By Stella McGuire, OU Lancaster 
Presented at AURCO 2025 
Faculty Advisor, Dr. Matthew Wanat

Ohio University Lancaster’s student parking lot resides in a small valley, and if you park in the northernmost part of the lot, the old Health Department building established in 1840 should look down on you from the hill across 37. Fairfield County Poorhouse became the Fairfield County Infirmary around the turn of the century, ceasing to house the mentally ill and disabled for good in 1985. The Fairfield County Poorhouse established a farm across the road sometime between 1865 and 1917, and the land was sold to Ohio University in the 1950s, so they could build a regional campus in its place. In 1986 the building was remodeled and rechristened as the Clarance E. Miller building, where sometime in 2010 I distinctly remember going in for a finger prick, looking through small paper books in a wicker basket on the floor, and being gently told by my mother not to play with the small plastic fruit and vegetable toys, because they sat on a windowsill that was certainly covered in peeling lead paint. The building was closed in late 2013. Now, the Fairfield County Infirmary has resorted back to its turn of the century name, and is turned haunted-Appalachian ghost tour building, where one pays twenty dollars at the door, and could spend up to $110 on renting equipment, like twenty-dollars for a “PHASMA BOX WITH JBL SPEAKER” and five-dollars on “DOWSING RODS”, among other paranormal detecting devices. If paid-for iPhone photographs of 20th century wooden wheelchairs medially situated in an otherwise secluded and purposefully unkempt room is what’s keeping OUL’s structural guardian angel from demolition, I am not sure I care about the ethics of the capitalization on the historical landmark.

I live 7.4 miles from Ohio University’s Lancaster branch, 8.2 miles from the grocery store where I work, and 3.6 miles from my old high school, to which I drop my brother off at each morning. In addition to bi-weekly trips to Columbus to watch movies, purchase books, CDs, records, and various, generally useless one-dollar ephemera, my day-to-day is confined to the previously mentioned. By my junior year of high school, I was completely over the constant mundanity and unengaging coursework. The eleventh grade English teacher taught Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). The class mean for comma worksheets and quizzes was highly unsatisfactory, I anticipated somewhere from 65% to failing, but our teacher never told us. Retakes for comma worksheets felt generally ridiculous to be doing at age seventeen, and equally ridiculous in retrospective, especially considering that the entire tenth grade English curriculum was concentrated on vocabulary and grammar rules. I had to take around four comma quizzes before the class mean evened out to an acceptable grade. That same year, the same class had dedicated a day for job research. Each student was required to browse ohiomeansjobs.org, pick two occupations they might desire in the future, and write down certain statistics that the worksheet called for -- like job title, salary, demand for the job in your area, and so on. After compiling statistics for both chosen occupations, students were to circle the job they would pick based on the statistics they found. My two choices were psychiatrist and English professor. I circled psychiatrist.

High school English classes were the only classes interrupted by vision and hearing tests, course selection days, and PSAs from the guidance counselor. In tenth grade English class our guidance counselor stood in front of us, waiting patiently for the bell to ring. I sat in the front row. He inquired about my coffee in a can, and when the bell rang, he began his second or third speech that day about CCP.

I went to one class at my high school during the twelfth grade. I had to fulfill one Math credit and one English credit to graduate. Over the summer, sometime in early July, I had attended an orientation at OUL and set up an advising appointment where I selected my classes for the Fall ’23 semester. I added two courses to my enrollment cart before my appointment: American Literature 1865 to Present and Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. I figured I would try and keep my coursework light, that way I could ease myself into the college-level curriculum. By the time I got my appointment, both classes were full, and I was told I could waitlist them, but would have to choose other courses in the meantime. I selected a couple new courses which were still taking students and felt a mix of hope and disappointment. Yet, by fate or some miraculous intervention, a week or so before the semester, one person had dropped from American Literature and Cultural Anthropology respectfully, permitting me to take the two classes I had originally desired.

Each day I looked forward to my classes, and my coursework. Most of my anxieties had melted away after about two weeks of class. Cultural Anthropology was a sincerely enriching and compelling online course which had asked thoughtful questions relating to our weekly chapters. Questions, like those from my Anthropology and Literature courses, written by the educators had been basically foreign to me. Everything in high school seemed as if it were pulled from Google. Prompts, questions, and coursework were all uninspiring and simple. My two real years of high school, since my ninth-grade year was interrupted by COVID, and my twelfth-grade year was a chosen escape, were horrendously dreadful and unengaging, and it wasn’t the teacher’s fault. My favorite year of high school was the one where I went to OUL instead.

By the time we had read Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918) in American Literature II I was assured. When we had read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1931) I was confident. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) erected the idea in gold and placed itself somewhere between my prefrontal cortex and amygdala. I wanted to be an English professor, and the idea of anything else sounded less than satisfactory. My cynicism combined with the cultural climate compels me to wonder if my experience in higher education has been the best or the worst thing to happen to me – reality is closer to the former, I hope. These works, and many more across film and literature courses, in addition to music and history courses through OUL, have effectively developed not only my tastes, but have broadened my perspectives and metamorphosed my knowledge and desire to learn.

The first paper our American Literature 1865 to Present class was assigned to write was a paper responding to one of several events, most of which occurred on campus, but could be accessed virtually. Students could attend talks, visit the Earthworks, take a workshop, do service work, attend OUL’s production of American Son, amongst other opportunities that engaged students with their community. I had decided to attend OUL’s production of American Son, a play about an interracial couple’s incompatible ideas regarding their son’s behavior. The play explores themes of sexism, race, and parenthood. During the play, I scribbled half-intelligible notes about the thematic innerworkings of the performance and script, while adjusting for the audience’s reaction, which, according to my paper, consisted of inappropriate laughter and ungaugable expressions. My notes sat in my spiral-notebook up until the week the paper was due. I was inexplicably nervous to write my first college English paper. I did well on it, but I am confident I would not be so emotionally affected by the performance, and therefore unable to write anything meaningful, if say, the play sucked. OUL organizes high quality programs which serve as catalysts for critical thinking within a student’s or citizen’s community. Thanks to the production, I was able to form takeaways not only about the subject matters of the play itself, but of what exactly the play meant to the audience, most of which were older white people, likely Lancaster residents.

My decision to attend OUL after high school was complicated at first. I had received lots of scholarship and aid through each college I was interested in, and was discouraged by distant family members, none of which are college graduates or were even ever college students, on enrolling at OUL for my freshman year. All of this advice was unsolicited. My education and connections I have formed at OUL and in my community are things I genuinely cherish. My regional branch allows me to learn in a way where I feel seen and supported by my professors, and where I feel comfortable and connected. When I rework my college experience so far, I consider how everything might be different if I started my degree in Athens, for example. In lecture halls with something like seven times the amount of people in my classes now, where might I fit in? Would I be too shy to sit in the front? Would I never raise my hand? My nervous and reticent disposition makes me wonder if I would get bored and want to hide underneath it all. If this looming vastness was my first impression of higher education, I think there’s a chance I would treat it like high school. My experience at my regional campus has undoubtedly eliminated that chance. The smallness of OUL, the branch, as if it is a lesser, more dispensable part of the whole, is part of the reason why its existence is so important. I have a genuine desire to be engaged in my community thanks to my experiences at OUL. This year, at the beginning of the Fall semester, I was given the opportunity to participate in work study for Dr. Wanat. Each Tuesday and Thursday, I flip through various books on Shawnee history, general Native American history in the Ohio Valley, and other such annotated bibliographies and anthologies. Searching indices, I fill a memo pad with key terms and page numbers: Wheeling – 71, 116, 157… Ohio, Ohio country, Shawnees in 30, 140, 621… My research, which is intended to assist Dr. Wanat in his scholarly work, is deeply rooted in the history of the state, and the areas surrounding where I sit amidst piles of books from 12:20 to 2:00 and mark sections. Shawnee begins here, the bottom of page 89, and ends here, middle of 90. Chillicothe is mentioned once within this section.

My research work is inherently self-reflexive – I am learning about the history of Ohio and surrounding areas while in Ohio. I am presenting at AURCO’s 2025 conference at Ohio University’s Chillicothe branch thanks to my opportunities forty-one miles away at Ohio University’s Lancaster branch. This campus is 4.3 miles from the Hopewell mounds. Are these earthworks OU Chillicothe’s structural guardian angel? What are the implications of the distance between these locations? Place is important. The existence of regional campuses within rural communities should not be undermined due to their size. The sites underneath the places within our communities harbor a cultural history that intricately unites people to their community and place.