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.