Road trip: A garden grows, alongside civic spirit, in an Ohio town
Text by Bill Glauber / Photos by Melanie Stetson Freeman
Posted: 06.05.2009 / 8:21 AM PDT
Ada, Ohio – This is late spring in the Middle West, the weather glorious, the sun still bright at dinnertime, the long winter now nothing but a memory.
At the edge of a driveway, a father and son shoot baskets. In another front yard, a husband and wife grill meat on a barbecue.
And in the center of the village of Ada, Ohio, by the old railroad station, a glorious garden is in full bloom, tended by a woman named Jackie Meyer.
On Thursday, Ms. Meyer (pictured here) digs into the earth, plants geraniums. There is a smile on her face.
“We put in some lilies this year,” she says. “Now, we’re putting in some annuals for color.”
Ada is a pleasant, sleepy place this time of year. The students who attend Ohio Northern University are gone for the summer, leaving Ada with about 3,500 full-time residents.
The village is in Hardin County, designated in Patchwork Nation as “Campus and Careers.”
Ada is home to the Wilson Sporting Goods factory that manufactures leather footballs used by the National Football League.
It is also home to a beautiful garden that surrounds a Civil War memorial. A cannon sits atop stone; the words “Lest we forget” are inscribed in the rock.
“I try to keep the reds and blues in the middle of the park,” Meyer says of her plantings. “And I like to put the reds and pinks up front.”
Sixth-grade students from the local school help her in the spring with mulching and early planting. It gives the kids a sense of ownership to a parcel of dirt.
Now, Meyer, who worked 20 years making soap for a Procter & Gamble factory in nearby Lima, oversees the garden. Her husband, Jim, is the town administrator.
Jim Meyer came to Ada 35 years ago while on a construction project and decided to stay and raise a family.
“We’re not isolated at all,” he says. “As mobile as everyone is, we’re pretty centrally located. One of our councilmen said Ada is in the center of everything. We’re an hour and a half from Dayton, an hour and a half from Columbus, and five hours from Chicago.”
Ada grew up around the railroad, the Ohio & Indiana and later the Pennsylvania Railroad. Passenger trains no longer move through the town, though freight trains still pass by. A two-story Stick Style depot still stands as a relic from another age when a train platform was a gateway to the world.
Ada may be something of a bedroom community, but there are plenty of local businesses, including restaurants, shops, and a drive-through convenience store that once housed a gas station.
“I believe in buying things made in the United States and supporting our local businesses,” Jim Meyer says. “I’d rather support the smaller business, the smaller guy. These little communities, we can’t survive if people don’t shop local.”
And a community like Ada wouldn’t be the same place without someone like Jackie Meyer, who tends a garden and brings color and beauty to a Middle Western spring.
Previous stops on the road trip:
Sunny side up in America’s ‘coolest small town’
In small-town New York, tough people for tough times
Gloomy economy rains on the parade in Plymouth, Mass.
June 6th, 2009 at 5:10 pm PDT
This article made me smile. I was an exchange student in Ada and miss it a lot. That town is truly showed that good side of small communities as people I met there warm hearted and liked to hear about living in Europe and how life in Ada (according to me) was much more relaxed and somewhat much more “real”.
That town still offers so good old American meals with an atmosphere that restaurants back here at home try to imitate. However, here it is never the same, there is always seems to be something missing. I think it has a lot to do with the people of that town.
It is my dream to take my family to Ada at some point of life and show the places. I just really hope this kind of “American History” remains even though the economic climate and working environments are changing.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:34 pm PDT
I remember Ada very well. My father, born in 1900, grew up in Ada, went to Ohio Northern, undergrad and law, and ended up a judge in Akron, Ohio. As little children my brother and I used to visit our grandparents back in Ada for a week or two in the summer during the 1930s, and the big event of the day was going down to the train station in the evening and watching the fast expresses roar through town. They would rip through at about 75 miles per hour or so and it was really something to see for a 6- or 7-year old. You could also see the club car of the train, usually the last car, with the white-coated waiters taking care of the businessmen on their way from Chicago to New York or Washington - it seemed like something out of The Great Gatsby. Then we’d get an ice cream cone (for five cents) from the drug store and go on home. Great memories…