Listing Through Life

Frantz Park in Dublin, Ohio, is a large lawn in front of a corporate headquarters filled with concrete ears of corn. It supposedly “symbolizes the history of the community’s farming legacy and serves as a memorial to rural landscapes.”

We arrived in Dublin, Ohio, at Scioto Park, on the banks of the Scioto River, just as it began to rain. I waited until the heavy stuff passed, then dashed out and took some photos of the Chief Leatherlips Monument. The plaque nearby reads:

Chief Leatherlips was a good friend to Indian and white man alike. To the Wyandots, Chief Leatherlips was called SHA-TE-YAH-RON-YA, which means “same size as blue.” In later years, he was called SOU-CHA-ET-ESS, which means “Long Gray Hair.” He was given the name, Leatherlips, by the white settlers in this area. They called him this because of his admirable trait of never breaking a promise.

He was executed somewhere in this general area by fellow tribe-members who weren’t thrilled with his friendship with the evil white people.

You can walk up the back to the top of his head and pretend you’re his hair, but since my wife didn’t get out of the car in the rain, I had to settle for these photos.

In Old Deaf School Park near downtown Columbus, a topiary artist has created the scene from Georges Seurat’s famous 1884 pointillism painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Unfortunately, on the day I was there, the pond was dry and undergoing repair.

Here’s the original painting in a photo I took at The Art Institute of Chicago.

When I showed my wife these photos, she wanted to see for herself. So a couple weeks later (on April 26) when the park was in a little better shape, we went back.

President Rutherford B. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on October 4, 1822. The house he was born in remained standing until 1926, when it was knocked down and replaced by a gas station. There is still a gas station on the site, one owned by the British, interestingly enough. When the house was torn down, a plaque was put up, but it doesn’t really give one a strong sense of history. Here’s what the house looked like.