Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Jeff Gill

Layers of narrative at Munson Springs

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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.