Helen Hooven Santmyer

Greene County Courthouse
Xenia, Ohio

By Jacob A. Bruggeman

I first visited Xenia, Ohio, a small city in the state’s southwestern corner, on a hot May afternoon in 2018. Headed north from Cincinnati on Interstate 71, smoke started rising out from under the hood of my 1999 Toyota Corolla. I pulled onto the highway’s shoulder, popped the hood, and prepared to do battle with the Toyota’s notoriously oil-burning engine. Equipped only with a container of 5W-30 motor oil, I realized that my modest mechanical know-how was insufficient, and I called good ol’ AAA.

While waiting for the Triple-A guy, I saw a roadside sign pointing Xenia’s way. Soon enough, I was riding shotgun in the tow truck as we rolled through the city and passed the Greene County Courthouse at 45 North Detroit Street. Built of Bedford stone in 1901–1902, the Romanesque courthouse’s soaring square clock tower has been a community touchstone in Xenia for more than half of its history.

Born in Cincinnati and raised in Xenia, novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895–1986) captures the courthouse’s centrality in the opening passage of her memoir, Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia (1962). Santmyer acknowledges that, because so many similar structures are scattered “all along middle western roads,” Xenia’s visitors “must hardly give the courthouse a conscious thought.” For the resident, however, the courthouse is distinct, familiar, and necessary:

Along with the state of the weather and the time of day, there has always been in his mind a background consciousness of the tower with its four-faced clock, the goose-girl drinking fountain on the Main Street curb, the spread of lawn, and the trees in the square whose crests are stirred by winds higher than the roof.

Ohio Town proceeds with similarly rich descriptions of community life in chapters titled “Streets and Houses,” “Church,” “School,” “The Railroad,” and “There Were Fences,” all focused on the rhythms of life in Xenia.

Founded in 1803, the same year Ohio was admitted to the Union, Xenia was an early testing ground for tribal relations and removal. In fact, in the early 1800s, the Shawnee Indians called Old Chillicothe, a small village just north of Xenia, their home; Tecumseh, the famous and then-feared chief who organized a confederacy to stop settler colonialism, was born there. As time passed, the character of his ancestral lands changed as ploughs broke, railroads cut, and Main Streets sprung up upon them.

Ohio communities like Xenia flourished as natives like Tecumseh were slain or forced further inland, and settlers began the long, frequently violent transformation of the region into what Xenia-born historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. described as the Midwest’s “valley of democracy.”

From a young age, Santmyer cherished the products of that transformation: southwestern Ohio’s communities and traditions. Enthused by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, she dedicated herself to recording them in writing. After retiring as a librarian in Dayton in 1959, Santmyer published her two major critical and popular successes: Ohio Town and …And the Ladies of the Club (1982), a nearly 1200-page epic telling the story of generations of communal life in rural Ohio. Indeed, Santmyer’s writing is a testament to the social dynamism of what might outwardly be described as a dull Midwestern town.

For Santmyer, the courthouse is a literary conduit for those intricacies: its enduring image “recall[s] the Saturday-night excitement of the past,” when its “curb […] was the center of noise and light and crowded movement.” For Xenia’s former residents, the courthouse remains the “the first vision to flash upon the inward eye,” expanding into memories of “the courthouse as it was on quiet afternoons, when nothing moved in the length and breadth of the sun-blazing streets, and only a few persons were to be seen in open shop doors or on the benches under the elms.”

To read Santmyer today is to revel in her satisfyingly efficient and life-affirming descriptions of midcentury Ohio life, whereby readers may access something of the joy and reverie once held common in its streets. At the same time, those celebrations also obscure the decidedly undemocratic origins of Ohio’s settler communities: despite their virtues as sung by Santmyer and Schlesinger, towns like Xenia were built on stolen land. The extent to which Xenians — and, indeed, Ohioans — comprehend this erasure is unclear, but ignorance then is no justification for indifference now. To read Santmyer today, then, is to dwell in the tension between her wonderful rendering of Xenia’s social and civic life with the true weight of its cost.

Jacob Bruggeman is a PhD student in American History at Johns Hopkins University and an editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. You can follow him on Twitter @jacob_bruggeman.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Dph414.