Granville

Granville is a village of about 5,900 people in Licking County, Ohio, settled in 1805 by families from Granville, Massachusetts, who laid it out like the New England town they had left. It sits in the Welsh Hills, a pocket of ridges named for later Welsh settlers, just west of Newark. Broadway, the main street, runs in a wide, tree-lined line of brick storefronts, white churches and inn porches, and the whole village has kept its early-1800s scale. Denison University, founded in 1831, occupies the hill above town and gives the village a second centre of gravity.

Start on Broadway with the Buxton Inn, operating since 1812 and the village's oldest landmark, and the Granville Inn of 1924 across the street, both built for the stagecoach and canal trade. The Avery-Downer House, an 1842 Greek Revival mansion, is now the Robbins Hunter Museum. On the hill, Denison's campus offers the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts, a college art museum and views back over the village. The Alligator Effigy Mound, a prehistoric earthwork shaped like a four-legged animal, sits on a rise at the village edge, and the great Newark Earthworks, the largest set of geometric earthworks in the world, are ten minutes east. Dawes Arboretum, 2,000 acres of gardens and plant collections, is ten minutes south, and Swasey Chapel's tower is the landmark you navigate the campus by.

For its size Granville eats well, with the inn dining rooms, pubs, cafes and a farmers market on Saturdays in season, and students keep the coffee shops busy. Nightlife is modest and mostly collegiate: Denison's concert and theatre calendar, a pub or two on Broadway, and village events through the year. The Fourth of July street fair takes over Broadway for days, the autumn chili cookoff plays on the rivalry with neighbouring towns, and the Christmas Candlelight Walking Tour, running since 1985, fills the December streets with luminaries.

Stay at one of the two historic inns if you can; otherwise the village has bed and breakfasts, a chain hotel by the highway interchange, and the full range of Columbus and Newark lodging within a short drive. There is no passenger rail and no intercity bus stop in the village. John Glenn Columbus International Airport is about 40 minutes west, and the village is an easy walk end to end once you arrive; Broadway's slope is gentle, the side streets are shaded, and the whole village reads as one preserved piece. the TJ Evans Trail runs from Granville to Newark for cyclists.

Granville is good nearly any time the university is in session, with spring and fall the prettiest seasons in the Welsh Hills. Denison's calendar fills the village with parents' weekends, concerts and games, and the weeks between terms are the quietest of the year. Summer brings the street fair and warm evenings, winter is cold and quiet between the candlelight tour and the students' return. One to two days covers the village, the campus and the earthworks comfortably.

Granville sits on State Route 16 about 35 miles east of Columbus, with Newark five miles east and the Hocking Hills country an hour south. On a road trip it works as the genteel overnight on the way between Columbus and the Amish Country or Zanesville to the east, and it pairs with the Newark Earthworks and Dawes Arboretum as a small cluster of stops worth a full day off Interstate 70.