It was thirty-three years ago, in August of 1963, when my wife and I and our three children arrived in Athens. We had spent the previous three years in Louisiana. I had a one-year teaching position at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and then spent the next two years doing doctoral work at Louisiana State University. Prior to our venture into the Deep South, my wife, Connie, and I had graduated from the University of Illinois, she with a degree in music education and I with a master's in geography. Connie is a native of Auburn, Illinois, located only a few miles south of the capital, Springfield, and in Sangamon County which Abraham Lincoln also called home. This is the heart of the Midwestern prairie country, the "grande prairie" as the French called it. Today, almost 80 percent of this flat, black land is "under the plow."
I came to Auburn in 1950 on a one-year high school exchange from Germany. In 1954, I returned to Auburn as an immigrant. Connie and I had been good friends during my exchange year and upon my return renewed our friendship which culminated in our marriage on June 12, 1955. For us, 1963 started out as a glorious year. The threat of imminent disaster between the USSR and the United States had abated. David, our oldest, had matriculated into first grade, Diana. three years younger than David, was growing into a little "Southern Belle"; and Suzanne, the youngest, was moving from babyhood to toddler. In June, I had passed the comps and my dissertation proposal was accepted, and Ohio University had extended an invitation to me to join the Department of Geography and Geology. After three years in the Deep South (I recall the first public occasion at USL when Dixie was played before the national anthem and everyone stood), my wife and I were ready to return to the Midwest.
Of course, by November of 1963, the tragedy of President Kennedy's assassination would bring that otherwise great year, from a personal perspective, to a sorrowful conclusion. Most of us who lived through that horrible event recall what we were doing when we heard the news. I was lecturing a class in Anglo-American Geography. We were in one of the smaller rooms on the fourth floor of Porter Hall when I was called to the phone. It was my wife, informing me that President Kennedy had been shot. My students sat in stunned silence when I told them what had happened. Finally, someone asked: "Is the president dead?" I said I did not know. There were a few more questions and comments, then I dismissed the class.
So, had we come back to the Midwest? Somehow, my geographical reckoning was skewed. Although, "Appalachia" was not yet a socioeconomic concept, the hills around Athens indicated that we had arrived somewhere between a perceptual Midwest and the East. Upon hearing the following little story, shortly after our arrival, I was convinced of the regional discrepancy.
A young teacher, somewhere in southeastern Ohio, wants to put on the Christmas Story. So, besides her pupils, she asked for volunteers from the community. Among others, three burly fellows join the group. The teacher immediately selects the three to represent the Wise Men. At the first rehearsal, these three fellows show up in firemen's uniforms. Their answer to the teacher's inquiry about the uniforms was: "You told us to read The Good Book and the materials you gave us, and there it said that the Three Wise Man came from AFAR.
In 1965, much of Athens and the academic community would hear that we were not in a geographic no-mans-land. It happened when President Johnson landed by helicopter in Peden Stadium and then, via a motorcade, through the throngs that lined Richland Avenue and President Street, made his way to the College Green where he told the assembled crowd that they were part of a region known as "Appalachia" and that his administration would do all it could to improve the economic lot of its residents. Thus, Athens and Ohio University became the geographical beginnings for the "War on Poverty." Today, thirty-one years after that visit by LBJ, that war continues to be fought. Perhaps, the most visible effect, locally, of that "war" has been the James Rhodes Appalachian Memorial Highway (Route 32) and the Athens bypasses of Routes 33 and 50-the latter, obviously, very much to the consternation of Lancaster, our larger neighbor to the north.
Back in 1963, Athens and the university looked very different than they do today. The built-up landscape was representative of earlier times and functions. Real changes had yet to happen. Construction on the West Green had just begun and Richland Avenue was still flanked by rental properties. At the present site of the Hocking River bridge was Higgins Feed Store, an Athens establishment which later on, when the river was relocated, was moved to the western margins of the town along Route 50. The South Green area was a pristine wetlands only disturbed by the rise of Lakeview Apartments. The latter were a most welcome addition to an otherwise serious housing shortage. Indeed, the community was ill-prepared for nearly 10,000 students and an ever-increasing faculty. And I recall one September, when the College of Arts and Sciences welcomed ninety-three new members to its faculty. Monticello, with its collapsed hillside, and Carriage Hill were still part of the future as was the creation of Route 682, paralleling the relocated Hocking River. Both the highway and new riverbed forever eliminated one of Athens' great attractions, the State Hospital park. Laid out by a student of America's premier landscape planner of the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted, the park consisted of an array of deciduous and coniferous trees, flowering bushes and shrubs, and four small lakes in the shape of the markings of playing cards-hearts, diamonds, clubs. and spades.
Uptown had not yet been changed by fires and an ever-larger student population, Nor had malls pulled much of the town's commercial activity toward the outskirts. The businesses catered to residents and students alike. There were two theaters, the Athena and its cross-street neighbor, the Varsity. For shoppers there were two department stores, Altman's and Belk's and, of course, Woolworth's, the latter located just a little farther up from its present and abandoned location. Oh, yes, there were increasing problems with parking. So, an old Victorian mansion on the south corner of College and Washington was replaced with a grayish monster which keeps reminding me of the air-raid bunkers spread strategically throughout Berlin where I spent many a weekend during the 1940s of World War Two, while attending a boarding school in nearby Potsdam.
The post office was still in its neoclassical home on West Union and across from Frisch's, one of the most westerly located diners in the country. There was no highrise College Inn (or Bromley Hall, as it used to be known), and the present site of the College Book Store was occupied by Beckley's, a fashionable haberdashery. The Baltimore and Ohio passenger trains still stopped regularly at the disputed station on the West Side, and the Athens Lumber Yard was surrounded by other earlier industrial enterprises that grew up along the old Hocking Canal bed and, later, the B & 0 Railroad. Also located on the West Side was Athens' old Sheltering Arms Hospital on Clarke Street.
Indeed, Athens and the university have changed a lot in thirty-three years. Whether these changes represent progress depends on one's viewpoint. The growth of the university was inevitable and with it came pressure to spread out. Some of that sprawl has created scars on the land, but, we are lucky, for much of it is hidden by those beautiful forested hills. From my perspective, Athens remains an oasis within an evermore suburbanized countryside. As a practicing geographer interested in the settlement landscape, I found this place and its greater surroundings the ideal habitat for teaching and research. I have to confess, I had little inkling of where we were headed when I accepted the university's offer back in 1963, site unseen.
Place names are always revealing of an area's geographical diversity. A quick glance at a map of Ohio shows that our region is a veritable cultural hodgepodge. To start out there is Athens, Troy, Carthage, Alexander, and Antioch intermingled with Coon Hollow, Pigeon Roost, Hemlock, and Floodwood. Just a little to the north of Athens is Bremen, Hamburg, Macksburg, and Deucher. What does it all mean? Settlers bring their cultural baggage along and place names represent cultural memory. New Englanders who rejected the England of King George instead identified closely with Greece and Greek culture. They were educated in the classics and those places with classical names in southeastern Ohio reflect their settlement influence. Similarly, German immigrants marked their identity on the land with names of German cities or family names, such as Deucher. American migrants from the Appalachian hills would usually select locally descriptive names, and the suffixes "hollow" and "run" (the former a small valley, the latter a small stream) are especially indicative of Upland South settlement influence. A wonderfully descriptive place name in our area (just to the south of Chillicothe) is Knockemstiff. Of course, the region's dependence on mineral resources is evident in names on the land. There is Mineral, Coalton, Carbondale, Union Furnace, Carbon Hill, and others. And, then there is the legacy of Native Americans in Logan, Shawnee, Hocking, Kinnikinnik, Muskingum, and, of course, Chillicothe.
What varied influences in a region that has had to battle the negative images of Appalachia. Yet, here in southeastem Ohio, America's three principal migration streams- from the Northeast, the Middle Atlantic, and the South- converged and began their march into the interior. A small plaque on the northern bank of the Muskingum River, supposedly the very spot where the New Englanders disembarked from their flatboats to establish the town of Marietta, says it all: "Here Is Where America Begins."
As a cultural geographer with an interest in the built-up landscape, my decision to accept the offer of Ohio University was one that could not have been more fortuitous had it been systematically planned. Remember, however, that I came site unseen to take over the vacated meteorology and climatology position in the Department of Geography and Geology. Today, as I look back over the past thirty years, the department and its changes represent a microcosm for the entire university. In 1963, there were three geographers who conducted an undergraduate major (with only ten or so students) but taught a multitude of service courses. There was little opportunity or time for specialization and technical training was minimal. Now, there are twelve on our faculty who are responsible for 160 undergraduate majors and between twenty-five and thirty graduate students. The program has evolved to include regional concentrations and seven topical specializations for undergraduate majors. Technical training, including cartography, geographic information systems, remote sensing, and quantitative methods, form a strong underpinning for the academic core subjects. The Department of Geography at Ohio University can be justly proud of its accomplishments but especially so for the fact that it is recognized as the department by choice of Ohio students wishing to major in geography.
So, my initial years at the university were spent teaching in the physical sciences. We geographers are versatile and I adapted to teaching in the physical sciences, while, at the same time, trying to understand the human-made landscape. Eventually, as the department expanded, I was able to shed the meteorology/climatology responsibility and devoted all my teaching and research interests to the cultural geography of southeastern Ohio. Needless to say, this regional concentration came over the emphatic objections of the remainder of my family who saw my colleagues head for exotic places in the world while I remained confined to Appalachian Ohio.
Among the three American migrant groups which converged in southeastern Ohio, settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia were especially important. Each of these two groups was culturally very different. The majority of Pennsylvanians were of Germanic background, Lutheran or Brethren. and many were wheat and livestock farmers. The Virginians were principally Scots-Irish, Presbyterian, or Disciples of Christ, and most were corn, cattle, and hog farmers. Similarly, their buildings, including houses and barns, differed greatly. For example. Pennsylvania settlers introduced into Ohio the "bank barn" with its distinctive "overshoot" or "forebay." Ohio farmers, particularly, often use the term, "overshoot" to identify the barn's second story overhang. One of my first research projects was locating and mapping this Pennsylvania-type barn in order to understand the cultural contact line between easterners and Southerners in southeastern Ohio. In time, the location of the Pennsylvania barn was correlated with actual origins of settlers, a project that culminated many years later after the census data of Ohio's eighty-eight counties (in 1850) were gleaned from the often impossible-to-read pages of the population manuscript schedules.
Besides the Pennsylvania Barn (also known as Switzer, Forebay, Dutch or Pennsylvania-German barn), there are two other architectural images that reflect New England and southern influences in southeastern Ohio. The saltbox house, so typical in the rural areas of Washington and Athens Counties, represents the New England legacy on the land. Built of heavy post and beam construction and usually on a massive sandstone foundation, the saltbox is distinctive for its long, rear roof which locals call a "catslide". Popular in New England in the eighteenth century, the saltbox was resurrected in southeastern Ohio among settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut and, of course, others who appreciated its functionalism and appearance.
Southerners, especially those from the Blue Grass Basin of Kentucky. brought the "Southern" or "Virginia I house" into our region. One of America' s most common "folk" structures, the I house (so called because of its frequent occurrence in the three I states-Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa) is always two stories high, two rooms in length and one room deep. Easterners and southerners built it because it stood for success on the land. The Southern I is distinctive because of its low-pitched roof, slightly raised on sandstone piers or foundation, and a central dormer or full, two-story portico. Sometimes this house has outside, gable-end chimneys, an unmistakably southern tradition. Because the porch is the first thing to go on these old houses, many Southern I houses in our region have only a door left on the second story to reveal the one-time presence of the portico. It left me wondering, when I first began to scour Athens' surroundings for cultural clues, why our ancestral settlers had a built-in suicide device on their houses. Eventually, one learns.
Indeed, southeastern Ohio is a region rich in settlement history and geography. Some of its cultural landscape variety survives in the houses and barns built by settlers or their descendants whose traditions reached back to New England, the East, and the South. Let us train our eyes so that we may understand the built-up landscape and have a real sense of place. A year or so ago, one of my former students stopped by the office to let me know that a small house east of Pomeroy had been used for training on a Sunday morning by the local fire brigade and burned down. What a shame. It was one of five or six Creole houses in the Pomeroy area, linking the place with the Deep South of Louisiana and from where that house type was carried as part of the mindset of an early settler. Indeed, ignorance is bliss.
I know it's an old cliche, but it seems like yesterday when Dean Rush Elliott welcomed me, in his office in Upper Tupper (it's gone), to the College of Arts and Sciences. There has been a lot of coming and going in the thirty-three years which I have spent teaching geography courses and talking and writing about the landscape of southeastern Ohio. Much remains to be done, however. So, I depart in the knowledge that someone will carry on and that future generations of students will have the benefit to learn what Athens and its surroundings are all about.
Hugh Wilhelm, professor of Geography, took early retirement this past June. He began his geography training at the University of Illinois where he received A.B. and M.A. degrees. His doctoral studies were taken at Louisiana State University where he had the opportunity to study with Fred Kniffen, one of the country's best-known cultural geographers and a premier interpreter of the American landscape. Dr. Wilhelm said: "My future academic interests were shaped by Professor Kniffen's research and teaching. He guided my dissertation which focused on German settlement in the hill country of Texas.
After coming to Ohio University Dr. Wilhelm developed a core curriculum in landscape studies, including "Settlement Geography" (GEOG 322/522), "Landscape and Culture" (Tier III 408B/GEOG 523), "Rural Vernacular Architecture" (GEOG 427/527), and "Seminar in Historical Geography" (GEOG 686). His regional concentration has been Anglo-America, and he developed and taught the three principle courses: "U.S. and Canada" (GEOG 240), "Appalachia" (GEOG 233), and "Ohio" (GEOG 232).
Dr. Wilhem's research and writing have centered on America's built-up landscape, especially the diffusion of folk buildings (houses and barns) and migration and ethnic settlement patterns, and several of his presentations on these subjects have been published. Dr. Wilhelm notes that his most time-consuming work was a 1982 statistical survey of the origin of Ohio's migrants and immigrants in 1850. Two of his most recent publications are Barns of the Midwest, a cooperative editorial effort with Allen G. Noble from Akron University and published in 1995 by Ohio University Press, and two chapters of the two-volume work on the National Road, published by John's Hopkins Press in 1996.
My chapter in volume I, The National Road, deals with the road's influence on cultural diffusion; the chapter in volume 2, A Guide to the National Road, is a description of the road between Wheeling, West Virginia and Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps my proudest research efforts are three video documentaries dealing with American settlement effects in southern Ohio, directed by David Mould, associate professor, School of Telecommunication.