What do Blue Limestone Quarry, Delaware Arts Castle, and Delaware Grape have in common?

George and Elizabeth Campbell


George and Elizabeth Campbell will be the topic presented at the Big Walnut Area Historical Society meeting at 7:30 Tuesday, June 14 in the Meeting Room of the Myers Inn Museum. Deb Shatzer and Paul Hammock portray the couple and will tell of their accomplishments.

Horticulturist George Campbell was a well known businessman in Delaware. He was part owner of the Blue Limestone Quarry. When he married Elizabeth Little in 1846 her father William Little gave them land at the corner of Winter and Elizabeth Streets.  In 1854 the Anglo-Norman house built of blue limestone was finished with the terraced hill in front for George’s greenhouses. George brought a small pinkish grape from New Jersey and perfected it to become the Delaware Grape which was well known for making wine. Although the greenhouses are gone and few of the grapes survive in Delaware, the Campbell home is now known as the Delaware County Arts Castle.
 

Delaware Arts Castle at the corner of Elizabeth and Winter Streets in Delaware. 

A Deb Shatzer photograph.

 

Deb Shatzer is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan where she worked for 15 years before becoming the first director of the Delaware County Convention and Visitors Bureau in 1996, a position she still holds twenty years later. For group tours visiting Delaware in 2000, she began portraying Lucy Hayes, the first girl admitted to OWU and wife of our 19th President Rutherford B. Hayes. She wrote a play about Annie Oakley and portrayed her at Sunbury’s Buffalo Bill Reenactment and will do so again on June 25 as part of Sunbury’s Bicentennial.

Paul Hammock has a degree in education from Bowling Green and a Masters of Divinity from The Methodist Theological Society. After 30 years of teaching he has served as a docent at the Columbus Museum of Art and volunteers for the Ohio History Connection as an interpreter in many venues.

There is no admission charged for the program in the Myers Inn Museum which is located across the street from the southwest corner of Sunbury Square.

         
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(05/17/2016)