Entertainment in Granville

Those early Welsh and New England pioneers liked to talk about “making your own fun.”

That may have been making the best of necessity back in 1805, but in Granville today, we still have a taste for entertainment that is of our own making.

The Old Fashioned Fourth of July is a week of local musicians and parades with floats that bear all the proud hallmarks of “we made it ourselves.” Broadway is blocked off for an amusement area with a midway of rides and games, along with a row of booths where food and crafts are made and sold by area residents. Guess where the longer lines can be found?

Broadway is, in fact, blocked off for public use quite a few times a year. Public spaces in Granville are still just that, areas for the public to use and gather in, not just for transportation to whiz past or rumble through. The Bluesfest in the fall, the Community Picnic every other summer, and other events can have you sitting comfortably in the center of Broadway, right on top of the yellow stripe.

The sidewalks see large crowds of visitors for the Candlelight Walking Tour every first Saturday of December, Denison University’s Commencement weekend in May, the summer sidewalk sale that precedes the week of the Fourth of July, and various antiques fairs and other events from time to time.

What anchors the spring season in Granville is an event that can’t be stopped and has many centers but no clearly defined border: the Daffodil Festival. The College Town House may be the epicenter of this explosion of yellow that threatens to color the whole town, but as you walk the blocks from the business district and historic downtown, you can follow the eruptions of yellow, from darker ambers to delicate saffron-whites, as far as your feet will carry you, and still one hill just beyond.

There are big names that come to the Denison campus, shows and speakers and concerts, plus the Newark-Granville Symphony that often plays in Swasey Chapel and elsewhere in the county; but what makes for the ongoing entertainment in the village is that there is almost never a night, let alone a weekend, where a musical group with mostly local talent isn’t playing nearby. It could be at the Granville Inn, or at the high school’s Performing Arts Center, or even in the third floor loft of Brews Café downtown – and it could be in someone’s living room that you were invited to from the next booth at Aladdin’s Diner, and you don’t even know whose house it is, but you have a seat and a glass and a small plate of, well, something, and friendly people are making music right there in front of you.

The pioneers of 1805 may not have made hors d’oeuvres from filo dough, but the scene before you would make sense to them, even so!

Copyright 2009 by Jeff Gill