultural and economic diversity of today’s landscape as an experience our visitors can take home with them.
If they want to buy some handmade baskets, decorative glass, or even pieces of Flint Ridge flint to take home, that would complete a circle of sorts, wouldn’t it?
And the new Great Circle Visitor’s Center, home of the CVB, will be the center of that circle.
* * *
Licking County Courthouse [91 words]
From 1809 to the present, four courthouses have stood on the "public square" at the heart of Licking County. A new brick building in 1815 replaced the original log structure, which was then supplanted in 1832 by an attractive building which burnt down in 1874. Today's Courthouse was erected in the French Provincial style popular in 1876, just in time for the nation's centennial; a fire in 1879 led to a magnificent restoration whose West Courtroom on the second floor is admired to this day, and the iconic central clock tower.
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