Notes from my Knapsack 5-28-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 5-28-2026
Jeff Gill

Taking a tour around Granville’s architecture
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There’s a tour I’d love to offer around Granville, just as I do walking and driving tours of the Newark Earthworks and the surrounding landscape. It goes something like this:

It would start with what’s called the “Nash cabin,” named for a family which actually was the second occupant of the cabin John Jones built for his wife and three children of blue ash logs in 1801. Abandoned after Lillie Jones died there in 1802 having their fourth child, it was again empty when the Granville Land Company settlers arrived in November of 1805, just before the final push into the platted area where their settlement would become our village the next day. Some slept inside, more in their wagons circled up in a meadow now half Erinwood and half the Munson Springs parcel, all opposite the Cherry Valley Road intersection.

It’s where Newark-Granville Road sees Cherry Valley Road coming up from the south where the 1810 House would be my next stop, opposite today’s Fackler’s Garden Center, one of the early products of the Munson sawmill on Raccoon Creek, a solid timber frame structure around a mighty single chimney in the center with five fireplaces. A home and a tavern and later an antique store, a notable location in both county and village history.

That original plat was centered off a stake atop the high conical mound at the center of the intersection of Broadway and Main Street, from which the original village street grid was laid out. Around the central traffic circle were the four corners of the “commons” which now hold church buildings, still owned in common by the village, though. Which is why from that twelve to fourteen foot high mound, I’d point you southeast, to the Opera House.

Built in 1849, this Greek Revival structure was the original First Baptist Church on the southwest corner, echoing in its architecture the 1837 Episcopal Church of St. Luke’s to the east. In 1881, as they did much more casually in those muscular days, the whole building was jacked up and moved across the street, so today’s United Church of Granville could be built in 1883. As a multi-use public building, the Opera House served many civic and commercial purposes.

Before anyone points out it actually burned down in 1982, I’m going to take our tour back to the east, and up Granger Street, to the Frank Packard designed and award winning 1924 Granville High School. This noted central Ohio architect had already done work up on the Denison campus, and was designing the Granville Inn and Public Library as he completed this comprehensive school building. The village saw it completed for some $200,000 with a 500 seat auditorium, a chemistry laboratory, and room for everything from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and it became a model for Ohio school boards to visit as an ideal facility.

Time may not allow us to get up to the nearby Denison campus to see the 1878 Doane Library, a gothic brick four-bay cruciform structure of a vast single multi-level room, with cast iron spiral staircases in the corners, an evocative space at any time of day.

So. You’ve likely figured this out by now. All six structures described here are no more. The cabin, the mound, the former occupant of the park named after it, and so on: they’re gone. Fires, demolition, replacement, time. Each shaped our village in ways you can still trace today, but are entirely vanished from sight.

Perhaps leading us to appreciate what we still have…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s actually leading a Granville tour of sorts in June, so stay tuned! Write him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 5-22-2026

Faith Works 5-22-2026
Jeff Gill

Ground level for the Overview Effect
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Astronauts know about “the overview effect.” Sometimes called the “orbital perspective,” it’s what happens to a person after being “up there.”

William Shatner struggled to communicate in 2021 the overwhelming experience of seeing the planet, our Earth, even in partial perspective from far above, with the horizons curving away all around from his viewpoint on a suborbital flight. As a man in his nineties, with a storied career depicting humanity in space and among the stars, he felt a powerful emotional impact from literally seeing our world from above.

The recent Artemis 3 crew had their own version of “the overview effect” as they circled the Moon, and saw the Earth both vanish behind another heavenly body, and then appear again, blue and while and green against the stark blacks and crystalline stars of outer space.

To “see the Earth as one thing” is an experience astronaut Victor Glover wishes we could all have. His April opportunity was something while in orbit he shared back with us, saying “I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special.”

He was saying that to you, to me, to all of us. And he went on:

“In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist (in) together.”

That’s the overview effect at work. And the common experience of John Glenn and William Shatner and Victor Glover is to want to communicate it to us in some form or another, so that we know as Glover concluded: "And that we got to get through this together.”

We have got to get through this together. I was thinking about that hope, that wish, that desire, as I watched Sister Monica Joan’s funeral. A fictional story, true, set in 1971 just after we’d first been to the Moon.

It was the series finale for “Call the Midwife,” which is a PBS show out of England that ran for fifteen years, itself set from the 1950s to 1971. Nonnatus House was not a spaceship, but a maternity facility run by nuns, which did often seem like a place very different from the lives most of us know. There’s a perspective to it, which is as alien to most of us in 2026 as circling the dark side of the Moon. Yet it intends to communicate to the viewer something of our common human experience.

I will never go into space. Nor will I travel in time (Einstein seems clear on this). What I get to do, every so often, is take a group of people around the Newark Earthworks to think about this same landscape, shaped and occupied by human beings, two thousand years ago, whose marks on the terrain in mounds and moats and faint hints of elevation hint at meaning and purpose for the indigenous people of the continent who built them.

Why go for a three mile walk on a Saturday to wander along streets and down alleyways searching for remnants of ancient wonders? Because of the connections we can feel across time, between viewpoints, and to know we all are just trying to get through this together. Those Native American builders were people like us, trying to get by, while seeking to understand.

Finding connections in that way can open up a perspective that is suborbital, but makes contact with the cosmos.

Yes, you’re invited: I’m leading one such tour on Saturday, May 23, at 9:00 am from the Great Circle Museum. Wear a sun hat, bring water which we all need in order to get by. It will take us to about 12:30 before splashdown.

I mean, until we get back to where we started. And see it, perhaps, anew?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s looking forward to a lovely walking tour on the 23rd. Tell him how you make connections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.