Licking County CVB -- 2010 Visitor's Guide

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Downtown Newark – Connected By More Than Streets

In 1801, a young man of 28 named William Schenck came to the forks of the Licking River from out of the Cincinnati area.

Recently married, he had been hired by his uncle, John Cumming to survey over 4000 acres that he and some partners had purchased, sight unseen, the year before. With years of surveying between the Great & Little Miami Rivers already under his belt, Schenck quickly sized up the confluence of three healthy streams, merging to flow east into the Muskingum River, and pegged out the start of his survey and the plat of a new town on a terrace, in the center of the property in question.

The angle of this terrace, embraced by the North Fork of the Licking River and a southerly bend in Raccoon Creek that drops down to join the South Fork, meant that the original town was laid out in 1802 not on a north-south, east-west grid, but with a slant of northwest to southeast along the lay of the land.

To this day, downtown Newark, named for Schenck and Cumming’s hometown in New Jersey, chooses its own direction. Main Street runs into Courthouse Square running northeast and southwest, wrapping around what is the fourth courthouse building on the same site since 1817.

Angled streets, legend says following old Indian trails, cut across the now traditional north-south grid from downtown, but they converge in the historic heart of the city. Here everyday business, legal affairs, retail opportunities, and recreational activities are still as vital as they were in 1808 – when Newark already had a grocer, a hat shop, two taverns, two general stores, and a number of attorneys -- some things never change!

Downtown Newark still goes against the grain, where many Midwestern downtown areas are empty of shops and restaurants. Contrary to that trend, you can pick from at least half a dozen different menus, two coffee shops, a winery and a grocery store within two blocks of the Square, not to mention two fast food options.

You can find a different angle on things in downtown Newark, whether in a comic monologue at the Midland Theatre by Garrison Keillor, or a reflective moment looking at the statue of Johnny Clem, the “Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” in Veterans’ Park on Sixth Street. The Works, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum just two blocks south of the Square, gives you a look at science and technology from the inventor’s point of view, but also that of the laborer and craftsman.

The Downtown Newark Association brings together business leaders, artists, civic organizations, and church officials to keep a vision of the central core of the city that holds onto heritage and beauty, but is responsive to the changes not only of the last two hundred years, but looks well into the next century. Their activities range from Christmas season walking tours of decorated historic church buildings, to architectural walks around the Square, and narrated tours of art and sculpture found downtown, from large public murals to little gargoyles tucked into the eaves of an old jail.

One of their latest ventures is the Final Fridays program, where galleries, eating establishments, and other participating businesses stay open into the evening and offer additional attractions to shoppers and visitors. The DNA is also working to help find a route, perhaps following the route of the old canal path just south of downtown, to connect the eastern and western portions of the countywide rails-to-trails path.

Whatever the future brings, downtown Newark is likely to stay just a bit off the usual angles, and follow its own path into the future.

Licking County CVB Visitor’s Guide 2010

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Granville: Ohio’s Best Hometown!

When *Ohio Magazine* went looking for a community to call one of “Ohio’s Best Hometowns,” they had to end up in Granville.

Founded by New England settlers in 1805, still graced with wonderfully preserved Greek Revival architecture, yet with every modern benefit from wi-fi for sidewalk cafes to global cuisine at your table, history and today are friendly neighbors here.

Long a favorite of day-trippers in central Ohio, travelers from farther afield have started to make this small college town a destination in its own right. Bus tours and art collectors and lovers of heritage tourism outings are picking Granville as less of a side trip than a hub for exploring Licking County and beyond.

The *Ancient Ohio Trail* marks Granville’s restaurants, shops, and historic inns as an ideal location to set up a home base while venturing across a landscape dotted with prehistoric mounds, earthworks, and archaeological sites.

Meanwhile, everyone from US News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” issue to the book “Colleges That Change Lives” point to Denison University, perched on College Hill overlooking the historic downtown, as a high point in American higher education.

Even a casual visitor to Granville is welcome on campus, where almost every weekend and many weeknights various nationally known speakers, sports events, and arts programs are there for you to experience (many of them at no charge).

You’ll find both students and local community members at these affairs, since the Denison campus is surrounded by residential neighborhoods on all sides. Granville prides itself on walkability, and bike paths connect the village to a county-wide network of rails-to-trails paths for both exercise and even simple transporation, whether over to the county seat of Newark or to other cultural venues in the area.

The brick-paved block that leads to the college, from the scenic “four corners” where Granville was established in 1805, now framed by four church buildings in each angle, is the scene of a Saturday Farmer’s Market for some six months of the year. The shadow of steeples cross the array of fresh vegetables and flowers, and point on to the west side of the intersection where a “Maker’s Market” of art and handcrafted items echoes the agriculture for much of the season as well.

Add in a public school system with some of the highest achievement ratings in the entire state, and you can see why residents love their hometown, and have long called it “Ohio’s Best” – so the designation by Ohio Magazine came as no surprise. And visitors have long been a regular part of public events, whether the Candlelight Walking Tour the first Saturday of December, or the Fourth of July Street Fair every summer.

As the word spreads not only nationally but apparently globally, judging from some of the overheard conversations and languages spoken around tables at Granville’s restaurants and coffee shops, the village residents continue to emphasize their plans to maintain the small town feel and close sense of connection residents have with each other, and their historic hometown.

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Arts Display a County’s Creativity

Just south of the Licking County Courthouse in the heart of downtown Newark, just off of Third Street, Licking County Arts is in the process of transforming one of the many classic 19th century buildings that surround “the Square” into a work of art itself.

Their new home is an old building, with all the challenges and opportunities that might suggest, but even the awkward corners and rough brick edges make for a creative space, where display galleries and a gallery shop can set off their contents to mutual benefit.

The LCA has been part of the Newark and Licking County cultural scene since the 1960s; their latest home offers space enough to show the true scope and reach of what is one of Ohio’s geographically largest counties, and artistically, one of the most varied as well.

Obviously emphasizing local artists, there is a very worldly sweep to the various mediums and materials deployed to artistic effect. Painting and sculpture are present, and handmade jewelry (did you know that the official state gem stone of Ohio is Licking County’s own Flint Ridge flint?), but the approaches to artistic expression don’t stop there.

Glassblowing, weaving, fiber art of many kinds, in fact; photography, block printing, 3-D framed works bridging painting and sculpture, mixed media of many sorts; styles from graffiti inspired painting to realism in depicting landscapes so beautiful they couldn’t be real . . . but are of scenes you can drive to visit just minutes away.

With the inspiration of terrain-spanning earthworks 2,000 years old and more all around, Licking County artisans have a long history of creative expression. More “recent” centuries include Amzi Godden, the 19th century painter, Thomas Jones, a sculptor of the late 1800s with one work dominating the Rotunda of the State Capital in Columbus, and Clarence White, the circa 1900 photographer whose career began in Newark and went on to match that of Alfred Stieglitz in New York.

With that kind of art history behind them, it’s no surprise that today’s artists and artisans who work with the LCA are path breaking pioneers in their own right.

Today’s LCA artists are building on that tradition by working closely with the local public schools, offering programs at Newark High School, displaying the work of those young artists at the LCA Gallery, and opening classes to the community through the Third Street facility.

Artists also know that inspiration knows no age barrier, so they also carry their programs out into area nursing homes, where a new Grandma Moses may appear at any moment!

Part of the mission of the LCA is “to be a liaison for artists, not for profit organizations, businesses, and government, in partnerships that develop diverse art opportunities in Licking County.” Whether as a viewer, a patron, a purchaser, or participant in an art class at the LCA, you can become part of that diverse range of art opportunities just by walking in the door almost any afternoon.

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The Sherwood-Davidson House – A Unique Turning Point

Along the western edge of the knoll where the city of Newark, Ohio was laid out in 1802, Sixth Street runs north to south, echoed by Veterans’ Park and its Veterans’ Walk of Honor.

Perched along this rise, looking east to the towering Licking County Courthouse, are three historic houses, each with a fascinating story, but in the center is perhaps the most unique and amazing of them all: The Sherwood-Davidson House.

Facing the Walk of Honor and the street is a fairly typical Federal style facade, with an off center, asymmetrical door, with a pedimented fan light and two stories of windows all around. You would guess the house is old, pre-Civil War, and you would be right about that.

But walking from the lane through Veterans’ Park, strolling to the main entrance of this house, facing the Heisey Glass Museum to its north, brings a revelation.

Leaping across the entire side of the structure is a grand entryway, a keystoned, capitalled, & pilastered arch, with a second story urn-topped gallery railing drawing together the whole arc and framing, to display an idealized symmetrical view, the classic Greek Revival look.

This house, built in the late 1820s by Buckingham Sherwood, a local merchant desiring to show off a bit of his success on the then “Old Northwest” frontier, is literally a turning point. It perfectly displays the pivot point between the Federal style of early Americana borrowed from England, and the Greek Revival approach which animated the first attempts of US architects to display a style that moved away from British models. It was a conscious attempt to draw a line between the historic roots of democratic government tracing back to Athens and the Parthenon, and the free public spirit of open access to opportunity that Americans saw as setting them apart from Great Britain.

You almost didn’t get to see this remarkable house, and there are many hands at work passing the torch along to you today. It is, to be fair, not on her original site, now a downtown bank some three blocks east, and the porch now faces north instead of the sunny southern view it was designed for.

After the Sherwoods lived here for thirty years, and the Davidsons for nearly ninety, it was slated for demolition. The Licking County Historical Society was given title and a gift by the property owner to help move it here in 1948, and it took four years of renovation and restoration to open the house to the public in 1954.

Another thorough renovation was needed by the turn of this last century, and after a four year “re-restoration” it was triumphantly re-(re-?)opened to the public in December of 2007. Period paint colors, hand screened wallpaper, and a refurbished mural in the front hall showing the former courthouse before 1876, all help to build the atmosphere of history preserved, but also of history vividly realized.

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Looking Out Across “The Valley”

Ohio is graced with any number of beautiful valley vistas. Centuries of rain and wind and rolling hills above push the rivers through the landscape, carving out gentle curves and occasional gorges through many spots in the Buckeye State.

In eastern Licking County, there is a region just known as “The Valley,” or even “Valley” (with the capital letter, for sure). If you go around to other parts of the county, even around central Ohio, you could even make mention of “Valley” and most hearing you would immediately make the connection to Licking Valley.

Licking Valley is a school district, but also a state of mind. The area has long been called “Valley,” even as their pride is best expressed in the sweeping overlooks on high hills that frame the hamlets and villages of their region. Some of the best viewpoints are from the hilltop where much of the Licking Valley School District has its campus, looking from the famous Longaberger basket building in the west across the curves of the Licking River far below until it cuts through Black Hand Gorge in the east.

But “The Valley” also includes the village of Hanover, moved up a side stream of the Licking River, safe from once devastating floods on that larger watershed, along the banks of Rocky Fork Creek. “Valley” includes Toboso, now perched above the 300 foot deep chasm of Black Hand Gorge and the rails-to-trails path that runs far below along the Licking River itself.

“Valley” includes even the meandering path of Brushy Fork Creek, winding down many long, winding miles from atop Flint Ridge, past a 180 year old stone church and vacation cabins with hot tubs, until finding its way into Black Hand State Nature Preserve.

The Licking Valley Heritage Society is the newest historical society in central Ohio, but they have already stepped up as partners with the Ohio Historical Society to keep the Flint Ridge State Memorial museum and grounds open. They have a story to tell that includes everything from a sheep drive out of Hanover with 10,000 Merinos in 1854, an economic gamble and transcontinental adventure that literally helped to build the state of California, to a devastating flood in 1959 that led to the Dillon Dam and Reservoir starting just below Black Hand Gorge, and the relocation of nearly a dozen small communities, leaving ghost towns nearly invisible in its wake.

The Valley is a place where you can get lost, but never for long, where small diners and family restaurants or unexpected craft shops turn up around the next corner, and where camping or lodgings range from the rustic to indulgent.

If 2,000 year old flint quarries, endangered wildflowers, or just strolling along a wandering river with many hidden stories to tell in every ripple is what you need for your get away, come to The Valley.

Granville Woodhull Memorial Clock Proclamation

Whereas – the Avery-Downer House has been a Granville landmark since 1842, beautifully expressing through Greek Revival architecture the ideals of education and culture so valued by the early settlers of this village; and

Whereas – we honor our fellow Licking County forebearer, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born and raised just north of us in Homer 171 years ago, on September 23, 1838, who went on to travel from California to New York City, speaking out on behalf of women’s rights, speaking as the first woman to address a Congressional committee, and first woman to formally run for President of the United States in 1871; and

Whereas – we salute former village resident and antiquarian Robbins Hunter, Jr., who purchased this home in 1956, living here and searching out antiques from this base through the end of his life in 1979; and

Whereas – Robbins Hunter saw fit to prepare our area for the national bicentennial by erecting a monument to a too little known Licking County personage, using his own property and assets to create and present a clock tower honoring in name and image Victoria Woodhull; and

Whereas – this memorial was in 1975 the only American memorial to honor this important figure in our history, paired with a memorial tablet behind the high altar of Tewkesbury Abbey in England, where as Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin she lived out her life in philanthrophy and public service until her death in 1927; therefore

We declare this day, September 12, 2009, a day of celebration and rededication of this restored clock and mechanism which once again, as Robbins Hunter wished, puts the name and face and dreams of Victoria Woodhull before the citizens of the village of Granville; this restored memorial helps to keep her memory alive for all who watch the hour strike, the figure to appear, and even to ask to hear the story of this Licking County original -- and the no less interesting story of the maker of this memorial;

Therefore, with the Robbins Hunter Museum staff and board, and the officers of the Licking County Historical Society, the members of Granville Village Council and mayor therefore proclaim this “Victoria Woodhull Memorial Rededication Day,” and invite all to join us in marking this day with all appropriate respect and celebration.

Remembering Bill Laidlaw



There’s one approach to history that focuses on “great men,” and a contrasting understanding that says “trends and movements” are the real hinge of historical developments.



When people look back in years to come on this era for the Ohio Historical Society, they will surely see the broader influences of significant economic shifts in the state, with budget cuts defining much of the story, but they will unavoidably notice a particular person who stands at the heart of the turmoil and trials of this time – William Laidlaw.



Bill may not have liked the label “great man,” but his influence has been great, even if in humble and unassuming ways. Bill’s greatness has been in good humor, by bringing a cheerful spirit and constructive attitude into tense meetings and challenging situations, with a smile and a raised eyebrow where others might raise voices and offer a scowl. That was not a look you saw often, if ever, from Bill Laidlaw.



With a background in management and academia, he chose to take on a radically new challenge at a point in his life and career when many men simply look for a capstone achievement, one ideally well within their comfort zone. Instead, Bill took on the task of helping reformulate a not-quite-state-agency that was already known to be in not-quite-good if not outright difficult financial straits. Not long after he got his pencils sharpened on his desk blotter, the state budget forecasts turned dark and got progressively stormier than anyone could have forecast -- but Bill stayed the happy warrior and gracious civic servant right through his latest rounds of statehouse lobbying and public advocacy, last May and June.



And as he worked with his staff to shape the statewide picture as much as circumstances allowed, he continued to communicate with individuals and families about the joys of history and the excitement of sharing knowledge. Here in Licking County, a mom down the street came by this afternoon to ask if it was true what she heard “about that smiling nice man with the white hair,” who had e-mailed her back after a chance encounter about places she and her four children would find interesting and accessible. She couldn’t quite recall his name, but she knew that “the boss” of the state historical society had taken the time to do personally what so many in his position would have quietly handed off to a junior staffer. Plus, she remembered the smile, and the interest in her kids.



In the next few months and years, historic sites and cultural landmarks in Ohio will be getting formal recognition from the United Nations of their unique significance, their greatness in a global context. Bill Laidlaw would be quick to point out that the major work, the detail work, the groundwork was all done by others. But for those of us who will be honored to see that day come when Ohio has sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, we will all know when that day comes that it was the cheerfully persistent leadership that Bill brought to OHS that was crucial to making it happen.



Was Bill Laidlaw a great man, or the right man at a time when greatness was called for? The right answer, many of us suspect, is “both.”

William Gavit -- 468 word version

William Gavit is justly remembered as one of the founding settlers of the village of Granville, riding one of the first three wagons into the central square in November of 1805, part of the advance party that led the group from Granville, Massachusetts, where the summer before he signed onto the association for the Licking Land Company.

He was not a member of the Congregationalist church that was so central to much of the early organization of the colony, but paradoxically that made him an ideal neutral party, tapped to help divide lots and allocate them in December of 1805, to lay out where the major roads would go in 1806, and to select where church and school lots would go in 1807. In the coming years he would serve as postmaster, state senator, and justice of the peace, elected to the last office so often he was known to the end of his 88 years as “Chief Justice Gavit.”

A freethinker, he was entrusted with trying to find a religious answer for a resident with a drinking problem, and taking the inebriated Capt. Butler to a Methodist revivial, found himself converted; with his wife Sarah and their twelve children (ten living to adulthood), they helped found in 1810 what is now known as Centenary United Methodist Church.

Obviously, this man was a recognized leader from the very outset among a group of strongwilled pioneering men and women; the scene with a hard drinking sea captain gives a hint of where these qualities came from. Late in life, two years after his wife Sarah had died, with two sons in the Methodist ministry, Gavit recorded his career in the American Revolution for an application for pension, a document which one historian noted “reads like a romance of the sea.”

It was as a fatherless fifteen year old that Gavit joined a privateering vessel that sailed to make war on the larger and more experienced British fleet, sailing out of New London, CT not far from his birthplace of Westerly, RI. He served on sloops and schooners, fighting brigs and warships of the Royal Navy; capturing and burning a number of British ships in the waters off Long Island, he was captured, exchanged, and captured again, imprisoned in the notorious “prison ships” opposite Manhattan, where a monument still stands to the over 10,000 deaths in captivity of American prisoners: over twice the total deaths in battle for the entire Revolution.

Gavit, at seventeen, led one of the few recorded escapes from the “Jersey” prison hulk . . . and signed up again to sail through the end of the war. In 1785 he married Sarah, and in 1788 he moved to Granville, Massachusetts, having had enough of the sea, but with a career in leadership still bright before him.

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William Gavit -- 548 word version

William Gavit made an application for pension to the United States government in 1844 from his home in Granville, based on his service in the American Revolution, which a later DAR archivist said “reads like a romance of the sea.”

Born in Westerly, Rhode Island, his father died when he was young, and at fifteen was given permission to join a privateer, a “private armed ship” out of New London, Connecticut where his mother had moved on her remarriage.

A youthful sailor on the 16 gun brig “Favorite,” accompanying the brig “Fair American,” they successfully took one British ship, but were rapidly surprised by the “Medea,” a frigate of 36 guns. Gavit and the other crew were put in irons below deck, and carried off to Wallabout Bay, the site (now the Brooklyn Navy Yard) of Great Britain’s notorious prison ships, including the deadly disease infested “Jersey,” where all accounts agree that more than 8,000 American prisoners died in confinement, twice as many deaths as in all land battles of the Revolution combined.

A prisoner exchange simply meant that Gavit soon joined the sloop “Randolph,” and later joined a relative’s schooner, the “Degrasse,” helping capture and burn British vessels around Long Island; the crew was victorious in a number of engagements until once again captured by the Royal Navy and returned to the “Jersey.” Knowing the dangers in staying in confinement, he wasted no time in organizing five of his fellows and making one of the few known escapes from the prison hulks.

This seventeen year old was one of only two who made their way back to New London, yet Gavit signed up with the brig “Martin” and helped carry the battle to the enemy through the end of the war. Having seen enough of the sea by then, Gavit married Sarah Babcock of Groton, CT two years later; in 1788 they moved to Granville, MA. They had twelve children, of which two died young, not long after the family made up one of the first wagons rolling into Granville, OH on November 12, 1805.

William Gavit signed the original Licking Land Company agreement, was one of three asked to divide up the lots in December, laid out the original roads the next year, founded the first Methodist “class meeting” in Granville in 1810, helped to start the village school system, was postmaster, state senator, and called “Chief Justice Gavit” until his death in 1854 at 88, for being so often voted by his fellow citizens justice of the peace.

[Intriguingly, one of the two sons who died young, laid to rest in the Old Colony Burying Ground where William and Sarah long after were interred, had the middle name of “Denison.” The Denison family, whose son William made the pledge that saved Granville College in 1853, came from exactly midway between Westerly, RI & New London, CT, where William S. was born before their move west – were they related in some way? Could the respect Gavit had among his fellows have extended directly to the elderly farmer a day’s ride east, whose name is still on the college?]

Oh, and that application to the government for a pension? It was denied, “to the shame and discredit of an American Congress,” in the words of the archivist.

Ancient Ohio Trail project – Visitor Experience Survey
Executive Summary
June 30, 2009

Central to our efforts in presenting and interpreting the “Ancient Ohio Trail” are current understandings surrounding the earthworks and mounds of Ohio. When inviting cultural engagement with and promoting informed tourism around the Native American cultural structures known generally as the “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks” [ http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5243/ ], our starting point has to be the present state of knowledge among visitors, both local and non-local, and with people residing near the earthworks who come in contact with visitors on a regular basis.

For the purposes of this planning study, we will look primarily at one term of the standard “interpretive equation” used across the country by the National Park Service, the component “knowledge of the audience”:

IO = (KR + KA) x AT

IO (Interpretive Opportunity) = KR (Knowledge of the Resource) + KA (Knowledge of the Audience) x AT (Appropriate Technique)
[ http://www.nps.gov/idp/interp/101/equationwksheet.pdf ]

Since April, in a three month period across the Spring season, Great Circle guestbook visitors, along with locations all around the state of Ohio, listed their hometowns in 30 states, from Hawaii to Maine, Florida to California; internationally from Sweden; Mexico City, Mexico; Southampton, England; multiple locations in Canada; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Nanjing, China.

Clearly, the earthworks of Ohio are already drawing a global audience, and a diverse one from all over the United States!

That’s just over 90 days, among the estimated 50% of visitors to the Newark Earthworks visitor center who choose to put their names down in the guestbook. After a bit over a year of operation with the new exhibit space and displays, word is beginning to spread that the “museum at Great Circle” is open regular hours, and visitors are starting to seek out interpretive experiences on their own.

As we will see, non-local visitors, defined as those coming from outside of Licking County, tend to arrive with some knowledge of the archaeology and history currently on record of these mounds and geometric earthworks. What we were particularly curious about for planning purposes were two more audiences, less studied and therefore less well understood.

These two audiences are local visitors, people coming to the site from within a ten mile radius, basically Newark, Heath, and Granville in Licking County; and visitor contact workers, interpretive sources non-formally, but no less influential. Front desk clerks at hotels, fast food cashiers, business and public service staff who are regularly in contact with people who might have occasion to pull in and ask “hey, what do you know about these mounds here?” – those persons have a role in how the site is understood and experienced, or (more problematically) not experienced.

Our survey design was adapted somewhat in practice after an initial development phase with the PI and other members of the AOT team. The baseline approach for Local Visitor Contact people followed this structure:

“Do you know anything about the mounds around here?”

“Who made them?”

“About how old are they”

“What were they built for?”

If the interaction was not under pressure from customers behind the surveyor, and the contact was not largely negative (i.e., “I don’t know, no idea, haven’t the faintest, sorry”), at this point the surveyor would say “Actually, I’m working with the Newark Earthworks Center at OSU-Newark, and we’re trying to find out what people know about the mounds, and how to help the area respond to visitors who want to find out about them: could you give me three words that you would use to describe the mounds?”

Further prompts were given at “Who made them?” if a one word answer – “say a bit more about that/what you mean by BLANK,” and also at “About how old are they” if the answer to start was “oh, I have no idea,” owith“Just give me a ballpark number, how old do you think?”

For the other two audience groups of Local Visitor and Non-Local Visitor, the initial question was adapted to “Do you know anything about these mounds?” since the question was most frequently asked in or immediately next to the Great Circle. Less than 10% of those approached chose not to respond beyond the “do you know anything question,” although a certain, small number, just over 5%, turned away from any contact whatever (with a qualification we will note later). No site surveys were done at Octagon State Memorial, which would be an interesting component of a more extensive survey for KA.

A total of 96 persons were surveyed in person among the three groups, abbreviated as LVC (local visitor contact), NLV (non-local visitor), and LV (local visitor).

The breakdown of these groups is 38 – LVC; 27 – NLV; 31 – LV.

Responses from the NLV audience (NLV) tended to cluster as follows:

“Who made them?” – 85% said “Indians built them” (including the terms Indian, Native American, tribal labels such as Cherokee, Shawnee, or “Tecumseh’s people”; also including “Hopewell” said by 12% of the total). Two persons named Romans and Vikings.

“About how old are they” – 30% said “thousands of years (two of the three said “two thousand years,” the only ones to say that in the entire survey), 60% said “hundreds of years.”

“What were they built for?” – almost 20% said some form of “astronomy/alignments” while 50% said “burials.” The remaining 30% were variations on “ceremony/ritual/dancing/worship/celebrations.”

The “three words to describe” clustered around “huge, amazing, wonderful.”

The responses from the LV audience (31) tended to cluster as follows:

“Who made them?” – 40% said “Indians built them.” 15% said some version of “the WPA/CCC built them,” and 25% were emphatic on “don’t know.” Of the remaining 20%, 6 persons said variations on “UFOs, aliens, mysterious beings,” or one other category we will discuss under LVC.

“About how old are they” – 65% said “hundreds of years,” while 20% said “millions of years.” No one in this group said “thousands.”

“What were they built for?” – over 75% said “burial/burial mounds.” 15% said some version of “a sacred site.”

The “three words to describe” clustered around “quiet, scary, haunted.” Size was rarely mentioned, or age, but “creeps the ‘bleep’ out of me” was a repeated refrain; various “ghost stories” were often shared by persons who chose to continue the conversation, including reports of knocking, poltergeist phenomena, and unusual dog activity by residents in the near vicinity.

The one positive cluster was “quiet,” reflecting the fact that many local residents like to come and visit the site, even many quite emphatic about the “creepy, scary, weird, haunted” qualities, because of a sense that there is a peacefulness and security during the day. Most said “you wouldn’t catch me coming over here after dark.” “Mysterious” and “magical” were used by a number of LV persons, but it was unclear as to the context, positive or negative, that they brought to those descriptions.

The responses from the LVC audience (38) tended to cluster as follows:

“Who made them?” – quite unexpected was almost 25% (9) stating that the mounds were naturally occurring, if unusual phenomena, most confirmed they had Great Circle in mind. If you add two from the LV audience, and use the two local audiences as a set, you arrive at 16% (11 of 69) who see the mounds as naturally occurring phenomena. 55% said “Indians built it,” 13% (5) named specific non-traditional groups, inclusive of Welsh, “lost tribes,” and “UFOs/aliens.”

“About how old are they” – 60% said “hundreds,” 13% “millions,” and the rest “had no idea.”

“What were they built for?” – Over 80% said “burial,” while 2, for 5% said “sacred/ceremonial site.”

The “three words to describe” clustered around “amazing, mysterious, spooky.”

To sum up, first, we would note that you cannot, in fact, summarize these three groups; however, the local visitor and local visitor contact populations cluster together while non-local visitors clearly come with an existing knowledge base out of the scientific and even technical literature which is not as much in evidence with local residents.

One LV and one LVC person named “alignments” as part of “what they were built for,” and further conversation revealed that they both had taken History 151 at OSU-N and took a site tour as part of their class. An intriguing skew was the absence of the term “thousands” from local resident respondents – we suggest that the absence is due to a naïve understanding of history, where the concepts of “hundreds of years ago” is familiar, as is “millions of years ago,” but “thousands of years ago” is not a category that is commonly dealt with in conversation or reading.

But in general, we can say this: most audience members state that the earthworks of Ohio are made by Indians (the term “Native American” was used by 3% of the gross total), they are “hundreds of years old,” and they are built “for burials.” Given that last predominant image, it is perhaps no surprise that the words “spooky, haunted, mysterious” are more frequent than “huge, amazing, historic.” “Magical, mystical, beautiful” are a close third, with “ancient, valuable, historical” a distant final grouping.

To hear that 16% of the local audiences understood the mounds as natural in origin was unexpected, but part of KA, “knowledge of the audience” that we need to know.

* * *

The visitor center itself was the subject of a visitor study, looking at usage and patterns. For this very brief planning study, four two hour periods were studied, on a weekday from 10 am to Noon and from 2 pm to 4 pm, and both a Saturday and a Sunday from 2 pm to 4 pm. A fifth weekday morning was studied, but due to weather and other factors, only four visitors came in and three stayed a very long (around 1 hour) period of time; staff input said that this was a highly atypical morning, and so those visits were not calculated into the time of visit and numbers, but their movements in the museum to start were included in the general exhibit usage study.

The approach used in the Newark Earthworks/Licking County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau visitor’s center, referred to subsequently as the Great Circle museum, was for the surveyor to sit in the chair behind a low wall, forming a “kiosk” for large group presentations. The surveyor would focus on reading material in front of them, and not make eye contact with visitors, which was not unusual due to the configuration of the space. If a visitor saw the surveyor and spoke directly to them, then all due courtesy and communication would pick up from that point – almost none of the visitors to the Great Circle museum noticed the surveyor until they were about to leave, if then.

This location meant that visitor interaction with the large mural opposite the greeter desk and diorama under the north wall arch was limited to sound cues only; the study attempted to include a number of observations of the central area while standing near the attendant/greeter, but the chance of influence in the confined space was naturally greater. Input from the two persons most frequently at the greeter desk is included near the conclusion of this summary.

The sample weekday morning saw 24 visitors for a total of 111 minutes; the average group size was 2 persons, and the average visit was 4.625 minutes.

The sample weekday afternoon saw 25 persons for a total of 143 minutes; the average group size was 1.66 persons, and the average visit was 5.72 minutes.

The sample Saturday afternoon saw 29 persons for a total of 137 minutes; the average group size was 1.5 persons, and the average visit was 4.72 minutes.

The sample Sunday afternoon saw 19 persons for a total of 272 minutes; the average group size was 2.4 persons, and the average visit was 14.3 minutes.

In aggregate, the sample saw 97 persons for a total of 663 minutes; the average group size was 1.89 persons, median group 3.1, and the average visit was 6.835 minutes.

Over 76% of visitors either themselves, or at least one member of their group, went directly to the restrooms on entering the building. Over 12% interacted only with the restrooms and the gift shop items (while, given the viewing location, their viewing of the mural is likely but not certain).

Not quite 20% tap the touch screen (19), of that 1 in 5, just less than 1 in 3 (6) go past the first segment, but of those viewers, the average number of clicks into the program is 12 – with no single pattern predominating. It can be safely said that those who choose to interact with the touch screen program often do so extensively, but the number who make the first steps could be improved.

Site staff report continued problems with people seeing “Touch Screen To Start,” though this was not observed in the study – adding the word “Computer” before “Screen” might help. It was observed that people would often try repeatedly to click words, and not the white square, but this did not seem to lead to termination of the interaction session.

The typical visit to the Great Circle museum might best be broken into weekday and weekend experiences, with the average visit being 5.2 minutes weekdays; and 8.5 minutes on weekends.

We looked at the fact that group by group, three-fourths of all groups start all or in part in the restrooms. Should some element of communicating site themes and messages be included in restroom décor? Are there simple, short phrases or images that could be placed in those locations where the overwhelming majority of site visitors begin their interpretive experience?

More than one in ten do not get beyond the restrooms, literature racks, and gift shop – are there ways beyond the books offered for sale to ensure a portion of the interpretive experience is delivered to those visitors?

From the viewpoint of those who serve at the greeter desk, almost every visitor stops to look at the large mural. Often an invitation to help orient the guest is met with appreciation, and they are told “where they are” in the picture. The greeters, and some limited observation during this study agreed, that almost all visitors tend to swivel past the diorama under the north wall arch fairly quickly.

One possibility mentioned was the relative darkness of the display elements causing the diorama to “disappear” – could LED lights be used, embedded behind the photo around each moon in the time lapse, slowly tracking up and then re-starting at the bottom, clicking upwards again; this would both communicate that the moon is rising in the viewscape presented, and also draw eyes into the display.

Two-thirds of visitors who enter the main display area do so from the north side. Tracking the interactions with display material showed a fairly significant set of differences between those who enter from the north (diorama) end and those who enter from the south (restroom) end.

North entrants tend to go directly to the Bear/Wray figurine panel, pause, scan right, and go to the south wall of the alcove where the computer imaged depictions of a variety of earthworks are on panels. Pausing there, they then scan right, and pause again with the objects of copper and mica, their contrast and irregularity standing out and usually attracting steps toward those panels.

From that point, visitors sort into two groups: those who then turn again to their right, scan the timeline, and then half of those will move towards the touch screen arm; or those who glance around quickly, and then leave.

South entrants follow a very different pattern. They step into the open space, and most often turn left, and move towards the copper/mica display – again, the contrast and irregularity seem to make that element stand out. Then about half turn to the faces on the north side of the alcove, pausing to read, and then do next what the other half started to do, which is turn to the Bear/Wray figurine panel, from which they either scan or pause on the timeline panels, or turn back and leave the way they entered.

We do not have solid numbers for this, but the general impression is that weekend visitors tend to turn from the Bear/Wray figurine panel to the Sacred Site panel and pause again, while weekday visitors hardly seemed to notice it, scanning past to the timeline or beyond. This may be due to the number of weekend visitors being non-local and taking more time.

Also hard to pin down, but seemingly quite clear, is that visitors are not making the connection between the Bear/Wray panel, which is very successful in gathering visitor interest, and the replica figurine. Visually, and in terms of movement, it is hard to see how any visitor could be or is making that connection. We would suggest, even before a more comprehensive visitor study and exhibit analysis, that at eye level, adjoining the Bear/Wray panel, either the replica be moved or a second replica be installed.

Additional signage next to the touch screen arm is called for, helping focus the visitor on the technology, which was perceived by some visitors out loud as intimidating (“I’m not sure how to use this; wow, how does this thing work; do you think it’s OK to move this around?”), and perhaps offering a sample sequence of three or four “clicks” to get started.

* * *

One further suggestion, and then a very emphatic hope for future study will round out this executive summary of our attempt to gain better KA, “knowledge of the audience” for the Ohio earthworks and mounds.

Local visitors are in many cases lower income residents of neighborhoods within easy walking distance of the Great Circle. We were startled to find out just how many people are on the grounds of an early evening, right down to sunset. Families, couples, people with dogs (many, many people with dogs on long leashes), groups of kids (yes, often with one or two on bikes) are all over the site; on one grounds survey for LV audience members, as the sun set on a Monday, there were 18 people within view from sitting on the front of Eagle Mound on the wall’s summit or within the enclosure.

The parking areas are complicated. The survey benefited from past conversation with the previous site manager for many years’ service, and the site manager until just a few months ago of seventeen years service on the site. It is well known in the larger metro area that the relatively secluded parking areas are popular for couples to meet, particularly couples who are not necessarily supposed to be in each others’ company. The truth of this received knowledge is hard to verify, but it is the case that approaching a parked vehicle in the lots, even by broad daylight (maybe even especially around lunchtime), meant sudden departures in almost every case. We did not attempt to speak to any parking lot visitors after the first few attempts.

But the families and couples and children walking (and biking) the grounds of an evening represent an interesting challenge. Almost everyone approached of an evening was happy to share their impressions, used the words “spooky, creepy, mystical, haunted” about the mounds as a description, and had never been in the museum. Would a few evening open houses, aimed specifically at local residents, create an opening for education and awareness that would also build local partnership on the most grassroots level, and perhaps also add a layer of watchfulness and stewardship that currently is only effected by the perception of ghostly guardians?

What we most would like to be able to accomplish on the site, and others like it, are pre- and post- surveys of KR, “knowledge of the resource.” How does interaction with the exhibits, displays, and site interpreters change the KR among our audiences? This kind of study will allow even more specific and effective recommendations to flow out of the work being done on the “Ancient Ohio Trail.”

Finally, a near universal question came in myriad forms – can we have more wayside interpretive panels around the site? The longest pauses and focused attention observed anywhere on the site, other than regarding the site itself, are on the bronze disc on a pedestal in front of the Great Circle museum. Visitors of all sorts crave signage that helps them see what they are looking at.

Such additions to the site will be expensive, but along with occasional, regular evening open houses focused on the neighborhoods adjoining the site, it sounds likely that the investment will not only pay dividends, but they will join in protecting that investment from casual mistreatment and vandalism.

Increasing the “sense of place” for local audiences of all sorts will promote connections, personal and social, of the kind discussed in the AOT Humanities Themes, which we append to conclude this report – along with the sincere hope that further study of KA, KR, and AT (appropriate technique) for the sites along the Ancient Ohio Trail will take place, improving the Interpretive Opportunities for all involved.


* * *

AOT Humanities Themes recap

1. How the earthworks stand today as markers of a distant culture, and how despite the gaps in time and in records we can understand that world and identify with it as a scene of shared humanity.

2. How the earthworks and mounds compare to the achievements of other ancient cultures across the world, whose architectural “ruins” we admire.

3. How modern archaeological research uncovers and tests explanations of what the sites mean, how they were built and used, and how their makers lived.

4. How our understandings of the earthworks can extend beyond archaeology and into a range of other interpretations.

5. How the early decades of Euro-American settlement in the Ohio Valley became the context for encounters, questions, myths, struggles, and fascinations concerning the earthwork sites, their makers, and their meanings, and who was involved in them, from first European contact through the beginnings of scientific archaeology.

6. How modern travelers to the region can gain a meaningful perspective on the earthwork
builders, and how they can connect their lives with those who lived and built among the hills and valleys of this region so differently, long ago.

* * *
* * *

A few last general observations (June 30, 2009) --

The abstract of the executive summary might best be put this way:

Visitors & staff in the area around Ohio earthworks think that the mounds were
* built by Indians,
* hundreds of years ago,
* for burial purposes.

Small but significant subgroups think the mounds are natural phenomena, more than think they are the product of alien or European cultures, and a little less than those who think they are products of Depression era work camps. Non-local visitors tend to come with knowledge such as "Hopewell" and "two thousand years" and "alignments," and local visitors/staff who know that have taken History 151 at OSU-N.

Non-local visitors perceive the mounds as "huge, beautiful, amazing," while local visitors & contact persons see "spooky, haunted, mysterious."

The average visitor to the Great Circle museum spends six and a half minutes inside, two of that starting in the restroom; one in five trigger the CD-ROM program and one in three of those do more than one click . . . but those stay with the program, clicking a dozen times or more, for a ten minute experience. The Bear/Wray panel and the copper/mica artifacts attract the most focused attention in the display area, along with the large mural in the lobby.

* * *

Further work on the question of what people mean by "Indians," on the "who made these" inquiry will be very fruitful; some conversations went on in that direction, but infrequently enough after the baseline set of questions that i'm reluctant to generalize from that data set.

Also of interest is a dual phenomena in talking to clerks, cashiers, and front desk staff at fast food, restaurant, gas, and lodging establishments. Again, the total sample and limitations of starting with the baseline questions means i have only fragmentary indications to work with, but there were two kinds of responses on the "ends" of the response continuum. A number said, explicitly, "boy, we really oughta have some flyers or something for us to get out for you/for us to look at/to use to answer questions like this -- but i just don't know anything, other than i hear about 'em." There does seem to be an opening on the level of service staff to welcome a user-friendly quick information guide to the mounds. Short, punchy, specific, since these are often 30 second interactions that are pressed by people stepping into line behind you, but a desire to be able to communicate something about the area mounds was clearly present.

But there was also a set of reactions almost as large that was nervous, uncomfortable, and almost furtive -- glancing around to see who was listening, whether other customers or managers. "Why do you want to know?" Many of the insistent "I don't know anything about those mounds" responses had an overtone of "I don't want to get involved in that stuff," but circumstances did not lend themselves to further follow-up in almost every such case.

This second guest services phenomena could have something to do with other preconceptions, such as New Age or nature religion beliefs, conservative Judeo-Christian perspectives, or a "ghost story" of the sort I heard many of when talking to local visitors on the site . . . but would not have had the chance to hear in a service related transaction. Arranging a few focus groups of service personnel at the NEC in their off hours, with incentives for participation and confidentiality, might be useful to understand this reaction.

But i did hear from a number of respondents a clear message that "there are people who don't want you talking about those mounds," and in one case, i heard very specifically about how they had been married at Moundbuilders Country Club, and had been "harangued" by the manager there during meetings to plan the service and reception about the "myths and silliness" around the earthworks, that were all "blown up by the militia years ago and rebuilt."

Finally, i think the frequent inquiry about wayside exhibits on the grounds could be addressed with some guided visitor experiences, a sort of "mobile focus group," where information about the "what" and "where" of exhibit stations and/or access to audio/cell phone/device-based material could be best tested and planned, all of which relates very directly to the Ancient Ohio Trail plans.

* * *
* * *

On Jun 30, 2009, at 9:14 AM, Brad Lepper wrote:

Hi everybody,

This is a wonderful study (partially because it confirms some things I strongly suspected, but mainly because it goes beyond assumptions and suspicions and collects actual data to address important questions)! There are surprises. I am surprised that even a small percentage of actual visitors to the park thought the mounds were natural, but I certainly was aware that many local people that pass the parks every day (such as the car salesman I've often spoken of) have no awareness that the mounds represent anything more than natural features -- "Mounds? What mounds?" I was also surprised at the relatively large numbers of folks who view the site as scary and haunted. Maybe we can get on one of those cable ghost-hunter shows?!

One thing I would have liked to see with regard to time visitors spent in the museum is some indication of variance in the sample -- such as standard deviations and/or ranges to go with the means and medians.

John -- Please let me know if (when) I can share this document with folks here at OHS. I am not sure, given our budget situation, how soon we can implement any of the recommended changes, but it would be valuable for OHS staff to see the recommendations as well as the obvious value of survey work such as this this.

Jeff -- Thanks for sharing!

Brad

* * *
* * *

This is chart and table free summary, but the time study can be broken down a number of ways, depending on what's useful. I can tell you on the fly that the visits range from 1 to 25 minutes (rounding to nearest minute; i.e. 29 sec no increment, 31 sec next minute), with the only visits past 25 being the three people i mentioned on the weekday morning that i didn't use. The most common visit "minute numbers" were 4 & 6. If you look at visitors as parties, a bit more than half were single visitors, with the most common visitor parties being pairs and trios.

Single visitor to total number of "parties" ratios: Sat., 13/19; Sun., 1/8; weekday am 5/12; weekday pm 12/17 -- aggregate, 31/56, meaning 55% of all visits were single visitor parties, but they were 32% of the total number of visitors (31/97). Single visitors averaged 5.4 minutes, so if anything a bit faster than the groups, not by much . . . their range was 1 to 22 minutes, but i don't have a median calculated yet.

But we can crunch that data out in whatever manner is deemed useful!

The issues of "scary" and "burials" certainly point us to some interpretive issues, as does the relative absence of the term "Hopewell" in public knowledge. I'm intrigued by what an evening series of open houses, with some lemonade on a table out front and a cheerful "welcome, feel free to use the restrooms" would get us in terms of local ownership and interest -- but there i go spending Susan's money, let alone OHS's!

Pax,
Jeff Gill
http://knapsack.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/Knapsack

Granville -- Ohio’s Best Hometown 2009 final draft 4-25-09


Community spirit

Granville is the kind of town where spring blossoms take turns from yard to yard in coming to their full blown peak, nodding agreeably to overarching rainbows against not quite threatening skies; where the slanting summer light picks up only the most golden dust to catch the light as outdoor concerts end; where the leaves turn color through autumn in artistically arranged masses with complimentary colors; where the icicles hang with particular grace even in the frozen but well-lit heart of winter.

You can say this is all simply a state of mind and a way of seeing, but things really do look differently in this remarkable village, where visitors rack their brains to come up with something to say describing the streetscapes other than “quaint” or “Rockwellian.”

New England characteristics and Greek Revival qualities set the tone for this over 200 year old community, settled by folk from Connecticut and Massachusetts in November of 1805. Their wilderness-surveyed grid is still the template and frame for the many early buildings that line the village center and trace the farmers’ lanes that stretch out into Granville Township. A monument in the form of a tree stump marks the place where the first tree was cut and used for a first public address to the gathered travelers, at the intersection centering the survey, still called “the Four Corners.”

Public buildings were planned for the middle of town, and four churches now grace the corners of Broadway and Main Street, with complimentary but very unique steeples reflecting the various traditions and customs that still draw Granville residents together and yet point to their essential and essentially different character, house by house and family by family.

But a single example of this is the Community Picnic, held every other year since the inaugural bicentennial affair, where tables were set from the Four Corners to the foot of Sugarloaf Hill, across the southern edge of the Denison University campus. Thousands of village and township residents come and sit together, with each table displaying an utterly different look as to centerpieces, tableware, and dining. Some with homey baskets stuffed with home-made specialities, and others with designer crates to set out a gourmet meal half of which was delivered from halfway around the world.

One table even had a hanging chandelier, which is a neat trick at an outdoor picnic!

Granville residents like to come together, to celebrate, to sing (like the full throated Welsh pioneers who snuck in before even the official pioneers arrived, leaving their name on the Welsh Hills that frame the township), to debate, to deliberate, to listen. And when we come together, we like to proudly share our differences, our uniquenesses, even our peculiarities – maybe especially our peculiarities. This is Granville, and things are different here, which is exactly how we like it.


Education

When the Four Corners were laid out in the original plat, a schoolhouse was planned along with a church as the first public building shared by all.

The New England forebearers from Granville, Massachusetts had already set a high priority on learning and scholarship, a value they carried with them in their ox carts and among their belongings.

Books and musical instruments and a love of education were as important to the initial settlers as a sharp axe and sturdy yoke for the oxen, and they were put to work just as quickly.

The old schoolhouse on the Four Corners is gone, but is remembered in the lessons and examples set before today’s children at the elementary, intermediate, middle, and high schools. They win awards, and the village is happy to let the realtors talk about the standing of the “Granville Exempted School District” (some say one of the ten best districts in the state of Ohio, others simply declare that the test scores show them to be the best in the state), but local residents are very little interested in comparing Granville Schools to other districts at all.

What gives energy and focus to conversations about education in Granville today is the question “are our schools the very best they can possibly be, and what do we need to do as a community to make them even better than they are right now?” It is with that kind of attention that everything in the district is under constant review, from the meals served in the cafeterias, to the scholarship support for the 90+% of graduates who go to college.

With a college on the hill overlooking Granville proper, the assumption that grads will go on to higher education is built literally into the local landscape. Called Denison University, founded as Granville College in 1831, the four year undergraduate private liberal arts institution casts a shadow over the village in more ways than one, although it might be more accurate to say it shines a light of learning across the homes and businesses and activities of our town.

From the tall steeple of Swasey Chapel atop College Hill to the lower campus down near the center of the village, venues for entertainment and activity imply a certain educational quality to everything from a string quartet to a Beatles impersonation band concert on the lower quadrangle (where the Granville Recreation Commission puts on a “Concerts on the Green” series every summer after the students depart for the season).

Guest speakers from the worlds of politics, the arts, and entertainment come to Denison for presentations open to anyone in the area, and not a few of those guests were once students here themselves, like Steve Carell of “The Office” fame or Michael Eisner, former Disney CEO; Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is still a regular visitor to campus as a member of the college board of trustees, and Jennifer Garner passes through between movie roles.


Entertainment

Those early Welsh and New England pioneers liked to talk about “making your own fun.”

That may have been making the best of necessity back in 1805, but the fact of the matter today in Granville is that we still have a taste for entertainment that is of our own making.

The Old Fashioned Fourth of July is a week of local musicians and parades with floats that bear all the proud hallmarks of “we made it ourselves”. Broadway is blocked off for an amusement area with a midway of rides and games, along with a row of booths where food and crafts are made and sold by area residents. Guess where the longer lines can be found?

Broadway is, in fact, blocked off for public use quite a few times a year. Public spaces in Granville are still just that, areas for the public to use and gather in, not just for transportation to whiz past or rumble through. The Bluesfest in the Fall, the Community Picnic every other summer, and occasional other events can have you sitting comfortably in the center of the village right on top of the yellow stripe.

The sidewalks see large crowds of visitors for the Candlelight Walking Tour every first Saturday of December, Graduation weekend in May from Denison University, the summer sidewalk sale that precedes the week of the Fourth of July, and various Antique Fairs and other events from time to time.

What anchors the spring season in Granville is an event that can’t be stopped and has many centers but no clearly defined border: the Daffodil Festival. The College Town House may be the epicenter of this explosion of yellow that threatens to color the whole town, but as you walk the blocks from the business district and historic downtown, you can follow the eruptions of yellow, from darker ambers to delicate saffron-whites, as far as your feet will carry you, and still one hill just beyond.

There are big names that come to the Denison campus, shows and speakers and concerts, plus the Newark-Granville Symphony that often plays in Swasey Chapel as well as elsewhere in the county; what makes for the ongoing entertainment in the village is that there is almost never a night, let alone a weekend, where a musical group with mostly local talent is playing nearby. It could be at the Granville Inn, or at the high school’s Performing Arts Center, or even in the third floor loft of Brews Café downtown – and it could be in someone’s living room that you were invited to from the next booth at Aladdin’s Diner, and you don’t even know whose house you’re at, but you have a seat and a glass and a small plate of, well, something, and friendly people are making music right there in front of you.

The pioneers of 1805 may not have made hors d’oeuvres from filo dough, but the scene before you would make sense to them, even so!


Health and safety

Main Street just off the Four Corners, along a stretch of brick pavement that abuts Broadway, is home to a block long Farmer’s Market, summer into fall each Saturday morning – attending the Farmer’s Market is as much entertainment as it is shopping for many village and township residents!

There’s a health factor that many of us in Granville swear by, as much as the worth of eating food grown out of the same terrain you’re standing on, and that is the element of knowing your neighbors.

If you know, really know the people who live next door, and across the street, and around the corner, there seems to be what the medical folks call “a protective factor” about that kind of knowing and being known.

It makes sense, because if you have neighbors to look out for you, to keep an eye on your house when you’re gone, to pick up the mail and water the plants, they might also be able to lend a hand when you break a leg. It’s that kind of neighbor who brings over a plate of brownies when you move in, and a casserole or more when trouble comes to roost (and even in the most idyllic villages, each of us has trouble perch occasionally on our lives).

So we know each other in Granville: we go to church together, volunteer at the schools together, coach teams out at Wildwood Park or across the creek at Raccoon Valley Park. In fact, it’s hard to stay too long on the sofa, especially in the warmer months, because between the Granville Recreation Commission always coming up with new programs and activities for all ages, the Granville Fellowship’s events and programs for those of maturer years, and the number of parent volunteer opportunities at the schools, there’s always someplace and someone who needs us to get up and get going . . . so we do.

And we still get home in time to watch “Idol.” Unless we’ve gone to help set up equipment for “Granville Idol” . . .

Healthy living and healthful activities are always at the forefront of community conversation around the village. Not just because we have an embarrassment of doctors and medical professionals living in the area (which we do), but there’s a get up and get going mentality that keeps the bike trails and walking paths and fitness centers not just full, but growing. A recent community study showed that a strong consensus existed behind adding to the current network of biking and pedestrian options, and new fitness centers have opened in the last few months, right in the teeth of the economic challenges that we all face.

To echo those old, well educated settlers, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” a healthy mind in a healthy body is a goal we all help encourage each other to follow, whatever path best gets us there.


Business environment

Granville has been interested in business since the earliest days of the settlement. We cut down trees and made all-wooden clocks, we dug the Welsh Hills and followed a seam of iron ore far enough to start the Granville Furnace and make cast iron stoves to ship down the Ohio & Erie Canal.

Education has been, in many ways, one of our most reliable industries, starting with attracting and keeping a college, started here by Baptists in 1831 as the Granville Theological and Literary Institution, and now a very successful private liberal arts undergraduate school of 2,100 students, Denison University.

Back when it was just Granville College for short, and before the businessman William S. Denison made the donation that put his name on the place, there were actually three other academic institutions in the village, all attracting students from around Ohio and back into New England. Some for women, who would have been in a separate school before the Civil War, and competing schools for young men.

Denison is the only post-secondary school in town today, but private schooling on the elementary and secondary level still is an active business in Granville today. The connection between industry and academics can be seen most clearly at the heart of the Denison campus atop College Hill, where the student center is in a building called Slayter Union.

Games Slayter was an engineer and administrator with Owens-Illinois, and helped to develop an unexpected invention that he called “fiberglas,” which led to their merger with Corning Glass Works to form Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation. Slayter had married a local girl, Marie Foor, and their roots in Licking County led to the establishment of the Owens-Corning Science and Technology Center on the edge of the village. The Tech Center, as it’s known locally, was dedicated in Slayter’s honor just before his death in 1964, and after he and Marie had already given Slayter Union to Denison’s campus.

Innovation is part of Granville’s heritage through the generations, from those wooden clock makers to finding a use for hollow tubes of spun glass, and the Denison University campus continues to be a base for research into the human genome, high energy physics, and the coming technologies of long-distance education.

Today the transportation options available to village residents are not limited to the Granville Feeder of the Ohio & Erie Canal or a spur of the interurban rail system that was born between Granville and Newark, Ohio in the 1890s. The four lane highway to our west offers a near-direct connection to the Port Columbus airport complex, and Granville folk not only work for airlines and aviation businesses, but some residents actually work as far away as New York and Nashville, while still calling Granville home, at least for long weekends.

Creative professionals who want a scenic and peaceful environment are finding that Granville, plus the internet, opens up possibilities to telecommute that literally opens up our small village to the entire globe . . . or perhaps we should say opens up the entire globe to the influence of this historic village!


Culture and heritage

There may not be many places in Ohio where March 1st sees a number of red dragons on a white and green background fluttering from a multitude of homes.

St. David’s Day is the day, a day for Welsh pride; here in the shadow of the Welsh Hills, we have a scattering of street names and buildings that echo the hills of Wales, and are equally hard to pronounce . . . or spell.

Gwennol Drive, Bedwyn Bach Lane, Merywen Circle, Ty Tawel Farm – and Bryn Du. It all goes back to Bryn Du.

For the Welsh heritage that is so strong in the Granville area, you can credit, or blame, someone named Jones. There were, as you may know, quite a few of them! And no one ever had trouble spelling Jones, which along with Rees and Morgan was the bulk of the early mark on the map by Welsh settlers around the village.

John Sutphin Jones made a different sort of mark. Around 1900, he made his fortune in southeastern Ohio with the Sunday Creek Coal Company, selling to the Columbus market, and beyond.

With his newfound fortune, he bought a classic stone farmhouse outside of the then-village, and hired the best architect in Ohio, Frank Packard, to redesign it as a magnificent country retreat (and would hire him again later to create the Granville Inn).

Looking to his own Welsh heritage, the area’s same roots, and the basis of his fortune, he found the words for “Black Hill” in Welsh was “Bryn Du.” According to today’s Welsh speakers, the correct pronunciation of this phrase is “Brin Dee,” but most local folk have been saying “Dew” for a hundred years or so, keeping the debate of “proper pronunciation” alive. Either way, the home is now owned by the village, with a Great Lawn stretching from the white columned portico to Newark-Granville Road.

On the lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, you will see polo played most Sunday afternoons from May to September, and on almost any other weekday evening the open green space is dotted with the temporary goals and lines of girls’ field hockey, boys’ lacrosse, and youth soccer and track.

If you wander up into the Bryn Du Woods neighborhood, among all the mysterious to pronounce names, you might work ‘round to a high point overlooking the Great Lawn, where a Historical Marker tells the tale of Native American residents from a thousand years before, describing an effigy in earthwork called “Alligator Mound,” a four-footed creature with a spiral tail that is one of only two effigy mounds in the state, the other being the larger Serpent Mound in Adams County.

Between the 1,000 year old mound and today’s soccer players are centuries and generations of residents here in Granville; houses from 1809 still private homes, an inn from 1812 that once hosted Johnny Appleseed, and that Henry Ford wanted for Greenfield Village . . . but is still here in historic Granville.


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Granville -- Ohio’s Best Hometown 2009 draft


Community spirit

Granville is the kind of town where spring blossoms take turns from yard to yard in coming to their full blown peak, nodding agreeably to overarching rainbows against not quite threatening skies; where the slanting summer light picks up only the most golden dust to catch the light as outdoor concerts end; where the leaves turn color through autumn in artistically arranged masses with complimentary colors; where the icicles hang with particular grace even in the frozen but well-lit heart of winter.

You can say this is all simply a state of mind and a way of seeing, but things really do look differently in this remarkable village, where visitors rack their brains to come up with something to say describing the streetscapes other than “quaint” or “Rockwellian.”

New England characteristics and Greek Revival qualities set the tone for this over 200 year old community, settled by folk from Connecticut and Massachusetts in November of 1805. Their wilderness surveyed grid is still the template and frame for the many early buildings that line the village center and trace the farmers’ lanes that stretch out into Granville Township. A monument in the form of a tree stump marks the place where the first tree was cut and used for a first public address to the gathered travelers, at the intersection centering the survey which is still called “the Four Corners.”

Public buildings were planned for the middle of town, and four churches now grace the corners of Broadway and Main Street, with complimentary but very unique steeples reflecting the various traditions and customs that still draw Granville residents together and yet point to their essential and essentially different character, house by house and family by family.

But a single example of this is the Community Picnic, held every other year since the inaugural bicentennial affair, where tables were set from the Four Corners to the foot of Sugarloaf Hill, across the southern edge of the Denison University campus. Thousands of village and township residents come and sit together, with each table displaying an utterly different look as to centerpieces, tableware, and dining. Some with homey baskets stuffed with home-made specialities, and others with designer crates to set out a gourmet meal half of which was delivered from halfway around the world.

One table even had a hanging chandelier, which is a neat trick at an outdoor picnic!

Granville residents like to come together, to celebrate, to sing (like the full throated Welsh pioneers who snuck in before even the official pioneers arrived, leaving their name on the Welsh Hills that frame the township), to debate, to deliberate, to listen. And when we come together, we like to proudly share our differences, our uniquenesses, even our peculiarities – maybe especially our peculiarities. This is Granville, and things are different here, which is exactly how we like it.


Education

When the Four Corners were laid out in the original plat, a schoolhouse was planned along with a church as the first public building shared by all.

The New England forebearers from Granville, Massachusetts had already set a high priority on learning and scholarship, a value they carried with them in their ox carts and among their belongings.

Books and musical instruments and a love of education were as important to the initial settlers as a sharp axe and sturdy yoke for the oxen, and they were put to work just as quickly.

The old schoolhouse on the Four Corners is gone, but is remembered in the lessons and examples set before today’s children at the elementary, intermediate, middle, and high schools. They win awards, and the village is happy to let the realtors talk about the standing of the “Granville Exempted School District” (some say one of the ten best districts in the state of Ohio, others simply declare that the test scores show them to be the best in the state), but local residents are very little interested in comparing Granville Schools to other districts at all.

What gives energy and focus to conversations about education in Granville today is the question “are our schools the very best they can possibly be, and what do we need to do as a community to make them even better than they are right now?” It is with that kind of attention that everything in the district is under constant review, from the meals served in the cafeterias, to the scholarship support for the 90+% of graduates who go to college.

With a college on the hill overlooking Granville proper, the assumption that grads will go on to higher education is built literally into the local landscape. Called Denison University, founded as Granville College in 1831, the four year undergraduate private liberal arts institution casts a shadow over the village in more ways than one, although it might be more accurate to say it shines a light of learning across the homes and businesses and activities of our town.

From the tall steeple of Swasey Chapel atop College Hill to the lower campus down near the center of the village, venues for entertainment and activity imply a certain educational quality to everything from a string quartet to a Beatles impersonation band concert on the lower quadrangle (where the Granville Recreation Commission puts on a “Concerts on the Green” series every summer after the students depart for the season).

Guest speakers from the worlds of politics, the arts, and entertainment come to Denison for presentations open to anyone in the area, and not a few of those guests were once students here themselves, like Steve Carell of “The Office” fame or Michael Eisner, former Disney CEO; Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is still a regular visitor to campus as a member of the college board of trustees, and Jennifer Garner passes through between movie roles.


Entertainment

Those early Welsh and New England pioneers liked to talk about “making your own fun.”

That may have been making the best of necessity back in 1805, but the fact of the matter today in Granville is that we still have a taste for entertainment that is of our own making.

The Old Fashioned Fourth of July is a week of local musicians and parades with floats that bear all the proud hallmarks of “we made it ourselves”. Broadway is blocked off for an amusement area with a midway of rides and games, along with a row of booths where food and crafts are made and sold by area residents. Guess where the longer lines can be found?

Broadway is, in fact, blocked off for public use quite a few times a year. Public spaces in Granville are still just that, areas for the public to use and gather in, not just for transportation to whiz past or rumble through. The Bluesfest in the Fall, the Community Picnic every other summer, and occasional other events can have you sitting comfortably in the center of the village right on top of the yellow stripe.

The sidewalks see large crowds of visitors for the Candlelight Walking Tour every first Saturday of December, Graduation weekend in May from Denison University, the summer sidewalk sale that precedes the week of the Fourth of July, and various Antique Fairs and other events from time to time.

What anchors the spring season in Granville is an event that can’t be stopped and has many centers but no clearly defined border: the Daffodil Festival. The College Town House may be the epicenter of this explosion of yellow that threatens to color the whole town, but as you walk the blocks from the business district and historic downtown, you can follow the eruptions of yellow, from darker ambers to delicate saffron-whites, as far as your feet will carry you, and still one hill just beyond.

There are big names that come to the Denison campus, shows and speakers and concerts, plus the Newark-Granville Symphony that often plays in Swasey Chapel as well as elsewhere in the county; what makes for the ongoing entertainment in the village is that there is almost never a night, let alone a weekend, where a musical group with mostly local talent is playing nearby. It could be at the Granville Inn, or at the high school’s Performing Arts Center, or even in the third floor loft of Brews Café downtown – and it could be in someone’s living room that you were invited to from the next booth at Aladdin’s Diner, and you don’t even know whose house you’re at, but you have a seat and a glass and a small plate of, well, something, and friendly people are making music right there in front of you.

The pioneers of 1805 may not have made hors d’oeuvres from filo dough, but the scene before you would make sense to them, even so!


Health and safety

Main Street just off the Four Corners, along a stretch of brick pavement that abuts Broadway, is home to a block long Farmer’s Market, summer into fall each Saturday morning – attending the Farmer’s Market is as much entertainment as it is shopping for many village and township residents!

There’s a health factor that many of us in Granville swear by, as much as the worth of eating food grown out of the same terrain you’re standing on, and that is the element of knowing your neighbors.

If you know, really know the people who live next door, and across the street, and around the corner, there seems to be what the medical folks call “a protective factor” about that kind of knowing and being known.

It makes sense, because if you have neighbors to look out for you, to keep an eye on your house when you’re gone, to pick up the mail and water the plants, they might also be able to lend a hand when you break a leg. It’s that kind of neighbor who brings over a plate of brownies when you move in, and a casserole or more when trouble comes to roost (and even in the most idyllic villages, each of us has trouble perch occasionally on our lives).

So we know each other in Granville: we go to church together, volunteer at the schools together, coach teams out at Wildwood Park or across the creek at Raccoon Valley Park. In fact, it’s hard to stay too long on the sofa, especially in the warmer months, because between the Granville Recreation Commission always coming up with new programs and activities for all ages, the Granville Fellowship’s events and programs for those of maturer years, and the number of parent volunteer opportunities at the schools, there’s always someplace and someone who needs us to get up and get going . . . so we do.

And we still get home in time to watch “Idol.” Unless we’ve gone to help set up equipment for “Granville Idol” . . .

Healthy living and healthful activities are always at the forefront of community conversation around the village. Not just because we have an embarrassment of doctors and medical professionals living in the area (which we do), but there’s a get up and get going mentality that keeps the bike trails and walking paths and fitness centers not just full, but growing. A recent community study showed that a strong consensus existed behind adding to the current network of biking and pedestrian options, and new fitness centers have opened in the last few months, right in the teeth of the economic challenges that we all face.

To echo those old, well educated settlers, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” a healthy mind in a healthy body is a goal we all help encourage each other to follow, whatever path best gets us there.


Business environment

Granville has been interested in business since the earliest days of the settlement. We cut down trees and made all-wooden clocks, we dug the Welsh Hills and followed a seam of iron ore far enough to start the Granville Furnance and make cast iron stoves to ship down the Ohio & Erie Canal.

Education has been, in many ways, one of our most reliable industries, starting with attracting and keeping a college, started here by Baptists in 1831 as the Granville Theological and Literary Institution, and now a very successful private liberal arts undergraduate school of 2,100 students, Denison University.

Back when it was just Granville College for short, and before the businessman William S. Denison made the donation that put his name on the place, there were actually three other academic institutions in the village, all attracting students from around Ohio and back into New England. Some for women, who would have been in a separate school before the Civil War, and competing schools for young men.

Denison is the only post-secondary school in town today, but private schooling on the elementary and secondary level still is an active business in Granville today. The connection between industry and academics can be seen most clearly at the heart of the Denison campus atop College Hill, where the student center is in a building called Slayter Union.

Games Slayter was an engineer and administrator with Owens-Illinois, and helped to develop an unexpected invention that he called “fiberglas,” which led to their merger with Corning Glass Works to form Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation. Slayter had married a local girl, Marie Foor, and their roots in Licking County led to the establishment of the Owens-Corning Science and Technology Center on the edge of the village. The Tech Center, as it’s known locally, was dedicated in Slayter’s honor just before his death in 1964, and after he and Marie had already given Slayter Union to Denison’s campus.

Innovation is part of Granville’s heritage through the generations, from those wooden clock makers to finding a use for hollow tubes of spun glass, and the Denison University campus continues to be a base for research into the human genome, high energy physics, and the coming technologies of long-distance education.

Today the transportation options available to village residents are not limited to the Granville Feeder of the Ohio & Erie Canal or a spur of the interurban rail system that was born between Granville and Newark, Ohio in the 1890s. The four lane highway to our west offers a near-direct connection to the Port Columbus airport complex, and Granville folk not only work for airlines and aviation businesses, but some residents actually work as far away as New York and Nashville, while still calling Granville home, at least for long weekends.

Creative professionals who want a scenic and peaceful environment are finding that Granville, plus the internet, opens up possibilities to telecommute that literally opens up our small village to the entire globe . . . or perhaps we should say opens up the entire globe to the influence of this historic village!


Culture and heritage

There may not be many places in Ohio where March 1st sees a number of red dragons on a white and green background fluttering from a multitude of homes.

St. David’s Day is the day, a day for Welsh pride; here in the shadow of the Welsh Hills, we have a scattering of street names and buildings that echo the hills of Wales, and are equally hard to pronounce . . . or spell.

Gwennol Drive, Bedwyn Bach Lane, Merywen Circle, Ty Tawel Farm – and Bryn Du. It all goes back to Bryn Du.

For the Welsh heritage that is so strong in the Granville area, you can credit, or blame, someone named Jones. There were, as you may know, quite a few of them! And no one ever had trouble spelling Jones, which along with Rees and Morgan was the bulk of the early mark on the map by Welsh settlers around the village.

John Sutphin Jones made a different sort of mark. Around 1900, he made his fortune in southeastern Ohio with the Sunday Creek Coal Company, selling to the Columbus market, and beyond.

With his newfound fortune, he bought a classic stone farmhouse outside of the then-village, and hired the best architect in Ohio, Frank Packard, to redesign it as a magnificent country retreat (and would hire him again later to create the Granville Inn).

Looking to his own Welsh heritage, the area’s same roots, and the basis of his fortune, he found the words for “Black Hill” in Welsh was “Bryn Du.” According to today’s Welsh speakers, the correct pronunciation of this phrase is “Brin Dee,” but most local folk have been saying “Dew” for a hundred years or so, keeping the debate of “proper pronunciation” alive. Either way, the home is now owned by the village, with a Great Lawn stretching from the white columned portico to Newark-Granville Road.

On the lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, you will see polo played most Sunday afternoons from May to September, and on almost any other weekday evening the open green space is dotted with the temporary goals and lines of girls’ field hockey, boys’ lacrosse, and youth soccer and track.

If you wander up into the Bryn Du Woods neighborhood, among all the mysterious to pronounce names, you might work ‘round to a high point overlooking the Great Lawn, where a Historical Marker tells the tale of Native American residents from a thousand years before, describing an effigy in earthwork called “Alligator Mound,” a four-footed creature with a spiral tail that is one of only two effigy mounds in the state, the other being the larger Serpent Mound in Adams County.

Between the 1,000 year old mound and today’s soccer players are centuries and generations of residents here in Granville; houses from 1809 still private homes, an inn from 1812 that once hosted Johnny Appleseed, and that Henry Ford wanted for Greenfield Village . . . but is still here, in historic Granville.

DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT – Lean Times/DisciplesWorld April 2009 – DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT

This could be the best time ever for a stewardship campaign.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

True, this is not the best time for fund raising or asking people for money. But at risk of horrifying some of the church treasurers among us, a stewardship campaign isn’t about fund raising. No matter what you call it . . .

Fall is usually the season for financial campaigns in our congregations, sometimes called a “stewardship emphasis” or “pledge drive” or almost anything but fund raising.

The hard fact is that avoiding the term “fund raising” makes sense, because the problem is less that there needs to be an annual emphasis on giving from congregants, than that these matters should be discussed year ‘round, but rarely are.

Once a year is better than never, though. One time a year is sometimes as often as church leadership’s nerves can take the strain of talking out loud about one of the few no-go-zones left in a culture where sexual habits and personal failings are the stuff of reality tv shows and coffee shop unembarrassed outloud conversation, but wallets and income and spending are kept in secret.

Check out Mark 4:22 on that.

Here’s what is important for religious people in general, Christians in particular, and potentially of benefit to anyone about the practice and discipline of stewardship. Not as a code word to avoid saying “money” out loud in church, but to see being a steward as a central image for what it means to be a Christian. Stewardship as care for what we’ve been given, the responsibility we have for what’s on loan to us for a little while, not what you call the little tablet of envelopes you get when you join a church.

Stewardship is a mindset, an expression of a worldview, which may be why Jesus came back again and again to stewards as a way of pulling us into a parable. In Luke 16, I imagine that many of his first listeners grabbed at a spot more nearer their wallets than their hearts when they imagined the awful feeling of being called to account by the boss (or, The Boss).

Stewardship, a sense of relatedness to what’s under our control that isn’t actually through our own autonomy, but by way of another’s interests that take priority. We hear over and over how now is our moment, we deserve a break, and it’s time to pamper ourselves a little (the “a little” is usually meant ironically, I think). So it takes a bit of counter-programming for us to step back, take a deep breath, and regard our stuff and our savings, our excess and extravagances, and realize “this isn’t really mine.”

Because it isn’t. Not even close. We have stuff, for a while, but it’s either going into a landfill, a museum, or fueling the hyperexpansion of the sun during its final stages of existence in a few billion years. Or it may spend time in all three.

But nothing is, in an ultimate sense, ours.

Not to make light of a truly awful situation for many people, but the whole 401K business is one aspect of a perfect teaching opportunity (I know, I know, you don’t have one anymore, you have a 201K, yeah, I’ve heard that one). There were stretches where lots of people thought they had lots of money in “an account” which was at “the fund” managed by “Wall Street,” whatever those three things actually are themselves.

Then suddenly, you had – well, something different. Candidly, something less. And for many, a question: did I ever have something there to start with?

For even less fortunate victims of certain funds that shall remain nameless, but You Know Of Whom I Speak, it turns out the answer is “No,” you didn’t have anything starting the moment you deposited with that gentleman who “made off” with so many people’s money.

We have our work, the income we generate that is paid at what we all know is less than we’re worth, and then we use symbols and numbers to trade that effort, the “sweat of our brow” as God told Adam, for stuff like food and mortgage payments and a newer exercise machine we won’t use, either. Now, that’s ours, isn’t it?

Except the good steward knows that even their ability to earn a living is due to the provision of tools and fields and opportunity that came from someone else (Someone Else?), so they are humble even about that. We acknowledge that reality, in a way, every time we raise funds to help those who can’t work for their food, for orphans and grief-stricken widows, for the differently abled and the utterly destitute.
In other words, we’re always stewards. We’re always beneficiaries of those who have gone before, of advantages enjoyed by our families and fellows often before we were even born, and much of what we labor over will truly be enjoyed most by those who come long after . . . or at least I hope so.

That’s the tough challenge that stewardship education faces, to re-vision our sense of ownership and entitlement into a perspective the Good Steward would recognize. It is a hard truth in lean times that we might be more ready to start seeing and thinking . . . and acting that way in our financial disciplines, now more than at any point in the recent past.

How do we get there?

The Lovely Wife and I have had a practice since the beginning of our marriage. We have a budget, based on projected income. That budget starts with giving 10%, saving 10%, and then we look at what’s left.

What’s left is shaped by the fact that almost 30% of our “gross income” goes to taxes, the good and worthwhile work of larger institutions, and a bit of waste here and there (yes, some, but that’s not our topic today). When our household adds up income and payroll taxes, my self-employed quarterly estimated to SocSec and various local taxing bodies, our property taxes, and the chunk of spending that goes to sales tax, just about 30% of our income goes to local, school, county, state, and federal taxes.

Since most years we actually put more than 10% in savings, that means, if you’ve been doing the math, that we live on less than half, under 50% of what we earn. My point is not that we’re dreadfully frugal (we are, but not so terribly), but the order you figure this out in, and the fact that the last thing this method takes you to is how much you can spend on whatever.

The budget, with that 48 or 49% we’re looking at in the final stages, has to list house payment and utilities and groceries and some clothes and such, the Little Guy’s amusements, and . . . there’s usually some amusements left for us, mainly aimed at a vacation trip or two.

If you start with that, and work backwards to how much you can “afford” to give, I can pretty much guarantee you the number will be 1 to 2%, tops. Given that our national savings rate is effectively in negative numbers these last few years (the hidden engine of our current economic mess), unless you give to your church on your credit card, it won’t be there.

Oh, and household debt is now at 130% of household income, so let’s not run that number up any higher in God’s name.

So starting with what you give isn’t about how much more your church needs the money than you do. It’s about how much you need to look at your income more as gift and opportunity and responsibility than as “what I earned,” which is why I know most folks would flip out at the idea of living on less than half of “my income.”

A gift you can give yourself is to stop seeing it as “my income,” and seeing yourself as a steward of what comes into and through your household at any given time. I’m willing to bet most of my readers aren’t paid what they ought to get, and who of us says “no, I haven’t earned it” to a raise? Pay is rarely equal to value, or daycare workers and kindergarten teachers and OB/GYN nurses would make more than anyone.

Start with giving, which says to God and your own heart and anyone else paying attention (like the children in your family who don’t miss a thing), “this is just what I get to manage for a season.” Prioritize some savings, which says to a future you and yours “I know that me, right now, isn’t all there is.” Write down your fixed costs, and make sure to account for taxes, because sooner or later you’re gonna pay ‘em.

And have fun with the rest; if you do those other things first, I’m not really all that worried with the choices you’ll make with what remains. For many of us, there’s not much trouble we could get into with that amount, anyhow!

Keep Luke 8:17 just in case.

Jeff Gill is a member of Central Christian Church in Newark, Ohio, and an ordained minister who provides licensed/commissioned ministry programming for the Ohio region when he isn't working as a juvenile court mediator, facilitating a Consecration Sunday program, or just out storytelling at a camp somewhere. E-mail him at knapsack77@gmail.com.