Washington Court House, Ohio

When I discovered a mini-bicycle pump along the road I celebrated it as the best find of the trip not realizing it was an omen and that I would be putting it to use before long.  I’ve found water bottles and lights that have fallen of bikes on routes that cyclists are known to follow or at events such as the Hilly Hundred, but never a pump.  Though I had a pump, and a spare, I am always happy to add another to my collection, as they do wear out.  One doesn’t want to be caught without a pump, why I carry two.

I wasn’t expecting a flat for days, if not weeks, after having just put on new tires in Columbus, but one of the several patches on the tube in my front tire starting slowly leaking, possibly because I may have blasted in a little too much air with the pump at the bike shop.  I realized the tire was going soft as the bike wasn’t holding steady on a steep climb through Hocking Hills State Park, slightly swerving as if my headset was awry.  But I knew the feeling of a deflating front tire all too well.

I stopped to give it a feel.  My thumb could only slightly depress it so I could keep riding until I came to the entry to the Cantrell Cliffs, the centerpiece of the park, a little over a mile away.  I made it fine, but was denied entry by a roadblock and “No trespassing” sign.  That was a bummer, as I had made a slight detour to the park upon the enthusiastic recommendation of Jeff H. who sent a photo and description of the cliffs in this most uncharacteristic Midwestern terrain of gorges and waterfalls.  But the lightly used road through the thick, almost old-growth forest was worth the detour.

Another of his recommendations, several clusters of Hopewell mounds around Chillicothe, were accessible, though the visitor center at this National Park Historic site was closed.  The array of mounds was almost mystical.  Some were burial sites and some were used for celebrations and ceremonies.

Mounds can be found all over southern Ohio and are very much in the vernacular.  Towns are named for them (Moundsville and Mounds Crossing) and many towns have a Mound Street, including Columbus.  None are as spectacular as those in southern Illinois in Cahokia, which qualify as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,  but they all have an appeal.

I didn’t have to go out of my way for the mounds outside of Chillicothe as I was headed there for its Carnegie, which still serves as a library with only a token addition to its rear despite the growth of the city, thanks to a large Kenworth factory and a sprawling penitentiary near the mounds.  It was the first capital of Ohio and remains the largest city in the region.  There were “Now hiring” signs everywhere, one offering $14.50 an hour.   Even the McDonald’s was trying to entice workers with $10 an hour.  Evidently so many people are enjoying their unemployment checks, they’re not eager to go back to work.   Chillicothe wasn’t alone in this.  Fast food franchises all over Ohio had signs out front begging for help.  

The library wasn’t open and it was the first with inoperative WIFi though a sign out front said it was a WiFi zone.  A plaque celebrated its first librarian rather than the library, Burton Egbert Stevenson, a rare early-day male librarian.  He was appointed in 1899, seven years before the Carnegie and served for 58 years, five years before his death.

The Carnegie in Pickerington was now home to a Historical Society.  It was closed so I couldn’t ask about the plaque out front and who came up with the figure of 1,946 as the number of communities in the US to receive a grant for a Carnegie Library since there were only 1,679 of them built in the US with many cities having multiples, including Cleveland with fourteen and Cincinnati with nine.

The Carnegie in Washington Court House, thirty-five miles west of Chillicothe, was the first in a while to have reopened, but only three days a week and only four hours at a time with one of those days devoted to people of “high risk,” a euphemism for the elderly.  The “Carnegie Library” etched in stone in this bunker of a building was barely visible, but one of its two additions flanking the original building spelled it out in prominent black lettering.

Washington Court House, the longest town name in Ohio, was another town with a labor shortage.  It’s McDonald’s was advertising crew positions for $11 per hour and managerial positions for four dollars more.  I had hoped with the library having semi-reopened, the McDonald’s might be as well so I could sit down and eat a burrito and take advantage of its WiFi, but it hadn’t even opened for takeout service as most have.  So it was over to the nearby Walmart to use its WiFi to check in on the world and do some charging.  And how did the town get it’s name?  It was originally just Washington, but to distinguish itself from the other Washington's in the state, it added the Court House over a century after its founding.  I wish the two Germantowns had done something similar, as I’m now backtracking to the one with a Carnegie I missed near Dayton because I mistook it for another Germantown on the opposite side of the state near Marietta.