Out in the County

After two weeks full of college orientation and new classes, I decide that it is time to leave the City of Athens and take a look at the surrounding county, which goes by the name of Athens as well. It is a calm Sunday, it doesn't rain or snow and the sun is almost shining. What more can you expect from January. So I pick up Lena with my ride and we leave Athens eastwards for a good old Landpartie, which I guess is the German equivalent to an outing. 

Oil-well pump east of Athens.

As I noted in a post before, driving on the highway is kind of an easy thing, and on this particular Sunday there are just a bunch of cars on the streets. After cruising on the Appalachian Highway for about half an hour, we arbitrarily take a junction right before Coolville and enter a tiny road that snakes its way through the hilly countryside. The road is seamed by small ranches and lone two-story farmhouses, mostly made out of white-painted planks and topped with gabled roofs. Shiny trucks park in the driveways, and the obligatory Stars and Stripes wave atop of wooden flagpoles on green lawns. This is how I had imagined the American heartland. However, the initial confirmation of my image of rural, individualistic America should be challenged in just about an hour. But to add on my stereotypes, a few oil-well pumps appear on the side of the road. They are not in use but in good shape, freshly painted and lubricated. Also, a constant smell of gasoline is sensible in the vicinity of the black machines. As I learn back in Athens from the instructor of my history class, Prof. Brobst, the pumps are now confined to extract the remains out of the once abundantly filled oil fields of eastern Ohio. The state was also at the center of a major oil rush in the 1880s, after which, starting in 1895, Ohio was the leading crude oil producing state in America for seven years. Even John D. Rockefeller founded his infamous Standard Oil Co. in Ohio. The conglomerate was dissolved by the federal government in 1912, but its largest successor still dominates the oil market: ExxonMobil is the biggest oil producer in the world, and its former CEO Rex Tillerson is President Trump’s pick for Secretary of State. And now, Ohio experiences a new oil and gas rush through the controversial technique of fracking. 

You can't beat a good neighborhood!

The mural, painted by a local drug-prevention group.

But back to Athens County. We decide to go northwards in order to drive through Wayne National Forest towards some small villages, and get back to Athens southwards later via Jacksonville. We enter Amesville, with a population of 154 as of 2010, but it is quite an impressive village as we quickly notice. We discover a community center with a public vegetable garden nearby, public playgrounds, and signs all over the main street stating: “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor,” in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Not quite what I expected, but to be fair I wouldn’t expect to see something like that in a German village of that size either. Turns out that Amesville, Ohio has a long history of social activism and community. It was the first place in the Northwest Territory to get a library – solely financed by community members. Lacking the necessary funds to buy books, villagers sold pelts from their hunting trips in Boston and finally bought 51 books for the village’s library in 1801. Only the shareholders in the project, now called the coonskin library because of the unusual fundraising method, were then allowed to read the books and the library grew over the years. Because there was no building to accommodate the collection, it moved from one shareholder’s house to another, until it split up and disappeared in the early 1850s. Also, a huge mural on the local post office’s sidewall refers to the fact that Amesville was a hub in the Underground Railroad: the clandestine network run by abolitionists and others to help slaves escape from the Southern States to Canada or the free states until the end of the civil war. Villagers from Amesville provided shelter and food to the escaped slaves and helped them with getting along. So much history and sense for community in such a small town – we are still astonished when we have pizza at a small diner in Jacksonville, and before we head back home through the now pitch-dark Athens County.