Notes from my Knapsack 5-1-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 5-1-2025
Jeff Gill

Why our courthouses are central, practically & symbolically
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May 1 is the official dedication day for the restored West Courtroom in the Licking County Courthouse. That day has also been "Law Day" since the 1950s, so it makes sense as a time for judges, lawyers, elected officials, and perhaps a few historians to come together and celebrate this central space in our county's central structure.

In Europe, the central building of a city is usually a palace for nobility, or a chief civic officer's place of operations. They may be castles or towers, usually with a military history attached to them.

Our pattern from early on in the United States, and certainly in the Midwest, is to built our county seats around courthouses. That says something specific about how we saw our governmental organization, of laws and justice at the center, not of a central executive or even legislative location. We can take the commonality of Courthouse Squares as just how it's always been, but there's a particular message here. "Equal Justice Under Law" as the Supreme Court in Washington has carved over the main door; in Newark, we have Lady Justice, blindfolded, with sword in one hand and scales in the other, to say the same thing.

A Cleveland architect, H.E. Meyer, designed our fourth courthouse in 1876, after our 1832 Greek Revival structure burned down in 1875. He laid out a Second Empire style on the exterior, then popular, echoing the transformation of Paris between 1850 and 1870 into the city we know today of broad boulevards and striking public buildings like the Paris Opera. Inside, though, his touch was light.

Our west courtroom for some twenty-five years was similar to the courtrooms on the first floor, steel framing for flat ceilings with pressed tin panels. By 1903, there was growing interest in having a more finished main courtroom, but county finances were tight. Needed repairs on the ceilings on the second floor, however, opened up the possibility of refinement, and Nov. 9, 1903 the county commissioners's journal records "It was further decided by said committee to change 6 panels in ceiling of Court room from steel to plastering." They also contracted with a local firm, "Pratt & Montgomery to furnish wood finishings in Court room as per specifications for $623.25. This was the beginning of what would become the West Courtroom as we know it.

By Mar. 14, 1904, though, "In the matter of remodeling the Court room /
In view of the fact that the Building fund is now overdrawn, be it therefore resolved that no new contract be entered into to complete Court Room repairs, and no outstanding contracts to commence, unless in the judgment of the Commissioners such work is necessary to protect work already done, until funds are available for such work." All three commissioners vote "Yea."

However, since the previous October, they had been purchasing piecemeal, on a square foot basis, round stained glass medallions from Kyle Art Glass of Springfield, Ohio. By July of 1904 they have installed four, and the plastered, coffered ceiling is done, but the vast expanses of walls and ceiling are largely empty. Which is the point at which the Bryant Brothers of Columbus, Ohio are called.

[To be continued!]


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had fun turning the huge pages of commissioners's journals to trace this story. Tell him what history you're curious about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 4-25-2025

Faith Works 4-25-2025
Jeff Gill

Farewells and continuity, with popes and otherwise
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My first papal funeral was black and white, grainy in a then-amazing overseas satellite hookup. Pope John XXIII died in the summer of 1963, and young as I was, it became blurred in memory with a very different yet quite similar series of honors in November, with the death of President Kennedy.

Still, I recall my mother explaining to me the significance of the ceremony (or ceremonies, as they do indeed blend together over sixty years later), the rituals and processions and the great sense of solemnity around it all.

Not being Catholic myself, I paid less attention to his successor, Pope Paul VI, but when he died in August of 1978, I happened to be in a radio station with an AP ticker, a black box around a teletype machine. It had a bell, which rang for a new story coming in, to tell someone it was time to tear it off. A big story and the bell rang twice, rarely three times, which meant you ran over to the machine immediately to see what was up. (Note to self: explain the world before the internet HERE.)

The bell rang, rang, then rang again, and I followed the news director over (John Bartholomew, WNWI, Wonderful North West Indiana), where he tore off the flimsy paper, and read "Pope dies." It was big news.

As it happens, less than two months later, at the end of September, I was in the newsroom of the student newspaper at Purdue. We were looking over a layout for the next day's paper, blue pencil marks and razor cut graphics pasted onto a mock-up. The AP ticker was across the newsroom, much larger than the radio studio I had been in last month.

It rang on September 28, 1978, and no one took much notice, because it rang all the time. Then quickly a second, then a third, and people all around looked up. And it rang a fourth time. The only time I ever heard that. A senior editor strode over to the device, ripped off the output, and gasped. He turned to the newsroom, and said "Pope John Paul just died." The layout editor next to me slid the mock-up of tomorrow's paper off the light table. It was now trash.

Pope John Paul II, "the Polish pope," would enter his pontificate the next month, and serve over a quarter-century. His passing, after a long struggle with age and debility at the end of his long life, was at age 84 in 2005. The papal funeral for him gathered together four kings, five queens, some 70 presidents and prime ministers, plus a dozen or more presiders over other faiths. Millions pressed into Rome and Vatican City, and at least a quarter million were crowded into St. Peter's Square and the basilica itself. Presiding over the ceremonies was the man who would succeed him, as Pope Benedict XVI.

Benedict would serve less than eight years, then took the relatively unprecedented step of retiring, a possibility that has haunted these last few years of Francis's pontificate. Benedict's funeral just over two years ago, on the last day of December 2022, was a more muted affair. He died at age 95, with the services presided over by Pope Francis, the first time this had happened in over two hundred years.

Now, with Francis's death at age 88, we are back in more familiar territory. He will lay in state at St. Peter's and Vatican officials will organize and preside over his funeral even as the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gather to hold a conclave, a special session to elect the new Bishop of Rome, and Pontiff or "Bridge Builder" of the church.

Many of us non-Catholics will be praying for wisdom and discernment in their gathering. The papacy is a symbolic figure who speaks to many, and popes have opportunities few humans have to address the times in which they live.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's moved by ritual even when it's not his own tradition. Tell him about memorial services which moved you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.