This is another in the “Sunday Story” Series on Our America. There’s just a few local politics here, but mostly a story of a “little” city called: Pataskala.
Christmas
Jenn and I were out Christmas “prepping” the other day. There’s a difference between Christmas “shopping”, that is, buying presents, and Christmas “prepping”. The “prepping” is all of the wrapping paper, ribbons, packing boxes, tape and other supplies that go into our long distance Christmas this year. So we were getting “prepped” for an evening of wrapping; trying to re-package all of those Amazon, Fed-Ex and UPS boxes that arrived on our front porch at literally all hours in the past two weeks. The dogs have had a field day with that – no one gets by un-noticed, even the 4 am stealth Amazon delivery guy. We listened to the Nat King Cole and James Taylor Christmas albums, and told stories of “prepping” Christmas’s of yore. A little red wine helped.
While we were driving around gathering supplies, I turned down a main county road here in Pataskala. Mink Street (or Mink Road, or Wagram Road, or County Road 41; it goes by all four) was once a country road, with farm fields on all sides. But it’s a connector from State Route 40 (the National Road, or Main Street, Columbus) to State Route 16 (Broad Street, Columbus), and it was always a busier-than-usual route. But now things have really changed.
Roundabouts
First, it is the “home” to the first roundabout in the city of Pataskala. That’s right, the old and dangerous intersection of Mink and Refugee (that’s Refugee in Licking County, not Refugee in Fairfield and Franklin Counties – a totally different road) now has a “newfangled” roundabout. It slows the traffic on Mink quite a bit, but it makes it possible to actually get onto Mink from Refugee without getting slammed by someone going sixty miles-an-hour on an “unmarked” country road. Not that Mink’s really unmarked – to the chagrin of the locals, it was marked at 35 miles-per-hour a few years ago. But that was widely ignored, and the city wisely moved it to the 45 MPH speed limit it has now.
All of that traffic control wasn’t just a matter of the “greater Pataskala” population growth, though. You see, County Road 41 just “ain’t” in the country anymore. What was fire Station #3, farms, a boat storage place, and a nice residential sub-division at the south end, is now wall-to-wall industry. And by industry, I mean big, giant footprint, semi-traffic and twenty-four hour action, industry.
Cities and Townships
Our local governments divide Mink Street. North of the new roundabout is the City of Pataskala, south is Etna Township. And both Pataskala and Etna are part of the huge industrial boom taking place on the outskirts of Columbus, beyond the “outer-belt”. What in the “old” days we would call warehouses, have been rechristened as “distribution centers”. And Etna has a bunch of them, from Fed-Ex and Kohls to several in the Ascena complex. But the biggest ones of all have the familiar Amazon label on the side.
So there’s the original Amazon distribution center, a huge single building built between the National Road and Interstate 70, titled “CMH 1”. And like any booming company, that initial complex birthed several only slightly smaller buildings (I think a total of six) with two spreading up Mink Street. In fact, those are the buildings where the ubiquitous little blue delivery vans come from. They line up everywhere, at the roundabout, intersections, and gas pumps in the Etna/Pataskala area. Those blue vans even create a local gas price “bubble”, the old supply and demand story. They create a lot of demand, raising the price a few cents a gallon here in our area. Just driving west into Reynoldsburg usually drops the cost.
Stalks of Concrete
And it’s not just Amazon. I can’t even tell you who owns the other giant “distribution centers” to the north on Mink, but they go up faster than corn grew in those fields just a couple of years ago. The pre-fabricated walls just pop up, days after the bulldozers and cement trucks move on, and soon there’s another nearly mile long building, with the requisite drainage pond alongside. The migrating ducks and geese are happy with the idea, as long as they don’t get in the way of the twenty-four/seven semi-trucks, or those little blue vans.
And it’s not just moving product either. No matter where you stand politically, we all realized after Covid that too much of the “important stuff” used by Americans was made in China. So “we” are “onshoring” industries like making computer chips (Intel is building about five miles north at the other end of Mink Steet). The newest is manufacturing solar panels, right here in “River City” (that’s a reference to the musical The Music Man, a show about the clash between the “country” and the “city”). One of the first industrial solar panel manufacturing plants in the United States is set to open in January, just down Refugee road from the new roundabout (Newark Advocate).
On-Shoring
There’s some controversy over that too. Solar panel manufacturing is dominated by the Chinese, and a Chinese company has a financial stake in the American company building here in Pataskala. Who would have thought – the words “Chinese Communist Party” were actually uttered in a Pataskala City Council debate, as if the “People’s Liberation Army” were opening a training facility on the “Red Chip” Parkway, the next road east from Mink Steet.
Pataskala is now a “center” of US “onshoring”. Soon the next industrial solar panels will say “Proudly Made in Pataskala”, instead of Wuhan or Qingdao. That’s a good thing.
And guess who just bought the land between the Red Chip Parkway and Mink Street, north of Refugee? Here in the “Silicon Valley” of the Midwest, the folks in Pataskala are welcoming Microsoft to their new 300 acre site (Dispatch). The computer company isn’t revealing its plans for the farm fields and horse stables yet; but you can bet it won’t be a Bill Gates’s horse farm.
Looking for a job? Pataskala is definitely the place. The “entry level” positions at Kroger’s and McDonalds are filled with high school kids. For fulltime work, there’s thousands of jobs available within the confines of the City of Pataskala and the Township of Etna. Just don’t get stuck having to rent or buy here. The housing price “bubble”, just like the gas, is pressing up. As always, people like to live near where they work.
And if you’re looking for a nice place, “out in the country”, with quiet lanes and bucolic scenes, it’s probably not here in Pataskala, a “Right to Farm” community (it says so, right on the city boundary signs). We are on the cutting edge of American industry. But we “ain’t” out in the country anymore.
PS – the original version of this essay mistakenly referenced the musical “Oklahoma”, instead of “The Music Man”. Shirley Jones, of “the Partridge Family” fame was in the film versions of both – which is, I guess, why I made the mistake!!!
The Sunday Story Series
- Riding the Dog – 1/24/21
- Hiking with Jack – 1/31/21
- A Track Story – 2/7/21
- Ritual – 2/14/21
- Voyageur – 2/19/21
- A Dog Story – 2/25/21
- A Watkins Legend – 3/7/21
- Ghosts at Gettysburg – 3/14/21
- Lessons from the State Meet – 3/28/21
- More Lessons from the State – 4/4/21
- Stories from the Road – 4/11/21
- A Bear Wants You – 5/1/21
- My Teachers – 5/9/21
- Old Friends – 5/23/21
- The Gift – 6/6/21
- Echoes of Mom – 6/20/21
- Stories of the Fourth – 7/3/21
- Running Memories – 7/25/21
- Lost Dog of Eldora – 8/1/21
- Dogs and Medals – 8/8/21
- The New Guy – 9/5/21
- Stories of 9-11 – 9/12/21
- The Interview – 9/26/21
- Night Moves – 10/3/21
- Funeral for a Friend – 10/11/21
- National Security – 10/24/21
- Boots on the Trail – 10/31/21
- Taking Care of Mom and Dad – 11/14./21
- Dogs Found and Lost – 11/21/21
- Watching Brian 12/12/21
- Stories from Shiloh – 12/19/21
- Team Trips – 12/26/21
- Uphill, Both Ways – 1/9/22
- Old Trophies – 1/30/22
- The Last Time – 2/7/22
- Olympic Miracles – 2/13/22
- Mind Numbing – 2/20/22
- Track Weather – 4/3/22
- What’s Missing – 4/11/22
- A Scouting Story – 4/17/22
- Waterproof Paper – 5/8/22
- Origin Stories – 5/22/22
- Origin Stories – Part Two 5/29/22
- Back at State – 6/5/22
- Out in the Country – 6/19/22
- Pataskala Downs – 7/4/22
- Car Stories I – 7/24/22
- Car Stories II – 7/31/22
- Old Man Experience – 8/7/22
- Cross Country Camp – 8/14/22
- New to the Pack – 8/21/22
- Car Stories III – The Bus – 8/28/22
- A Day in the Life – 9/4/22
- Stupid Human Tricks – 9/18/22
- Fair or Foul – 2/26/23
- Immigrant Story – 3/12/23
- Busy Season – 5/15/23
- Of Jeeps and Bucks – 5/28/23
- A Pole Vault Story -6/11/23
- End of an Era – 6/25/23
- Paybacks – 7/2/23
- Graying in Pataskala – 7/17/23
- Being a Goat – 7/23/23
- Toy Truck – 8/20/23
- Medical Terms – 8/27/23
- Missing Margaritaville – 9/3/23
- The McGowan – 9/10/23
- Who’s Watching – 10/22/23
- The Saturday Before – 10/29/23
- A Tale of Turkey, and Dogs – 11/26/23
- Bruno’s Story – 12/3/23
- Out in the Country – 12/10/23
