“It still exists in my heart”
A family and a community remember the legacy of Spring Valley 16 years after local pool closed
Spring Valley Pool looked as it always did when the sun was shining: The sandy beach was lined with towels and half-built sandcastles while kids bobbed up and down in the cool, murky waters of the spring-fed pool. A line was forming at the sandwich shack, and rumors of “the Snog,” a monster that supposedly lurked near the deep end, were making their way from kid to kid.
It was 2004, and the writing was on the wall. The pool, in operation for the better part of seven decades, couldn’t survive as financial challenges mounted and membership fell.
Grace Gordon, whose family owned the property for generations, remembers the last day the pool was open. She remembers standing near the parking lot with her mother, looking back at the community pool that was a summer centerpiece for her and so many others in Licking County, and thinking “this was it.”
To support our community-based reporting initiative in Licking County, visit us at thereportingproject.org, subscribe to our newsletter and donate today.
When the pair drove off together, they both started crying.
“We were just like, we don’t want this to be the end,” Gordon recalled in mid-November this year, 19 years after the pool’s last season and 16 years after she helped convert the space into a nature preserve. “It was kind of the center of my universe in the summertime.”
The pool didn’t open for the 2005 season, the first time the pool sat empty since it was developed by Gordon’s great-grandparents Edwin and Anna Roberts in 1933.
The Granville Village Council tried to purchase the land — $850,000 for 45 acres — but that deal fell through. Later, township voters overwhelmingly defeated a bond issue that would have raised $2.5 million to purchase and renovate it. Developing the land, adding a gas station and a McDonalds, didn’t pan out, either.
Though the pool no longer exists, Spring Valley endures as a 45-acre nature preserve, with trails, forests and creeks frequented by hikers, dog walkers, picnickers and summer campers.
Developing the nature preserve
In the interim years of 2005-2007, questions swirled about what would happen with the Spring Valley property.
The land meant so much to the family members who grew up at the pool, taking care of the space, working in the sandwich shop, lifeguarding each summer. No one wanted to see the pool go.
Gordon, who worked as a park ranger and an environmental educator, returned to Licking County to help with the next phase of Spring Valley's legacy.
“If it wasn’t going to be a pool, [preservation] is what the family would all agree on,” Gordon said. “It’s the next best thing.”
Gordon worked with the Licking Land Trust, members of her family, Amy Chamberlain, Denison University, Park National Bank, Granville Township Trustees and the State of Ohio to secure funds for long-term restoration and protection.
Restoration came in phases, and the land is currently maintained by the Granville Recreation District, the Granville Township Land Management Committee and the Granville Township trustees.
Though the pool is gone, an unofficial community group keeps watch over the natural space, removing invasive plants and cleaning up graffiti and trash when it appears. While the pool helped Granville form a community, the nature preserve continues to bring people together, Gordon said.
“All these people love this place so much, and we’re all coming together and doing something good for this land,” Gordon said. “Especially during quarantine, I remember I would come out and just see the parking lot totally full of cars, and it’s like this is what it looked like when it was a swimming pool.”
“It was just so cool — you just felt the love for the land,” she added.
Before the pool was constructed in the 1930s, early Granville settlers used the property for salt production, and, before that, Indigenous people built mounds and earthworks around the area, known locally as the Salt Run.
Denison University students frequented the land, too, seeking out the famed Proposal Tree, so called because couples were engaged there. It was once located on the edge of the woods by the creek.
“It was two sycamore trees that grew together and the trunks formed a kind of seat,” Gordon explained. “You’d come here and have your sweetheart sit there and you’d bend down and propose.”
Gordon strolled across the field where the pool once stood, now covered by dying weeds and grass, towards the Salt Run. Each summer, she brings summer campers to the creek in the woods for adventures.
A postcard shows the original Proposal Tree near the creek at Spring Valley. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
A postcard shows the original Proposal Tree near the creek at Spring Valley. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
Remembering Spring Valley Pool
The preserve is protected by the Licking Land Trust and the Granville Township Open Spaces program “in perpetuity,” which prevents future development of the site, though family members of the Reeb-Roberts family still miss the days when Spring Valley Pool operated.
A 1,000-members-strong Facebook page dedicated to “People who miss Spring Valley Pool” provides an online community for people to reminisce about the Snog, the Proposal Tree, Spring Valley owner, creator and sandwich shop aficionado Anna Roberts who they affectionately called “mom” – though many were of no relation to her – and the annual Fourth of July celebrations when lifeguards put on over-the-top skits, and attendees could participate in a sandcastle contest and a penny hunt in the pool.
“It’s what I miss for my daughter,” Gina Ormond, a Reeb-Roberts family member, told the Granville Historical Society for an ongoing oral history project about the pool. “She’s too young, so she never got to see the pool as it was, and I think that’s a real shame.”
Ormond said Granville lost part of what built a sense of community when the pool closed.
“Until I had been on the swim team, it never would have occurred to me to think of it as anything other than the pool,” she told the historical society. “The pool was definitely the center of the social scene in the summertime, definitely for kids, and even in some ways for adults.”
An article in the July 13, 1933 edition of the Granville Times announced the opening of Spring Valley Pool. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
An article in the July 13, 1933 edition of the Granville Times announced the opening of Spring Valley Pool. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
A guests pass from the Spring Valley Pool in 1939. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
A guests pass from the Spring Valley Pool in 1939. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
Edwin and Anna Roberts, who created the pool, often relaxed at the Spring Valley Pool in the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
Edwin and Anna Roberts, who created the pool, often relaxed at the Spring Valley Pool in the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Granville Historical Society
Gordon regularly visits the Spring Valley Nature Preserve, and is glad the area can still be available for community recreation. Credit: Andrew Theophilus
Gordon regularly visits the Spring Valley Nature Preserve, and is glad the area can still be available for community recreation. Credit: Andrew Theophilus
Gordon brings her students and campers to the nature preserve each summer for adventures. Credit: Andrew Theophilus
Gordon brings her students and campers to the nature preserve each summer for adventures. Credit: Andrew Theophilus
Gordon remembers working with her family to care for the pool each fall, winter and spring, between pool seasons.
“We’d spend many weekends in the spring painting and cleaning, gardening and cleaning and painting more things,” she said. The pool – which was 12 feet at its deepest end – was drained in both fall and spring for maintenance.
By the time it closed, it was one of only a few pools in central Ohio fed by water from a natural source.
“It was not a blue-water pool, and people would come up, and they’d be like, ‘why is it green?’” Gordon said with a laugh. “And it was in part because the water was coming from the creek. We would still chlorinate it, some years better than others.”
Now, in the summer, Gordon says she can still hear it: the joy, the kids screaming and splashing in the creek, the birds singing in the trees.
“Sometimes, I’ll close my eyes and be like, this is still Spring Valley,” she said. “It still exists in my heart.”
The Reporting Project is the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported in part by the Mellon Foundation and donations from readers.
thereportingproject@denison.edu
This story was updated Dec. 6, 2023, to include additional information about the organizations that maintain the nature preserve.
Built with Shorthand