West of Granville, branching off Raccoon Valley Road just beyond Wildwood Park, is Moots Run Road, named for a short watercourse flowing north into Raccoon Creek.
It springs out of the hills from shale outcrops, then runs through a fertile bottomland valley a brief span before disappearing into the larger flow of the Raccoon heading east, through Granville to Newark and on to Black Hand Gorge.
The name Moots Run is a peculiarity in the area. Raccoons we still see, and many other names used locally like Welsh Hills or Jones Road tie back to pioneer groups or families. Granville traces to a town in Massachusetts, which in turn gives honor to a British noble in charge of the Privy Council at the time of its incorporation, as Newark connects to its original surveyor’s home in New Jersey, which itself goes back to Nottinghamshire in England.
Before that 1802 surveyor came to map out land claims on behalf of the early United States government, some pioneers took a chance and claimed land by blazing trees. A blaze was simply peeling off a large square of bark about chest high, and carving your name into the exposed wood. Such a blaze would last and be legible for many years.
When the early Welsh settlers came, one of them encountered a tract of land, west of today’s village of Granville, marked with blazes inscribed with the name “Moots.” For a time this area was avoided, but once the formal government recognized land claims were made, the Moots area simply became the name for the short stream which no doubt is what attracted our mysterious Mr. Moots. No one by the name ever arrived to formalize that claim.
Today, there are political debates about whether individuals or organizations should state “land acknowledgments” — a statement made to recognize Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live, according to the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian — whether in a talk, an email signature file or published work.
Meanwhile, we are surrounded by land acknowledgments of a different sort: The name Ohio acknowledges the presence of an Iroquoian people, the Seneca, while our neighbor to the west, Indiana, is an acknowledgment writ large of Native American Indian presence.
And we have many other such acknowledgments in everyday use for places and institutions around us, from Muskingum County east of us named for a Lenapi, or Delaware Nation word for the location, and a farmer in that county most of his life who gave his family name to Granville College, making it Denison University. The Delaware left their name on a city and county just northwest of here, and their language named the Hock-hocking River to our south, now just Hocking but on both a river and a county. A friend of mine, Bob Neinast, suspects our main watershed and surrounding county draws its name from the same language’s naming conventions, perhaps the Lick-licking for a sandy, gravelly stream, which was elided into the Licking River, echoing the Kokosing and Walhonding Rivers to our north.
My point is that we do land acknowledgments every day, whether we know it or not. Earl Granville is buried in Westminster Abbey, and the Welsh language still marks our landscape in many names, while we nod to Sherwood Forest every time we talk of our county seat. Native names suggest we have a ways to go in recognizing their role in forming the community we are becoming.
But in the season of Hallowe’en, it’s fascinating to know we regularly recognize someone entirely unknown to history, other than a scattering of blazes left long ago, calling out to us across the landscape across Moots Run. And whatever happened to them? We likely will never know.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller and preacher in central Ohio.