Notes From My Knapsack 9-7-17

Notes From My Knapsack 9-7-17

Jeff Gill

Statuary and other public goods

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Perhaps it's just as well that we don't have more public sculpture in Our Fair Village.

Around the nation, there are debates about Confederate generals on horseback and monuments to oppression in bronze and marble, the wording of plaques in public places no longer reading as quaint as much as they now sound downright cruel, or even simply wrong.

We've had a form of this sort of public discussion, albeit about private property on public display. At the head of Main Street for generations the entry sign in stone for Denison University said "A Christian College of Liberal Arts." Tons of granite, that by 2006 no longer spoke the truth.

In fact, when "the Centennial Stone" gateway went up in 1931, the word "Christian" was controversial in some quarters, because it signaled the end of a specifically "Baptist" identity for the college. And that move in 1931 to a broader understanding of their mission pointed to the change that came 75 years later, since the mission of Denison is today rooted in a more secular vision of education. You can debate whether that's an improvement, but was certainly true that the old memorial gave some visiting families pause as they came for their first look.

There are other inscriptions on different gateways between the village and the college, but little in the way of artistic depiction of historic figures. Some modern abstract sculpture, but you have to go to Newark to see bronze persons remembered, from a grandpa with a candy bar downtown to Mark Twain by the Midland; a reading child at the library arch to Shakespeare and Monet at the Ohio State Newark campus.

We do have two kids and a puppy in front of the Granville Public Library, and a more hidden woman pouring out her thoughts behind the Robbins Hunter Museum. On the side entrance to the Avery Downer House is a memorial Robbins Hunter, Jr. placed to celebrate Victoria Woodhull, his part in marking the nation's bicentennial and more recently refurbished. On the hour, a three-quarters sculpture of the first woman to run for President of the United States, carved in wood, painted and well shellacked, comes out on her balcony to gaze upon the people she was ready to represent.

And we do have a stump. Carved of stone, marking a more perishable original, it sits on the spot where the first tree was cut down with a steel axe as the 1805 pioneering party entered this valley from Granville, Massachusetts & Granby, Connecticut, the stump becoming a speaker's platform for the dedication sermon. Those New England pioneers we now know not to be even the first Europeans to reside in this township, let alone the first humans by some thousands of years, but their names, which undergird the village as we know it today, can still be read on that sculptured stump.

Should we have more busts, a hero on horseback, other sculptures in public places here in Granville? Somehow, that kind of monumentalism doesn't quite seem in place for this place. Our tastes are more to the simple lines of Greek Revival and pointed steeples, Federal brick and the occasional fanlight, green lawns and Doric pillars.

I am glad we have Victoria, though. On the hour, for a few moments. She seems just right for our town.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he has done little sculpting, other than in mashed potatoes at dinnertime. Tell him about statuary that's caught your attention at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.