Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Take this, you trivia buffs


THE YELLOW SPRINGS QUIZ

How Up Are You on Village History?

by Ralph Keyes (with help from Scott Sanders,
Gilah Pomeranz and Detlef Frank)


This is the first of a series of quizzes based on Yellow Springs lore that will be posted periodically on this blog.


1. Wheeling Gaunt

-----a) owned the town’s first bike shop

-----b) founded Yellow Springs

-----c) donated the land for Gaunt Park

-----d) was a popular railroad engineer who waved at kids while
--------his train passed through town

2. How many U.S. senators lived in Yellow Springs?

-----a) 2----------b) 1

-----c) 3----------d) 0

3. The Yellow Springs in Glen Helen got its name because

-----a) Antioch students once poured yellow dye into its waters.

-----b) It has a high content of rusty iron.

-----c) During the Civil War male residents of the adjacent town
-------were considered cowardly draft dodgers.

-----d) Local residents often relieved themselves there.

4. Another town called Yellow Springs once existed in the state of

-----a) Oregon -----------------b) Minnesota

-----c) Pennsylvania ----------d) none of the above

5. Yellow Springs was a busy stop on the Underground Railroad.

-----a) True ----------b) False

6. Chief Tecumseh was born in a Shawnee encampment

-----a) adjacent to the Yellow Springs

-----b) where the Winds Wine Cellar is now located

-----c) where the Glen Helen Nature Center is now located

-----d) none of the above

7. An early organizing meeting for the Republican Party was held
--at

-----a) Odd Fellows Hall -----------b) Whitehall Farm

-----b) Ellis Pond --------------------d) Ye Olde Trail Tavern

8. James McKee was the first African-American to hold the
--position of Yellow Springs’

-----a) Mayor ------------------------b) Chief of Police

-----c) Council President ----------d) High School Principal

9. Following World War II a group of scientists and engineers who came from Germany to work at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson) were welcomed as Yellow Springs residents.

-----a) True -----b) False

10. Before it was a community center the Bryan Center was the
----local

-----a) armory

-----b) high school

-----c) elementary school

-----d) opera house

Answers: 1-c, 2-a, 3-b, 4-c, 5-b, 6-d, 7-b, 8-b, 9-a, 10-b.

Notes:

1) Wheeling Gaunt was a onetime slave in Kentucky who bought his freedom and migrated to Yellow Springs where he became a prosperous landowner and philanthropist.

2) Simeon Fess and Mike DeWine were both onetime residents of Yellow Springs who became U.S. senators.

3) Technically Yellow Springs should be called Ochre Springs or Burnt Siena Springs.

4) According to its website, Yellow Springs, Pennsylvania is now part of Chester Springs: “Situated 35 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Chester Springs is best known as the location of Historic Yellow Springs — an early American historical village and museum. Originally a health spa in the 18th century, George Washington commissioned the nation’s first military hospital in Yellow Springs. … Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Lenape first used the iron rich ‘yellow’ spring water for medicinal purposes thousands of years ago.”

5) According to Wilbur Siebert’s history of the underground railroad in Ohio, conductors were wary of this area because so many Cedarville residents were pro-slavery.

6) Yellow Springs is one of the few area locales that doesn’t claim to be Tecumseh’s birthplace. According to biographer John Sugden, Tecumseh most likely was born near Chillicothe.

7) Whitehall Farm was one of several settings where anti-slavery activists met during the early 1850s to discuss forming a new political party that became the Republican Party.

9) Several participants in Operation Paperclip (the code name for a program that brought German scientists and engineers to work in U.S. aerospace efforts) who worked at Wright Field settled in Yellow Springs after encountering animosity elsewhere.

2 comments:

Chris Till said...

Re: #6. "Chillicothe" is the former name of Old Town, on Route 68, between YS and Xenia. I wonder if that biographer was referring to present Chillicothe, or old Chillicothe (Old Town), which claims Tecumseh's birth. Old Piqua (west of Springfield, site of the Revolutionary War battle), as differentiated from the current town of Piqua, also claims Tecumseh's birth.

Joe Payne said...

I just read the Sugden biography of Tecumseh. Sugden does refer to his birth near the present Chillicothe, on the Scioto River. He mentions that some historians have claimed a birth place farther west, but those villages were not in existence at the time of his birth. He seems to be in the minority, but he is going on over 30 years of research.