You might be surprised by how often people attending a function at Monomoy Place ask Tina or me, “Do you actually live here?” I’m never quite sure what’s behind this question. Perhaps from some it is simply an observation that the house is large, a rather grand Victorian in a prominent location on Granville’s Broadway. From others, it might be a commentary on the age of the structure; Monomoy is, after all, is well over 141 years old and has all the quirks you might expect in a house its age. For still others, it may be just that the house somehow seems stolidly “institutional,” just another of the Denison campus buildings behind and beside it. And maybe for a few Denison alumni who resided in Monomoy during its half-century as a women’s residence hall, its brief adventure as a fraternity house, or its final years sheltering students as a co-op residence, an incredulity that it has become the college’s official presidential residence.
Whatever lies behind the question, it never ceases to take Tina and me aback. Live there? Why, yes, of course, it is our home. Now, obviously, we don’t own the place; we’re tenants at the sufferance of the board of trustees. And we’re kind of stewards, too, caretakers of a piece of Denison’s historical fabric, committed to passing it on not just whole but better to tomorrow’s Denison. But, for all that, it’s home.
During this year in which “home” has been a campus-wide intellectual theme, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to reflect upon my home at Monomoy. What makes a house a home? More, of course, than its function as a place to store your stuff and catch your forty winks. Monomoy Place is where Tina and I for eight years have celebrated seasonal and family holidays. When our daughter, living in far-away Texas, says she is coming “home,” she means to Monomoy, though she has never lived in Granville. Monomoy is the last home that our late fathers saw us installed in, and it is the home where we are visited by our widowed mothers. It’s the place where we feel the comfort of being surrounded by the furniture and accoutrement of thirty-five years of married life together and where our family pictures hang on the walls. In our whole lives, both as children and as adults, Tina and I each have only lived in one house longer.
Yes, Monomoy Place is a large home, and its first floor has a number of rooms that serve the college well for events of all kinds for students, faculty and staff, alumni, and Granvillians. And, of course, the patio and the lawn (under the great, two-century-old maple) extend that capacity by creating an outdoor living room. Yet, those spaces make up what we consider our home, too. I love the first floor study where, like any professor, I feel comforted by being surrounded by so many of my books. Both Tina and I tickle the ivories from time to time on the grand piano in the southeast front parlor (which we, accordingly, have styled the “music room”). I enjoy reading the daily newspapers and catching some television in the rear “blue room,” a large chamber that on public occasions accommodates a good crowd. But like other families in other homes, we probably live as much in the kitchen as anywhere else in the house. Tina’s a terrific cook; I’m a sometime help-mate and, I’m told, a pretty good baker. And about that garden: much of the community knows Tina as that lady on Broadway with the clippers and the garden gloves!
Monomoy Place has been the Denison president’s residence since it was saved from the wrecking ball by Bob and Nancy Good in 1979. President and Mrs. Good had been looking for a house that might better support college activities than the one that had been built to accommodate President Joel Smith’s young family back behind Sunset Hill, and Nancy made Monomoy her special project. Like other homes, it’s experienced all kinds of families. As with Tina and me, Bob and Nancy occupied the house after their children were grown. Andrew DeRocco, who followed, was a bachelor. While residing at Monomoy, Michele and Gail Myers had a daughter in college and a son passing through his teenage years, a young man who especially enjoyed the possibilities of the expansive attic, once a ballroom!
But Monomoy also has a deep history that extends well beyond Denison’s acquisition of it for a dormitory in 1935. I think about that past a lot as I walk its halls. In 1863, Dr. Follett, the builder, began seeing his patients in what is now my study, clients entering by a side door where there is now a closet. Follett’s daughter married one of Granville’s most colorful characters, John Sutphin Jones, an entrepreneur whose Jones & Adams Coal Company operated mines in Ohio and Illinois from offices in Chicago’s Loop. Jones greatly expanded Fort Hill house as a country estate he renamed Bryn Du, and he significantly enlarged the Follett residence as his “town house,” naming it Monomoy Place in honor of his wife’s favorite vacation spot at the elbow of Cape Cod. It was Jones who demanded that Denison run a tunnel under College Hill so that the smoke emitted by the “new” (1904) heating plant in Cleveland Hall, exit through a smokestack behind old Talbot Hall (the site of today’s Knapp Hall) so as not to deposit soot on Monomoy. Late in life, Jones was the builder of the Granville Golf Course and the Granville Inn, presided over for many years by Sallie Jones Sexton, daughter of his second marriage.
I hope this issue of Denison Magazine gets you to thinking about the many aspects of “home,” too. We trust that graduates ever think of Denison as home, just as Tina and I have come to regard both the college and our Monomoy Place.