8) A Sense Of History

The Jones Family and Welsh Heritage

(Eric Jones)

I come from a large family with a Welsh background.  My mother had seven sisters and a brother, and they were very much into family genealogy.  Still are today.  Of course, the Welsh Hills represents a significant part of the community and it was even more so then.  It wasn’t chopped up into developments.  So when I was growing up, if you went out on Hankinson Road from Welsh Hills Road to Cambria Mill, pretty much everybody on that road was a relative of mine, and the same with Cambria Mill.  And we had family reunions, three or four a year and all the conversation centered on our Welsh ancestry.  My Aunt Ruth Sipe, who used to write a column for the Granville Sentinel on the Welsh history of Granville, lived with my parents and I until I was eighteen.  So all I heard when I was growing up was about my Welsh ancestry. 

I don’t remember a lot of the details but it’s still very important to me.  Don’t hold me to the exact, it was four greats and a grandfather who originally would have been Thomas Philipps.  And he and Theopilus Rees were the two original purchasers of a large tract of land that represents most of the Welsh Hills today. And they would have arrived in Granville somewhere between 1801 and 1803. So that makes me the eighth generation and my kids the ninth.

First Welsh Settlers:  Theophilus Rees and Thomas Philipps

(Ruth Sipe)

I am descended from several of the original families in the Welsh Hills.  It all started in South Wales where there were two farmers, Thomas Philipps and Theophilus Rees.  Thomas Philipps had a son who was a free thinker who wrote a number of seditious things about the crown, the government, and restriction on worship.  An order went out for his arrest.  So he had to get away and come to the United States.  Soon he began pleading with his parents to come to America, this land of promise.  So Thomas Philipps and his neighbor, Theophilus Rees, got together a whole shipload of people from this town in South Wales.  And they went to Beulah, Pennsylvania, which is in Cambria County.  There’s a Cambria Mill Road in the Welsh Hills – that’s where that name came from.

Theophilus Rees and Thomas Philipps each purchased about 1000 acres of land in the Welsh Hills from Sampson Davis, I think his name was.  And Theophilus Rees came right away (1802) to settle his 1000 acres so he is given more credit for settling the Welsh Hills than Thomas Philipps.  But actually, Thomas Philipps is the one who initiated the plan to come and he bought the land at the same time.  So they’re really co-founders of the Welsh Hills.  Thomas Philipps didn’t come until 1809.  So my family came in 1809.

The Welsh Hills – A Place Unto Itself

(Ruth Sipe)

I think lots of people don’t understand, that when we talk about the Welsh Hills, we’re talking about the area just north of Granville.  It’s the northeast quarter of Granville Township.  Welsh Hills is a place and an entity in itself.  Many people have adopted the name.  There was a Welsh Hills Nursery, the Welsh Hills Players, Welsh Hills School.  But the entity of Welsh Hills was founded in 1802, which was three years before Granville was.  It was always a place by itself, because the settlers maintained their Welsh language up until the turn of the century.  I think I’ve heard Minnie Hite Moody say that the people were still speaking Welsh on the streets in Granville in the early 1900s.   Then they had their own church and they had their own school.  So my interest is in the Welsh Hills rather than in Granville, because that’s where I lived and that’s where my people came.

Naming the Roads in the Welsh Hills

(Ruth Sipe)

Not very many people know the story of the naming of the roads in the Welsh Hills. In 1955 when Granville was having its sesquicentennial, they wanted to have a tour of the Welsh Hills as part of that celebration.  And they came to Sammy, one of the young Samuel Philippses.  (There’s been a Sammy and a Thom – Samuel and Thomas in every generation of Philippses.)  Sammy lived at the intersection of what’s now Hankinson and Welsh Hills Roads.  And of course being at that intersection, he was constantly being asked for directions to someplace in the Welsh Hills.  Now at that time, every road in the Welsh Hills was called the Welsh Hills Road, so it was almost impossible to direct anybody anyplace.  So it was decided that to make a map for the tour, they had to have names for the roads.  Sammy hit on the idea of naming the roads for the families who had originally settled on them.  So he worked out a plan and submitted to the Theophilus Rees family reunion and they approved it and it was put into effect then as part of the sesquicentennial of Granville.

We have Hankinson Road, because of William Hankinson who settled there.  Over the years that road had several names -- it was Cramer Road and then it was Hankinson Road, and then it was Route 2.  There’s a Philipps Road where the cemetery is.  Now Jones Road is not named for my family of Jones.  It’s named for the J.S. Jones that’s Sallie Jones Sexton’s father.  And there’s a Milner Road, Price Road, King Road.  All are named for the original families that settled there.

The Village Spring

(Dick Mahard)

The village spring is in the west yard of the Kappa Alpha Theta House.  And the nucleus of that house is the Gilman House, which is the oldest frame house that is still intact, although it is now completely surrounded by an addition on two sides.  But in the back yard of that house, to this day, there still is a little pool-like thing.  And that little pool marks the site of where there was an important village spring, which was declared a public spring.  Even though Mr. Gilman owned that lot, that spring was public and it was the most important spring in those very early years.  [ To get there, you go up Mulberry Street to College.  When you cross College Street, then Mulberry Street becomes the sorority circle.  The Theta house is the first house on sorority circle on your left. ]

Old Colony Burying Ground  (1930s)

(Ed Deeds)

When I was young, the Old Colony Burying Ground was a place that people avoided – it was like a spooky place.  And back then (around the mid-1930s) the Burying Ground was just really a mess.  It was a tangle of brush and most of the graves were down and everything.  At that time, my father was head of the committee that took care of the town streets in Granville.  So my father decided that he would just consider that south Main Street got really wide there where it goes by the cemetery, and that way the town street money could be used to have it mowed.  I guess he never took any credit for it, but he started the tradition of having the street people keep it mowed.

Granville Sesquicentennial Events – 1955

(Sam Schnaidt)

I was here in 1955 and remember all the activities of the Granville Sesquicentennial.  It was a fun, fun time.  One Saturday afternoon, the Denison Theatre department put on little vignettes of history in the place where they actually occurred.  And I remember riding my bike from one to another.  For instance, one vignette was acted out where Lisa McKivergin’s real estate office is [ 124 S. Main St. ].  Back in the early 1820s it was the home of a minister of the Presbyterian church and so the students acted out the great Sabbath controversy.  It was Sunday and the weather was getting bad so the minister told the workers to go ahead and finish the brick on his house.  Then there was a big uproar in the town about this violation of the Sabbath.  And they acted that out right there at that house.  I thought it made history come alive, some good history lessons.

They also had a very nice historical parade, but no carnival.  And that’s when they officially opened the Historical Society Museum.  Governor Lausche was the governor of Ohio then and he cut the ribbon to open the museum.  All the store windows were decorated with historical displays.

The House with the Wreath

(Sam Schnaidt)

Our house was built in 1940 by John and Eva Montgomery.  But before they got it finished, John was called to the service in World War II so they actually never moved into it until about 1946.  They lived here until 1958 when they sold it to Carl and Fran Alstrom who lived here until 1970 when we bought the house.  We found the wreath frame that my wife Heidi puts up each Christmas up in the attic of the garage.  So Heidi called Eva Montgomery and asked her how she did this wreath because I had remembered it as a child and Eva told her and Heidi has done it ever since.  The wreath has become a tradition.  We also told our daughter that if they buy this house that she has to continue the wreath tradition or she’ll get thrown out of Granville.

First House to Have a Telephone

(Gary Hamilton)

We moved to East Maple in 1978.  We found out that our house was built in like 1880.  Old John Boaz Jones was the guy that owned it.  He was part of the huge Jones family from around here.  Dick Powell told me that our house was one of four houses set up with the first telephone in Granville.  They have it in the museum.  It was like a wooden box that had a piece of something like a calf’s heart that they used for a diaphragm.  And they strung this big, thick copper wire and they strung between the houses.  Our house is one of the houses and I think Tom Evans’ house down on South Main was one of them.  I can’t remember the other ones, but Dick said that once the big wire was hooked up, they would thump on that diaphragm if they wanted to get the person’s attention and talk.

Old Colony Burying Ground Walking Tour

(Laura Cramer)

Third grade was really my Granville history year.  All our class made an old Granville city.  We worked together with a partner and we made cardboard houses and did a history report on one of them.  I did the Buxton Inn because it was close, and I learned that they sold lemonade.  That year I really learned a lot about Granville’s history and how people had come here and what it was like.

Then I was asked to portray Emeline Rose for the Old Colony Burying Ground Walking Tour.  The Granville Historical Society had given me a brief history about her and then I did some research for myself.  And the night of the tour I got my costume on and some stitchery to do while I was waiting and so I sat by her gravestone and waited for a group of people to come around.  And then I gave a talk about Emeline and told how I had lived as her.  So it was a really wonderful experience.  I was the only child actually, and there were a lot of adults who had also participated and been different people.

The Story of the Pink House

(Carol Apacki)

When we came here in 1968, we were able to buy a house in town for $35,000.  We bought “the pink house” on Maple Street.  There were four houses for sale when we moved from Indian Hills into Granville and there was only one house that was in our price range and the realtor said you’ve got to see it and it was bright pink.

When I looked at it I said, “I don’t even want to see that house.  Anybody that would paint a house bright pink, I don’t even want to see it.”  She said, “Well you better, you just have to come inside” and she took me inside and I fell in love with it.  It had been bought at a sheriff’s auction and been restored by an elderly couple, the Windles.  He was actually a world famous physician.  And they had bought it and restored it in true Victorian style.  And Victorian homes were pastel colors, like the Buxton Inn and so they restored it to be historically correct.  So we bought it thinking, well we’ll repaint it.  And then when we priced out what it would cost to repaint, it was like a thousand dollars.  And we thought, “Oh we sort of like the pink house.”  We'd get letters written to us, "the Apacki family, the pink house in Granville".  The town was that small!  It had that sense of smallness still.  And the pink house is still bright pink today!

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