Faith Works: How do we celebrate new opportunities while still acknowledging the past?
2022 will long be a significant date in Ohio and Licking County history.
The truly historic decision to put what now seems to be starting out as a $30 billion dollar investment in our backyard will put Intel in a narrative that goes back through names like Heisey, Scheidler, Rugg, Pharis and Wehrle.
Some years ago I had the opportunity to share a platform with other local historians talking about the industrial development of Licking County. In a ballroom that was filled to capacity (hat tip, Freedom Years and Park National Bank), we talked through a fascinating narrative of how sand and natural gas led to glassworks and lighting and why the B&O Railroad and the Pennsylvania Station set the table for machine shops and foundries to start and grow here.
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We also tried to point out the multiple waves of industrial and technological development that rose and fell across this narrative; I tossed in light-heartedly, but with a sincere intention, the fact that our first known industry was flint-based technology, distributed across the continent, spurring the local Hopewell economy 2,000 years ago. But, I noted, we don’t engage in large-scale flint business anymore.
Nor do we make cast iron stoves or rope or beer bottles. Fiberglass comes along, and that has had a day not yet done; aluminum replaced the dominance of cast iron, with a smaller workforce to make more tonnage. Things change.
This was November 2019. COVID-19 wasn’t even a rumor yet, and Intel? That’s an overseas manufacturer, right? Turns out they had U.S. fabs, and now half of Licking County knows where they are and it seems half of those have been to Arizona or New Mexico or Oregon for a visit.
Dayton isn’t going to make the world’s cash registers again, and Akron has blimps but no longer a near-monopoly on tire manufacturing. They’re looking for their next step forward. In Licking County, we’re already marching on ahead.
None of what’s coming is going to erase our past. We have some remarkable episodes in American history, some epic and marvelous, others tragic and painful, that happened here in our previous eras of boom and bust. We’re entering a boom time; many of us have only known a busted era as adults, watching plants close and factories ship south, with our elders comparing any development today to better days past. A boom time is good times, right?
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Pastorally speaking, I find it interesting that the crowd on that evening in 2019 did not respond well to our attempts to talk about positive developments in our local economy that were taking place, with the Port Authority in Heath and The Limited and other distribution centers to our west. There was some strong and immediate grumbling at any talk of better days ahead. The focus was on what we’d lost. And I understood, even if I regretted that attitude in the room.
In a parallel way, I find myself sifting some of the earlier history for what we lost when the now-vanished manufacturers and businesses got started. What we as a community recall as boom times came with costs to people and ways of life that were displaced by steam engines and assembly lines. Growth wasn’t, and won’t be, all good.
The challenge for faith communities: How do we celebrate new opportunities, while ministering to the losses that will come with change?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s imagining a pastor talking to a livery stable owner as the interurbans went in. Tell him what your community is doing with change at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Celebrate new opportunities while acknowledging the past
