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Chauncey Mayor Tammy Hawk addresses the crowd at the groundbreaking ceremony for a major streetscape revitalization project.
Chauncey Mayor Tammy Hawk addresses the crowd at the groundbreaking ceremony for a major streetscape revitalization project. [Kyle Bosscher]

Chauncey breaks ground on a streetscape beautification project with hopes of economic revitalization

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CHAUNCEY, Ohio (WOUB) — “Everybody say, ‘Chauncey deserves nice things!’”

And with that, local leaders and other dignitaries broke ground on a major project to spruce up  the village’s main drag.

The hope, said Mayor Tammy Hawk, is to make Chauncey a more inviting place for visitors and businesses.

“We’re wanting some more mom-and-pop type of stores,” she said. “People who have small, down-home values that can come in and just add to our community and make everybody feel at home.”

Near the top of her list is getting a cafe or coffee shop in the village. A place not just for locals to hang out, but also a stop for people coming off the Baileys mountain bike trail system at the far end of town.

A signboard shows a conceptual rendering of scenes from a mural that will be painted on the wall of a building on Converse Street in Chauncey as part of a streetscape beautification project.
A signboard shows a conceptual rendering of scenes from a mural that will be painted on the wall of a building on Converse Street in Chauncey as part of a streetscape beautification project.

The streetscape project includes adding gateway piers at the entrance to Chauncey, along with new sidewalks, decorative lighting, planters and benches along Converse Street.

And the real showpieces will be two large murals painted on the sides of buildings, one at the entrance and the other farther down Converse.

One of the murals depicts the village’s early history as a salt mining community, long before the coal mines came in. The area was once dotted with natural brine leaks.

“And so Native Americans would collect that briny seepage as a liquid and then dry it,” said Athens artist Keith Wilde, who will be painting the mural.

Once scene in the mural depicts a Native American woman drying brine in a ceramic bowl over a fire.

Farther down, the mural shows a worker doing the same but at a much bigger scale over large furnaces after the industrial mining operations were built in the early 1800s. Chauncey takes its name from one of the mine owners.

The project is being funded through a slice of the state’s $500 million Appalachian Community Grant Program.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am and how much this is going to mean as we start to build these corridors for people to come to this region, invest their dollars when they visit, bring their businesses here, and really try to spool this out from here,” said Chasity Schmelzenbach, executive director of Buckeye Hills Regional Council, which worked with local communities on their grant proposals.

Work on the streetscape project is expected to begin next week, and it’s under a tight deadline. The terms of the grant require it be completed by next September.