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.