by Vivian Wagner

Created on: August 15, 2008   Last Updated: September 04, 2008

Village People:
A Portrait of New Concord, Ohio

Scots-Irish immigrants founded the village of New Concord along the banks of Findley's Creek in the hills of southeastern Ohio in 1828. The creek's thin trickle still snakes between the town's buildings and under its streets, down to the wetlands across the railroad tracks and the village still maintains a sense of its hardscrabble, clannish, Presbyterian roots.

New Concord lies along the National Road, also called Route 40 and, in town, Main Street. The National Road was the country's first major road, built in the 1820s and stretching from Maryland to Missouri. Classic Midwestern two-story, wood-frame houses line the street, with their large porches, porch swings, wood siding, and slate roofs. Main Street also has a post office, a village hall, a few pizza places, a bed and breakfast, a hardware store, a grocery store, and a pharmacy. The village's residential districts lie on the hills above Main Street, on streets named after its early settlers: Montgomery, Thompson, Harper.

New Concord serves as the home of Muskingum College, a four-year liberal arts, Presbyterian-affiliated college founded in 1837 and built on the highest hill in town. It has red brick buildings, a lake, and green lawns, as well as an expansive air of learning, literally rising above the earnest little town below it. Many of the 1,600 students who attend the college are from Ohio, though increasingly they come from other states, as well.

New Concord is also the birthplace of space traveler and politician John Glenn, and visitors to the town will want to stop in at the John and Annie Glenn Historic Site to see the Glenn house recreated as it was in the 1940s, along with tour guides playing the roles of Glenn's mother, father, brother, and other characters. Oddly, these tours reveal 1940s New Concord to be much the same as it is now: frugal, patriotic, and tidy.

The people of New Concord are of two main types the ones who were born and raised here people "from round here" and the ones, like me, who were transplanted here for jobs at the college or other assorted professional jobs in the region. The people "from round here" are polite and friendly, but they have a sense of wariness toward outsiders. They are generally conservative, wear jeans and plaid shirts, drive pick-up trucks, and have extended families in town and on farms in the surrounding countryside. The transplanted people residents who may have lived here for thirty years but are still relative outsiders are mostly college professors, and many of them live on the red brick, tree-lined Montgomery Boulevard near the college. They drive Subarus and minivans, and they have their own sense of clannishness and separateness from the "townies."

Recently, the Jitterbug Coffeeshop opened on the south side of the village. Unlike Johnson's Restaurant, a diner where locals order a 50-cent cup of coffee to go with the breakfast special the Jitterbug features many different kinds of specialty coffees and coffee drinks, as well as bagels, muffins, and soups. This coffeeshop is one place where you can see both people from the college and people from the town, as they read, talk, and mingle over cappuccinos and lattes. As a communal space, the coffeeshop is the place to go to overhear both college and village gossip from the who's-published-what-book kind of gossip to the have-you-seen-Mrs. MacArthur's-dahlias kind.
This blending of village and college cultures bodes well for the future of a village that has its feet firmly planted in the past.

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