Granville's Culture and Heritage
There may not be many places in Ohio where March 1 sees a number of red dragons on a white and green background fluttering from a multitude of homes.
St. David’s Day is a day for Welsh pride; here in the shadow of the Welsh Hills, we have a scattering of street names and buildings that echo the hills of Wales, and are equally hard to pronounce . . . or spell: Gwennol Drive, Bedwyn Bach Lane, Merywen Circle, Ty Tawel Farm – and Bryn Du. It all goes back to Bryn Du.
For the Welsh heritage that is so strong in the Granville area, you can credit, or blame, someone named Jones. And no one ever had trouble spelling Jones, which, along with Rees and Morgan, was the bulk of the early mark on the map by Welsh settlers around the village.
John Sutphin Jones made a different sort of mark. Around 1900, he made his fortune in southeastern Ohio with the Sunday Creek Coal Company, selling to the Columbus market, and beyond.
With his newfound fortune, he bought a classic stone farmhouse outside of the then-village, and hired the best architect in Ohio, Frank Packard, to redesign it as a magnificent country retreat (and would hire him again later to create the Granville Inn).
Looking to his own Welsh heritage, the area’s same roots, and the basis of his fortune, he found the words for “Black Hill” in Welsh was “Bryn Du.” According to today’s Welsh speakers, the correct pronunciation of this phrase is “Brin Dee,” but most local folk have been saying “Dew” for a hundred years or so, keeping the debate of “proper pronunciation” alive. Either way, the home is now owned by the village, with a Great Lawn stretching from the white columned portico to Newark-Granville Road.
On the lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, you will see polo played most Sunday afternoons from May to September, and on almost any other weekday evening the open green space is dotted with the temporary goals and lines of girls’ field hockey, boys’ lacrosse, and youth soccer and track.
If you wander up into the Bryn Du Woods neighborhood, among all the mysterious to pronounce names, you might work ‘round to a high point overlooking the Great Lawn, where a Historical Marker tells the tale of Native American residents from a thousand years before, describing an effigy in earthwork called “Alligator Mound,” a four-footed creature with a spiral tail that is one of only two effigy mounds in the state, the other being the larger Serpent Mound in Adams County.
Between the 1,000-year-old mound and today’s soccer players are centuries and generations of residents here in Granville; houses from 1809 that are still private homes, an inn from 1812 that once hosted Johnny Appleseed and that Henry Ford wanted for Greenfield Village . . . but it’s still here, in historic Granville.
Copyright 2009 by Jeff Gill