Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-24

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-24
Jeff Gill

Chronophobia isn't a new diagnosis
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My impression is chronophobia is not precisely a clinically accepted diagnosis, but it's been around a while.

It would be, from the root words, fear of time's passage. Not too far removed from Lucy's diagnosis of pantophobia, which she suggested to Charlie Brown, to her own discomfiture. (You can look up the clip.)

Pantophobia, the fear of everything; chronophobia, the fear of the most inevitable issue any of us have. Time will pass, things will change.

As they always have. I hear people worry about our village's unique qualities, growth coming to the school district, changes on highways and byways, and my head goes back into history.

Introducing stoves for warmth into our church buildings was a BIG deal in our second decade as a village. Heat the church, and soften the moral fiber. Our parents had cold churches, and . . . ah, we put them in anyhow.

There were worries in the 1820s and 1830s as the Granville Academy, the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, and the Granville Female Seminary were all founded in short order. Will our rural retreat be overrun with students? Yet we adapted, and endured, and survived. The GLTI became Denison University in the mid-1850s.

Around this same period the Cumberland Pike was being extended across the continent just to the south, later to become The National Road (US 40 today), and then the Ohio & Erie Canal to our east, with Lucius Mower spearheading the Granville Feeder over to the foot of the village, and all the economic disruption faster transport might offer. What remains of that project is the former aqueduct, now roadway bridge over Raccoon Creek which will soon be pre-empted and re-routed from onto the Thornwood Crossing.

Railroads began to undercut canals and turnpikes almost as soon as they were completed, and Granville sought a rail connection avidly for many years; we didn't get a station in town closer than Union Station until 1880 (now a place to get fresh and tasty muffins). Rail traffic didn't do much for Granville, to the chagrin of some; the real impact on the community was when the interurban electric railway came down Broadway in 1890, a pioneering effort connecting us to Newark where you could catch trains to anywhere, and buy almost anything. We only just got a regular bus route back between the two this year, after decades of absence.

Oft-told but not too frequently said is the poetic tragedy of Charles Webster Bryant, our village pharmacist who campaigned for an historical society successfully in 1885, and for a clean public water supply — making it all too ironic that he died of typhoid in 1886. Change did not quite come fast enough in that case.

Residential electricity and telephones, radio broadcasts, television, liquor sales in the village . . . each innovation had its advocates, and also a chorus to proclaim the coming doom each would bring. The internet, smartphones, teleconferencing . . . these are the new horse-people of the apocalypse.

Or will we adapt, and adjust, and find a way to be Granville while incorporating changes, even big ones, into the fabric of our everyday lives? History says we're likely to do just fine.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure if adding thermostats to churches was a good idea, but that's a different story. Tell him your fear of what's to come at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.