Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Jeff Gill

Layers of narrative at Munson Springs

___

For me, the discovery of a fluted point in relatively undisturbed subsoil is an event in our local prehistory that takes us back, both 10,000 years or more when it was left in the ground by Paleoindian hunters, and its find by archaeologists a year before I moved to Licking County.

Where the layers of history that make up the Munson Springs site intersect most directly with my own story was when in November of 1989 my trowel pinged off a unifacial scraper, a piece of flint not really diagnostic as to dating in itself, but found within centimeters of the previous season's fluted point…and of the same type flint, along with a scattering of flakes made from more of the same.

With that find, a lone fluted point became a toolkit assemblage of sorts, and possibly even a base camp for those ancient early hunters across these hills and valleys. Just a few weeks later, all of us from the Munson Springs dig became involved in the excavation and recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, not directly related but of the same general era, with dating more precisely made there to 11,500 years before the present.

From that fluted point to the "settler" period of Granville history, the amazing thing about the area around the intersection of Newark-Granville Road and Cherry Valley Road is that we have in one place a meaningful indication in and on the land of every epoch. Paleoindian period stone tools, Archaic projectile points, Adena and Hopewell era mounds, late prehistoric Native American presence on the landscape, and then the arrival of the first Euro-American colonists.

At Galway Drive a marker reminds us of the first over-wintering settlers in 1801 from the East into Granville Township, Lillie and John Jones with their three children. The next year she bears their fourth child, dies a few weeks after, and the rest of the family departs: but nearby, just east of them, a quiet part of our pioneer story remains. Patrick Cunningham, born in Ireland, veteran of the Revolutionary war, thrice-widowed, had built his cabin just beyond the springs, where the Jones cabin was closer to the foot of the hill.

Cunningham helped bury Lillie Jones, and aided her extended family in moving her remains first to Newark after their establishment of a formal cemetery following 1802's plat of that town, then again after early Granville's leaders laid out the Old Colony Burying Ground. Before they did that, their main wagon train camped on the open land south of Munson Springs on November 16, 1805, the night before their entry into today's four corners and establishment of the village as we know it. Cunningham through those early years planted apple seedlings purchased from Johnny Appleseed on those south facing slopes, and an early account notes his orchards and cabin foundation could still be seen in 1889, though he had died in 1832. His son William fought in the War of 1812, dying of disease on his way home from the Ft. Meigs area and buried in the Old Franklinton Cemetery across the Scioto from Columbus in 1814.

By this time, Licking County has been marked off from Fairfield County, of which we were a part until 1808. From Smucker's 1876 history: "the County of Licking was organized with the following persons as its first Judicial and County Officers… Judge of Common Pleas Court, William Wilson; Associate Judges Alexander Holmes, Timothy Rose, & James Taylor; Clerk of Court Samuel Bancroft; Sheriff John Stadden, and Treasurer Elias Gilman…" (who promptly would go back into the village and build his house which stands just off of College St. today).

The account continues: "The first Court was held at the house of Levi Hays, four miles West of Newark and two miles east of Granville. There not being room in the house, the Grand Jury held its inquest under a tree…" directly across from Fackler's Garden Center today, and just down the hill from our historic Munson Springs. Our county's literal foundation begins at that historic intersection.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's convinced our history still speaks in this landscape, if we listen closely. Tell him what you've heard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Jeff Gill

Munson Springs flows with local history

___

A tract of land north of the intersection of Newark-Granville Road and Cherry Valley Road is rich with history. We've seen new development nearby, but along with the Great Lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, it's one of the last open stretches open for preservation on our village's eastern gateway, and there's reason to consider our doing so.

Full disclosure: I have been part of the discovery of this historical narrative, and I confess to some personal interest in how more people can become aware of what a hinge of history that intersection is, and can be. When I first moved to Licking County in August of 1989, I came with an archaeology degree in my background, and arrived just in time to attend a conference held by the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society (LCALS), with speakers from National Geographic, Ohio State's faculty, and scholars from around the country.

That event got me introduced to Paul Hooge, the founder and executive director of LCALS, which had been doing summer field seasons with different archaeology programs including Ohio State on what was known as the Murphy tract. Soon I'd end up on the board of LCALS, but it was for only a few weeks later I would be invited to come help with the last day of that field season, which was going to be some site clean-up and the grunt work of backfilling and closing down a site for the winter.

There was snow in the air and a chill already on the ground when I showed up, and Paul introduced me to someone who would become a lifelong friend, Brad Lepper. He and I were assigned to cleaning off the sides of a unit dug to one side of a trench through a mound near what was already being called the Munson Springs, named for the farmstead at the heart of the Murphy tract. The house and barns still stood where now is the Glen at Erinwood, just east of Jones Road on the north side of Newark-Granville Road.

In another year, the Murphys would close down our work, and begin their intended development; along with facilitating some truly important archaeological digs, they would help with preserving the historic 1810 Munson home, which was moved a half mile east and across the road to become the core of the new Welsh Hills School. But the Munson Springs site had been given another year of work because in the previous year's site closure, an excavator had found a fluted point in the side of the trench.

Fluted points are relatively rare, and almost never found "in situ," in the ground where last they were left. Often in Licking or Coshocton Counties they are found in plowed fields after rains, knocked about and not necessarily located where they were deposited. They date to the first human occupation of this are, 10-13,000 years ago, just as the last glaciers were retreating north. Paleoindian hunters sought out mastodons and mammoths, elk and caribou, and of course deer, using wood and stone tools, the flint projectile points on their spears carefully crafted with a characteristic fluting flake off the base.

There are less than a dozen "in situ" fluted point finds in Ohio: one was within today's village limits, at the Munson Springs site. But this is only the beginning of the story!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he finds scraping and sifting soil to be therapeutic under the right circumstances. Tell him how you relax at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-17-21

Faith Works 7-17-21

Jeff Gill

Everything's not fine, but not so bad either

___

For a few weeks, I've been asking some questions as a person of faith, with a worldview shaped by what church people call "Scripture and tradition," about whether or not things are as bad as you might think.

If you've been reading my reflections for any time at all, you know I have a running issue with the fact that, for many so-called opinion purveyors, worry and concern and anxiety and even fear are how they earn their income.

Nervous people don't change the channel. If you're shocked or provoked by "this weird trick" or what "you won't believe" you are more likely to click the link, turn the page, continue on into the story, read the second page of the three page mailer with a postage-paid return envelope. Getting people worked up into a state is how fundraisers and direct mail goobers and not a few media outlets pay the bills. So there is a huge bias towards bad news and dread invoking possibilities.

My long-time favorite example is how most people have been convinced by implication and innuendo that high school graduation rates have fallen over the last half century, when the opposite is the case. And the general case is made by quotations from antiquity on down, and by antiquity I mean written in cuneiform on clay tablets, about how the younger generation is ruder, more in a hurry, and less respectful of their elders than has ever been true. So we have a general tendency to believe these gloomy scenarios.

While I think education and opportunity and possibilities are better for more people today than at any point in U.S. history, I don't think we live in the Beloved Community promised for the end of the age. We're a long way from being as good and as happy as we could be, as I believe God wants us to be. And much of our misery is self-inflicted, which is why I hate seeing government and politics giving us more ways to make ourselves miserable. I can be convinced by many libertarian arguments, to be honest, but while I don't want to see many things made illegal, I dread the apparently inevitable advent of legal weed, online gambling, or even expanded access to fireworks let alone firearms. 

Where I think one's faith can be most helpful, and what faith communities can do when lobbying the legislature is of no avail, is to teach . . . truth. And while I get most of the email and other communications from interest groups that any minister sees, telling us how to define truth in terms of political issues and partisan candidacies, I reserve the right to define truth separately from the spirit of the age I live in, even when it's a sensibility I might agree with.

Truth, in scripture, is a simple matter of cause and effect, action and reaction. And I frame it less often than some might wish as morality as I do stewardship. Truth is that if I drop a hammer, it will land on my big toe. Yes, I've seen the video, there are exceptions: if I'm on the space station, if there's a really high wind, et cetera. But in general, Scripture & tradition are reliable as norms, and dropping a hammer means something's gonna land hard. So rather than tossing a hammer to one side, I set it down, with care, watching out for people and property.

Likewise, sex. Folks, we can talk this one to death but the reality is the spirit of our age spent decades trying to convince us all that if we could have more sex more freely we'd be happier. Forty years of pastoral counseling and I'm pretty clear that hypothesis has been disproven. The Bible teaches that sexual intimacy is fire, a flame that can spread easily and burn indiscriminately. It needs a hearth, a safe setting, a secure environment to be a blessing and not a bane.

Fireworks, sexuality, it's all a question of good stewardship to me as a preacher. There's little enough we can legislate or regulate if we don't have more individuals committed to the stewardship of the time and resources and gifts God has given us, to use with care what blesses us with the good of others in mind.

If there's anything wrong in our world today, it's not so much the lack of things as it is having more of a sense of enough. I hope to conclude with a word about "enoughness" next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if there's a good way to to know how much is enough, he'd be happy to hear it from you. Tell him how you set boundaries and practice stewardship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-10-21

Faith Works 7-10-21

Jeff Gill

What's wrong, and what's to be done?

___

Having committed some inexcusable and apparently, to some, unforgivable lapses of optimism recently, I'm willing — but only in the context of my prevailing hopefulness — to share a few of my less encouraging, more worrisomely concerned takes.

As a Christian, let alone a person with a calling to faith community leadership in preaching and ministry, my hope is in the cross. That means I have a peculiar relationship to hope at best. Call it pessimistic optimism, or optimistic pessimism either way. I believe things will work out for the good, but likely through a very painful and temporarily unpleasant pathway. Like, say, the cross.

In the cross of Christ I glory, which means I have my hope anchored in heaven and eternity, but I see how the way there means suffering and sacrifice along that Way. It's in the Book, it's part of the operating manual, it's what we've been told to expect.

And I trust in God to use our mistakes, our missteps, for a greater good. My theology unpacks it this way: that in each moment, God is working for our blessing, and in almost every moment, we fall short of making the best use of everything God has given us, so God is eternally and infinitely working on Plan B. There's a vast and majestic Plan A guiding the whole, but in any one moment or life span we are all called to be co-creators, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling as Paul says, and to trust grace in how we will mess that up and that Divine Providence is constantly sweeping up behind us.

So for what's wrong, let's start small. Fireworks. I think it's a horrible, terrible, no-good idea to (as the vendors all agree and are preparing for) double the amount of consumer fireworks going into private hands and in many cases blowing up in them. Someone said on Twitter last weekend that we should keep in our prayers those for whom this is the last day they'll have ten fingers; the news has told us about how even youth and wealth are no protection from amateurs using not-quite-high explosives in their backyards, with death the occasional result. Am I happy about legalizing fireworks use? No. Is this a problem for the church? Well, we preachers can talk about stewardship and the care and keeping of fingers, I guess, but in general, no.

Sports betting on your phone. Hey folks, I have spent now over a year shuttling back and forth to my home state of Indiana, where sports books are all competing like mad for your $5 bets and credit card numbers with access to notifications on your devices. My social media as soon as I'm over the border lights up with betting ads and posts, thanks to geographic ID, and it's . . . well, to me, it's nauseating. Not because I think gambling is a deep moral evil per se, but because all the claims of "they'll bet anyhow" and "Ohio is losing money to other states" and "it's recreational" are belied by the tiny notices of where to call to deal with addiction and gambling. It's going to be what it always is: a tax on ignorance, a burden on those already behind the 8 ball (I'm fine with pool, you see), and the most regressive form of paying for public costs we could come up with. I hate it, and ask my son how I feel about the word "hate."

Yes, churches fought gambling in Ohio for years; when the constitutional amendment workaround prevailed on the ballot, most have given up and caved in. I don't encourage churches to spend much time shouting at the tide on sports betting as state policy, but I can assure you preachers will mostly be warning their flocks: it's not good stewardship.

More worries? Sure. How about guns? I'm not taking a position here on the Second Amendment or pacifism, I'm just going to say it: there are too many guns out there. We have more firearms than people in the US, and too many idiots (let alone lawbreakers) can easily get ahold of a pistol when they're in a mood. Do I think guns are evil? Nope. But our (everybody, now) stewardship of what we've been given should ask why we're spending so much on overpowered weaponry we don't know how to handle.

Enough for now? Next week, come back and we can worry about sex. How's that for concern trolling?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he worries about plenty, thank you very much. Tell him about what you hope for at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.