Thornville, Ohio, USA - Mid 1950s until ....
Long before I stood in front of classrooms in a wide variety of places, one of my first ‘informal’ classrooms was tucked above a garage on High Point Road, just outside of Thornville, Ohio. It wasn’t a formal space—no chalkboards, no desks—but it was a personal collection curated with a reverence for learning that shaped me more deeply than any syllabus ever could. It belonged to my great-grandfather, Ira Franklin Cooperrider, a man whose quiet passion for collecting and cataloging artefacts transformed his home and small farm into a living museum.
Grandpa Cooperrider wasn’t a professional archaeologist or botanist; in fact, he wasn’t even college educated, but he was something rarer: a man of boundless curiosity and a steward of pre-history/history. His varied collections—of Native American artefacts, of coins and botanical specimens, and of curiosities from the Ohio countryside—were meticulously labeled and lovingly displayed. He built cabinets, mounted boards, and even planted a garden where each tree bore a hand-lettered sign. His museum wasn’t just for show; it was a place of inquiry, wonder, and his storytelling.
As a boy, I wandered that space with wide eyes and eager fingers, absorbing the textures of flint, inspecting the patina of old and foreign coins, and exploring the nature of objects that had outlived their makers.
Inside the house, those coins waited for curious hands. I remember sitting beside Grandpa, just the two of us, sorting through them, tracing their origins, imagining the journeys they’d taken. Grandpa also had a small but focused collection of books —- on butterflies, reptiles, trees, and the mysteries of the natural world. He was always happy to share, a quiet teacher, never instructing, always inviting.
It was the museum up rickety stairs above his standalone garage though that gave Grandpa Cooperrider some renown. It was that museum that introduced me and others who were invited to unknown worlds, and it showed us that culture and history weren’t just subjects you read about—they were something you could touch, question, and pass on.
Alongside the arrowheads, stone tools, and ceremonial fragments there were also remnants of early America’s farm life, from household goods like ceramic crockery and candle moulds to handmade toys, 19th century photographs and an extensive collection of firearms — each piece carefully laid out and categories thoughtfully arranged, all a testament to the lives that had shaped central Ohio before us. Grandpa Cooperrider didn’t collect for prestige—he collected to preserve, to understand, to honor.
One of the display sheets from that magnificent collection (said to number 3000 arrowheads alone), is shown here in a photo, and it illustrates these lessons up close and personal. It’s a simple board wired with stone artefacts — arrowheads and gorget fragments — arranged by my grandpa with great care. Besides the range of pieces what catches an observer’s eye is a faint pencil mark around one particular arrowhead. That circle, I believe, was made to honor a small but meaningful moment: the discovery of an arrowhead by Ira’s daughter, my grandmother Carrie Elizabeth Cooperrider Blackstone — or Katie — when she was young, sometime in the 1920s or ’30s.
Grandma Blackstone would have been a girl then, wandering the fields near their home in the tiny community of Bruno Grange, her eyes trained on the ground the way Ira had instructed her (and then taught us great-grandkids 40 years later). Her find wasn’t just added to the collection—it was celebrated, circled, preserved. That gesture speaks volumes about Grandpa Cooperrider’s style: every object had a story, and every story mattered.
For me, that circled arrowhead is more than a relic. It’s a thread connecting multiple generations
—a child’s curiosity, a father’s pride, and a great-grandson’s lifelong pursuit of meaning through objects. It reminds me that collecting isn’t just about possession; it’s about making these connections. It’s about honoring the hands that came before us and the stories that get passed on.
Ira Cooperrider’s museum above the garage may be gone, but its spirit lives on—in my own humble collection, in the essays I write to commemorate my own learning and discoveries, and in the way I still pause over a weathered stone wondering what it might be and who held it first.
Two ancient hammers from the Ira Cooperrider collection.
Some of my own finds from over the years.
No comments:
Post a Comment