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A Journey to Places Real and Imagined

The village of Millersburg, Ohio, is the Holmes County seat. At the village’s center square, there is a sandstone courthouse and a red brick jail, just as I have described them in my novels. Here is the center of my stories, and as you will see, it is all quite real. Other locations that I have used in the novels are also real. Joel Pomerene Memorial Hospital is certainly one of them. It is on a steep hill, beside the Wooster Road, which is Ohio State Route 83. When I first began writing, the hospital was fairly new, and few trees had grown up around it. Today, there are many trees, and the hospital is well used. And as for Sheriff Robertson’s red brick jail next to the courthouse? Well, a new and modern jail complex was constructed several years ago, north of the village, on a hill overlooking the Wooster Road. I still write about the old jail on courthouse square because it suits Bruce Robertson so well.

However, if you tour around Millersburg, you will discover that other locations in my novels are fictionalized. For instance, Missy Taggert’s coroner’s labs are not found in the basement of Pomerene Hospital. Sorry, folks, but I had to put them somewhere, and this seemed like a logical place for her work. The same is also true of Millersburg College and the Brandens’ brick colonial on a cul-de-sac at the top of the hill. These would have been worth searching for, but all you’d actually find there is only an old cemetery. The college, the brick colonial, and the cliffs at the back of the Brandens’ yard all exist quite clearly in my imagination, but nowhere else. I assure you, however, that they are so real to me that I have nearly convinced myself that they are right there where I wrote them into my stories.

Cal Troyer’s little church building and parsonage are also fictional, yet they are completely authentic. I know of dozens of little churches like Cal’s, and it hasn’t required much imagination to portray them as I have. For all the places I have invented, and for the real ones that I have used in my stories, I hope that they occupy a clear and lasting place in the reader’s imagination. I suspect they do, and I will long remember the fellow who buttonholed me after one of my library talks to say that he “loved Millersburg College, and he knew right where it was.”