Kith & Kin

“Carl G. Lytle cutting Holmes County Swiss Cheese in his general store in Fredericksburg, Ohio.” From the Cleveland Plain Dealer , August 5, 1963. You can disagree with me if you want to, but I believe if everyone everywhere could be raised in small towns, the world would be a better place. Having been raised in a small town myself, I am both an expert on this topic and completely unbiased. When I was a child, Mom told me our hometown, Fredericksburg, Ohio, had “about six hundred” residents. Well, she had it right: census data from 1970 shows there were 601 residents. That was the all-time high for the town (which dates back to 1850), though: the population has been steadily declining ever since. In 2020 the population was only 409. The Freedom to Roam When you lived in a small town in those days, you could walk or bike anywhere you needed to go without a parent. School, the general store, the post office, the bank, or down to the “crick,” it didn’t matter. Someone would be keepi...

Great-Grandma Slutz lived in a neat little house in Fredericksburg, Ohio. If you were walking north on Mill Street (tiny Fredericksburg’s main street), you would cross a bridge over Salt Creek and then cross the railroad tracks and pass by, on your left, a house with the name “Graber” written on the door (which I pretended said “Grabber” because it was the home of a monster who would grab children who walked too close to the porch), and the next home was Grandma Slutz’s. This was the route I took walking home from school each day, starting in kindergarten. Grandma’s house had several concrete steps—probably five or six—that led up to her porch. To me they seemed quite high. You could stand on her porch and look down at the sidewalk, where Grandma waged war on grass and weeds that dared to poke through the cracks in the walk. She showed me how to kill them by pouring salt water or boiling water on them. Both methods quite effectively discouraged further growth. Directly across the s...